Oxygen Mask

I recently found Big Think, and at the moment it's my favourite site to visit when I have a few minutes to fill with something awesome. I love watching the videos of smart people (sadly, mostly smart guys) talking about things they are passionate about, and sometimes it's useful or affirming, like this one, where Tal Ben-Shahar, a psych lecturer from Harvard, talks about Five Ways to Become Happier Today...



As I was watching this, I realised that I'm already doing some of this stuff... I'm getting better at separating out and naming my negative emotions instead of trying unsuccessfully to pretend that they don't exist. It's far easier to mitigate loneliness, money worries and fear that I can't cope, for example, than an un-named and dreadful turmoil pressing in on my mind. And not-so-strangely, I really am much happier...

... And I exercise most days, for at least half an hour and I do Jenni's TiLT and I do try to make sure that, at the end of the day, I spend some time really appreciating being with my boys, cuddling and reading and talking and making sure that they go to sleep knowing I adore them... which has the fabulous side effect of making me feel adored too!

And thinking about all that I was reminded of this...

...which arose out of a conversation with my friend A, after he visited from the UK 18 months ago (just after I changed jobs) and came on holiday with me and the boys. I think it's fair to say that he was pretty worried about me at the time... He compared my situation to a incident on an aeroplane where I should put on my oxygen mask before helping the kids with theirs. I didn't (and don't) believe things were catastrophic, or my behaviour was life-threatening, but he made some pretty accurate observations about my mental state and some recommendations for weekly goals, which I wrote down (there were some other goals too... getting divorced and moving to Wellington, but they aren't relevant here). I started exercising more regularly and by the middle of last year had begun habitually exceeding 30 minutes/day. I don't always manage the requisite dose of 15 minutes of Karen time (which has to involve intellectual activity... ideally something that would make me say "Hmmmm"... A assumed a Thinker pose as he explained this) But, realising that A is right, and that thinking about cool and interesting things does make me happier, I am going to try and generate a new habit. 'Dr Bunny hops and hops and hops and...' started as a blog about learning to cope as a single parent, but when I lost my job and during my divorce it became a blog of failures and self-indulgent whining about bad choices.

I haven't felt comfortable here in recent months. I've even been considering starting a new blog, but I think I should 'own' my bad times as well as my good ones! So, instead, I am going to reclaim this one and try and establish a new habit. In the spirit of 'history has expired due to inactivity' (which has expired due to inactivity, but some people may remember), I will don my oxygen mask, seek out and blog about at least two things each week that I think are cool or interesting or thought-provoking. Let's see how it goes...

"I don't think 9 billion [people] is better than 1 billion"

James Lovelock, the scientist who originated the Gaia theory has written a new book (The Vanishing Face of Gaia) and New Scientist has an interview with him.

Read it... It's pretty extreme stuff:

"I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less."

I don't really have enough background to assess this at the moment, and I'm very sure my values differ from his a whole heap, but if this was a marketing ploy, it was effective, because I definitely want to read the book now!

Kapcon 18: The joy of being several someones else

Saturday
Round 1: Shelter Me
GM: Marcus Bone

Like last year's "Fear of Dreaming", this game really was one of the highlights of my con! Interestingly, I found it a bit less intense than last year, probably partly cos I have been gaming regularly, and partly because my character's fairy obsession took the edge off the stress for me (while making it much more stressful for some of the other characters). Still, it was plenty horrifying, and our interaction with the dead Nazi psychiatrist "bad doctor" and his victim will stay with me for a long time! Marcus's GMing style gives really excellent scope for players to interact and develop their characters' stories, and this group took advantage of that... there's been a lot of comment on the excellent roleplaying in this game (which also ran in round 6) on NZRaG... I absolutely agree that Mash's creepy obsessive list-making was truly disturbing (and worryingly reminscent of some people I know and love) and I'd recommend the sequel next year (so long as you don't take MY place).

Round 2: FRUP: One of our dinosaurs is missing
GM: Ivan Towlson

Cool premise and great fun... I did a lousy job of roleplaying my character who was someone else's minion, and a muscle-bound fighter... Strangely, not my usual choice in D and D.... Enjoyed the rest of the party's roleplaying and all the humans dressed up as various monster manual beasties... Loved the reserve where new beasties were being "bred" and was delighted by the appearance of real live dinosaurs (only in the game, silly). Good, but a bit light following Shelter me... would've worked better for me the other way round

Round 3: Sneaking off for a swim and putting kids to bed

Unfortunately J eavesdropped on me asking his Grandma if I could go for a swim, so I clearly failed my sneakiness roll... however, the double tantrum (if one starts, the other follows to get in on the attention) had subsided by the time I arrived back at my folks' place and they were all eating happily. I was convincing enough in the maternal GM role to settle two very demanding PCs. In fact, I came out from feeding and settling my littlest darling to find the other wee darling asleep on his dozing Grandma, so just had to carry him to bed... easiest ever! A busy day was had by all!

LARP: Mafia 2071

I enjoyed the LARP this year (and I didn't run away... yay!). I played Rhond1a, a Stanford business graduate who had fallen foul of a nasty sexually-harassing corporate boss, ended up running on-line gambling sites for the Neo-Mafia to launder money, and was looking for a way back into the legitimate corporate world. I made a couple of pretty satisfying deals... one with the Malandrinos to open a joint-venture casino that would serve as an interface to attract new clients, and another working as a consultant for a corporation to help them minimise their visible profits... not quite the legitimacy I was looking for, but I like to think I played my part in making the head of our family Don of NeoSteelsburg...

From my POV, a problem with this Mafia wake scenario was that there was not much action to watch or tag along with... to get the most out of it, you really had to walk up and engage other people in conversation, and I wasn't feeling awesomely confident in my roleplaying abilities (having had a panic attack and run away from last year's LARP)... so it was hard work for me... but well worth it!

Sunday
Round 4: Games on Demand-Covenant
GM: Malcolm Craig

Last year I had to play Games on Demand cos of never knowing when my 6-month-old would need feeding... this year I was determined to play one cos last year rocked. This didn't disappoint! Malcolm was a great GM...

Covenant is awesome too... you play members of a a cult that was preparing for an apocalyptic event that never came... the use of motifs (images that crop up repeatedly within the context of the game... ours were London fog, timepieces, crying babies, puddles and ? ) gives plenty of scope for beautiful cinematic imagery which I loved! I actually came away with pictures... my character and her lover with coffee on the steps of the British museum, an armed confrontation in an abandoned docklands warehouse... cliched, perhaps, but very very compelling in context.

Relationships are central to the game... and in this scenario, they were truly f**ked up (as you might expect). Combats allow you to draw on motifs, on the conventions of your cell group within the cult (core beliefs you share... Suffering can be avoided, science trumps art) and your own edges (attributes and relationships)... the game itself was very tense, with lots of ugly dialogue and action...

My character Leonie was sleeping with an arsehole called Trent (one of her edges) who actually tried to kill her! Talk about plumbing new depths of relationship nightmare through roleplaying!

This was definitely my other favourite game at this year's Kapcon. You can read about Covenant... and I bought the PDF for $10 at RPGNow (it's the 1st new RPG I've bought in years if that is any recommendation... but I have a copy now, so if you know me you can totally check it out)


Round 5: Breach of Containment
GM: Me

Not my best effort... the players felt there was too much science and I explained it badly and probably came across as an arrogant nerd.... and sadly I couldn't convince most people to score me so I had a better chance at a spot prize. [I had a bit of a self pity wallow after I f**ked up my game... and I apologise to anyone I talked to while that was happening, cos really my life hardly sucks at all these days :-) ]

Round 6: For me, there was no round 6

Still and all, life gets easier... and nothing highlights how much easier it's got than trying to do something that last year felt like an almost impossible struggle, and finding it almost frivolously easy! I got to the same number of sessions this year (apart from my sustained LARPing effort), but overall my Kapcon felt more satisfying because of being able to hang out and chat, and not having to race away immediately the breaks began.

I'm already looking forward to next year and I have 2 ideas for games to run... and I promise... whichever one I go with... there's not much science in either! See you at Kapcon!

Breach of Containment

Tonight we playtested my game for Kapcon... It was fun, though I worry that all my players were science geeks too and it may require too high a degree of that kind of geekery! I will post about it after the weekend when spoilers won't matter...

I am fascinated to see if the real game resembles the play-test in anything beyond the characters and initial scenario!

It is late now! G'night world.