Mike Selinker's page

Sean K Reynolds wrote:

Mike Selinker wrote:

W E Ray wrote:

How 'bout getting Mike Selinker to do a Pathfinder Shakespeare!

Hmmm. I've already done Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest for D&D, and I'm not sure how one follows that up.

Hamlet, durr. :)

No way. It's got to be The Taming of the Shrew! ...wait.... that would be a horrible adventure ;). How about Midsummer Night's Dream, set in the First World?

The Shakespeare campaign for Dungeon (which was Spirits of the Tempest, Dark Thane Macbeth, and Lear the Giant-King) started as a proposal for me to adapt A Midsummer Night's Dream. Which I did not do because, well, nothing happens in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Hamlet? Please. One ghost, a little swordfight, and a super-size serving of angst. Vampire: The Masquerade, not Pathfinder.

Anyway, this is still in the category of "Hmmm."

Mike

How 'bout getting Mike Selinker to do a Pathfinder Shakespeare!

Hmmm. I've already done Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest for D&D, and I'm not sure how one follows that up.

Hmmm.

Mike

Last year I launched "NaNoWriMi," or National Novel Writing Minute, and lots of folks here participated. The challenge was to write as much of a novel as possible in one minute. Now it's back, over on the Wired Magazine site. Feel free to jump in there, or here, or wherever you like. Here's the post on Wired.com:

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NaNoWriMi: A Wired Challenge to Write a Novel in One Minute
By Mike Selinker November 2, 2010 | 6:37 pm

Here is a writing challenge for all readers of Wired.com with a little time on their hands. Make that “very little.”

With a tip of our cap to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the Decode blog wants to see which of our readers can write the best start to a novel — in only 60 seconds. You can flex your creative muscles in NaNoWriMi: National Novel Writing Minute just by posting a comment to this entry. The rules are these:

1) You can’t start with any ideas in your head. Open a comment, hit a timer, and then write a title, a byline, and as much text as you can.
2) When the timer ends, you can finish your thought, but for Pete’s sake, be quick about it.
3) You’re not trying to write a complete novel. You’re just trying to see how far you can get in 60 seconds. So you don’t need a middle or an ending. We’re not looking for length either.
4) Submissions must be in by 11:59 pm Pacific on November 30. (Okay, you can have another minute.) You can submit any number of novels, as long as none of them takes you longer than a minute to write.
5) This is totally on the honor system. Sure, you could dust off that story you wrote in Freshman English, copy and paste in the first few sentences, and impress us with your creativity. But we’re sure you’re not like that. Besides, it’ll probably take you longer to find it than it will to write a new one.

Here’s how this came about. Last year, with no likelihood of having time in November to write a NaNoWriMo novel, I figured I at least had the time to start one. With a timer next to my desk, I wrote as much of a novel as I could in one minute. This was “Novel Zero”:

Last Moon at Aggathor
by Mike Selinker
Today I am a man, thought Redclaw. I can give up enough of myself to make the change, day or night. The greater acommplishemnt is retaining enough of myself to change back.

Yes, that’s terrible, and yes, that’s exactly how I typed the word “accomplishment.” You think I’m going to waste precious seconds performing a spellcheck? I published the result on my Facebook page, and then hundreds of 60-second novels sprung from my creative friends’ fingers. People talked about how it was good practice for larger writing tasks, and how it was better than coffee for waking them up in the morning. You can see some of the results on the forum for the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game.

We’re sure you can do just as well as those authors. So, got a minute to spare? Open a comment, start your time and start writing. We’ll post comments on our favorite ones later in the month.

Just FYI: DriveThruRPG now has a megabundle where you can get $1500 worth of PDFs for your $20 donation. It's a staggeringly great return on donation. Details here.

At last count, they had raised $116,860.00 for Doctors Without Borders.

Mike

Doctors Without Borders is as good as a charity gets. I highly encourage donations to them.

Very good idea.

Spread the word.

The good folks at DriveThruRPG are organizing a Gamers Help Haiti drive, where you can join your fellow gamers in contributing $5 to the relief efforts. Follow the link if you want to donate.

Mike

Layoffs destroy morale. The constant drain on talent was one of the major motivators in my resigning from Wizards' RPG division in 2001, and eventually from the company in 2003.

Rob Heinsoo is a great designer, and will undoubtedly be doing phenomenal things for someone else very soon.

Mike

FYI, here's the "Play for Obama" shirt on Daily Kos.

We at The Loonbucket Brigade didn't really cotton to the whole "Pray for Obama—Psalm 103:8" flap, so we made our own gamer-themed version. Let me (ducking) know what you think.

Mike

Argh the grammar the grammar....

So badly want and need to edit.............

Discipline, Dwarf, discipline. Just getting the words down is its own acommplishemnt. Er, accomplishment.

Tensor, you have made the greatest thing to ever use the words "Taco Bell."

All very fine novels, guys.

Rob, that's a fine bit of science-fiction.
Reggie, that's a fine bit of horror.
Cosmo, that's enough out of you.

Whodunnit?

Detective Dudley puffed on his pipe as lightning crashed outside. He regarded the group sitting in the parlor and said, "One of you is the murderer! Is it Prof. Pumpernickel? Miss Crimson? Or perhaps Dr. Knowbody? Judging by the evidence we have, that murderer is..."
(Seconds to spare)

Seconds to spare? Then you easily could have told us who the murderer was! That's just mean.

OK, I admit I thought of the title before the minute started.

I thought of my byline before the minute started, so don't worry about it.

Yes, you read that correctly. I wanted to do something to show solidarity with my NaNoWriMo friends, so I invented “NaNoWriMi.” You see how much of a novel you can write in a minute (hence the “Mi”), and then you abandon it forever. 1, 2, 3, go…

My "Novel Zero" was this:

Last Moon at Aggathor
by Mike Selinker
Today I am a man, thought Redclaw. I can give up enough of myself to make the change, day or night. The greater acommplishemnt is retaining enough of myself to change back.

Yes, that's how I spelled "accomplishment." You think I'm wasting precious seconds on spellchecking? I've concluded that the rule "You can finish your last sentence, but for God's sakes, be quick about it" may need to exist, but most people seem to get somewhere with 60 seconds from conception to (a sort of) conclusion.

Anyway, it's kinda taken off on my Facebook page ("novels" by Jason Bulmahn, Owen Stephens, Miranda Horner, and more), so I figured folks here might like in. I'll probably collect them somewhere afterward. Anybody want to climb on board the NaNoWriMi Express?

Mike

Today's Most Beautiful Thing is about TSR's classic typo "dawizard." If you went to the ENnies at Gen Con, you heard me talk about it there. Enjoy, and post comments here or on the journal itself (you don't need an LJ account).

Mike

Now it is live. Check it out. It's cool.

And also woefully underdeveloped on the Pathfinder front. None of the Adventure Paths are in there, for example. Anybody feel like taking that challenge on?

Mike

Mike Selinker and Wolfgang Baur competing in a freestyle battle!

Go!

I rock the mike in a style so orderly

I leave your kobolds all drawn-and-quarterly...

This is my favorite game of the year so far. It's just about the quickest game I've ever seen, from the moment you open the box to the moment you start playing. Two players get cards with people on them, like Gandhi and Frank Sinatra. Then you flip an action card such as snowboarding or basket weaving, and the players make arguments for who would win. It is as fun as fun gets. We played a ten-person game at the National Puzzlers' League convention, and people wouldn't leave until we'd finished the entire box. Give it a try.

Mike

It is an awesome read. I haven't played it, but I'm sure I believe Mouse Guard is the best RPG I've read in half a decade. It is also the prettiest. And the finger-puppetiest.

My buddy Wolf Baur and I got into a little tete-a-tete over whether the selection of Mouse Guard over 4E was an "upset." He insisted it was. I had to burst his bubble on that. There were a couple of things going on here. The Origins Awards' final step is a fan vote, after the panels of experts (including me) and the retailers narrow down the lists. Every attendee had heard of 4E, and while many of them loved it, even hardcore WotC supporters would say that there were a whole lot of people who didn't love it. Meanwhile, Mouse Guard has only two types of people: those who have never heard of it, and those who love it. So add a whole lot of passionate supporters of one product and a whole lot of detractors of another, and you get Mouse Guard over 4E. It might be an "upset" that WotC produced such a polarizing system, but the end result is not hard to fathom.

The ENnies just got a whole lot more interesting, says I.

Mike

One of the things that's made me happy as a board game designer has been Board Game Geek, the ultimate encyclopedic compendium of tens of thousands of board and card game. It's the site if you want to know anything about board games. Hardly a day goes by where I'm not looking something up on it.

So the roleplaying game designer in me is particularly happy about this: the upcoming debut of RPG Geek, which is just like Board Game Geek for RPGs. There are 3200 entries for 1000 systems currently being slated for construction.

There's an open beta starting very soon, and a call for entry development will likely go out shortly thereafter. So if you ever wanted to help transfer all that Pathfinder or D&D or any other RPG content into a massive database, this is your chance.

You can sign up for the open beta here and read about the project here and here.

This is a very big project, but I think it will be very, very cool.

Mike

Mike Selinker wrote:

Actually, what I want to wear at this week's Origins is a T-shirt or pin that says "Oh yeah? Was YOUR game on The Tonight Show?"

That's fine, until you run into Klaus Teuber...

I spent a fair amount of time with the Mayfair guys at Origins. We are now brothers in the fraternity of my-game-was-on-the-Tonight-Show-and-yours-wasn't-so-there.

Mike

What is this Yetisburg?

Sounds like some kinda joke.

It is. But it's a good one.

At Gen Con 2007, James Jacobs was sleepy, and heard someone say "the battle of Gettysburg," and said, "Did you say Yetisburg?" Josh Frost was inspired to find me, and the true story of the Civil War was born.

To make the joke extra funny, we made it a good game.

Mike

P.S. Truncated video here, courtesy of my cousin Ben.

Thanks, Neil. Yetisburg should now be marketed, "As seen on the Tonight Show!"

Actually, what I want to wear at this week's Origins is a T-shirt or pin that says "Oh yeah? Was YOUR game on The Tonight Show?"

To be mocked by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's sidekick is easily the proudest moment in my brief time on earth.

I had a great time in the half-dozen hours I was there. It was one of the most relaxing and enjoyable conventions I've been at in some time. I especially liked meeting Adam Daigle and Lilith and Friadoc and the other folks I only knew as their screen names. Good times.

And special kudos to the Shackletons for teaching me the three words I didn't know I desperately longed to hear: LIVE ACTION YETISBURG! (I got a hobby horse!)

Thanks to Josh for letting me in the door, and Jason for not chasing me back out through it. But not for lack of trying.

Mike

Whoops, the links disappeared.
The Paizo store page is here.
Stan!'s story page is here.

OK, now go check it out.

Unprompted plug here, just cuz I love this thing: Run, don't walk, to click this Paizo store link and order Stan!'s amazingly cool Cthulhu bedtime-story "The Littlest Shoggoth," which can be previewed on the Story Time with Stan! site. You may not know yet that you need this little book, but you do. Hurry--Stan will only sell as many as people actually buy!

Mike

Agree on behalf of the original Dying Earth short stories, and on the first of the Cugel books. However, the later ones were a bit much. Rhialto was good, though. Plus, Jack Vance is one wicked banjo player.

Yeah, I can't tell them apart, quality-wise. I read them all in one swing, so they don't have these massive decade-plus gaps for me. They seem pretty seamless, like they were written in just a couple years.

Mike

What program did you use to construct the website?

It's a LiveJournal blog, which might explain why your office blocks it.

Man, that Orb edition doesn't look near as attractive as the old paperbacks.

I have no idea why that book has the cover it does. Nothing like that floating city ever appears in the stories.

Great website, too; I wish it had an RSS feed. Haven't figured out why my office has it blocked.

If somebody were to tell me how to make an RSS feed happen, I would happily do so.

Most of all though, I despised all things Cugel. It was a struggle to get through most of his section of the series. However, much like Lord Foul's Bane, it's all but impossible for me to root for a rapist.

I think you may have taken this series more seriously than Vance intended. It's all farce to him, and certainly none of the characters are worth rooting for. Anybody who has any good in them is ruined by the actions of the other characters. That doesn't make it less funny; in fact, it may make it more funny.

Covenant is different. He's an awful person. That doesn't make him less fascinating as a protagonist to me, but I could see why others would feel like staying away.

Mike

If only there was a Planet Stories version of it that was actually in print :)

Until that happens (and it should), it seems plenty available new on Amazon.

100% agreed.

Well, it's settled, then. Everyone go out and get a copy by tomorrow.

As some folks here know, I write an occasional series of columns called "The Most Beautiful Things". Somehow, in a year of writing this, I never wrote anything about fiction. So today I just posted about the most beautiful fantasy novel series, which I think is Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. Feel free to post your agreement or disagreement there if you like.

Mike

Mike, it's been a month. Were you able to get through?

I haven't heard from her.

Mike

Gwen (DungeonGrrl) is not only a member of our community, she's also a Contributor (PF #13). I'm sure that the Paizo staff has contact information for her. (And I'm also pretty sure she wants to keep that information as private as possible.)

I'm dropping a note to Mike S., letting him know our concerns.

Appreciated, Chris, but hold up a bit. I'll send a note to Gwen about your concerns, but let's not send out the search party just yet. If she asks me to share something with you, I will.

Mike

Sigh. Jonathan gave me my start at WotC, when we convinced him and Peter to hire me, Wolfgang Baur, Tim Beach, and Teeuwynn Woodruff as a package. He's the best game designer I've ever met (and I've met them all), and one of the few true geniuses in Wizards' history. To see that they've decided to go on without him is very disheartening.

Pretty much everybody else on this list is a friend and colleague of mine too. That is no good at all.

Mike

MONA for President!!!!

Oh wait...are we to late for that?..DOH!

Come to think of it, have we ever seen Erik and Obama in the same place?

Their names are frighteningly similar:
baRacK ObamA
eRiK mOnA
Maybe they're really one person named ERACK OMONA...

He'd get my vote, anyway.

Mike

Hey Mike, would you happen to know who designed the AH Star Wars: Queens Gambit Game? It would seem that game has a lot of promise in crossing over into other game themes. It uses an odd system to manage four different games (some trite while others are complex). I really thought it to be a breakthru. It manages a lot, and also manages to be fun.

That's the good work of Rob Daviau's team out at Hasbro corporate.

Mike

Best use of the word "anthropophagous" in a Civil War song ever.

Mike

Oh, and yeah, as you brought this to my attention, I blame you for this Selinker. Thanks. Thanks a ton dude.

Happy to help.

I just wished that when I designed Risk Godstorm, these guys had been around to give me a campaign like "ARE YOU GOD ENOUGH?" There could be a GODLY METER, and an ADONIS CHALLENGE, and a line like "Grab your sandals and pull up your toga!" Opportunities missed.

Mike

Check out the ad site for the new Risk:

It asks ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH?
And then says, “Grab your shoes and pull up your panties. Your manliness is about to be tested.”
And there’s the words MAN UP! on the screen.
And a MANLY METER. (Subtle.)
And a STUD CHALLENGE, where you pick up women in a bar using pickup lines (I scored two women at once, but left a $20 bill for the other one as “seed”—apparently I need pickup lines to hire prostitutes).
And a WIFE BUTTON, which leads to a Tiffany’s parody page.
And a remote control which plays a movie of hot women dancing.
And a finger you can pull for the obvious effect.
And the ability to turn your truck’s trailer hitch into a sack of two soccer balls. (Way subtle.)
And a big pile of poo on the intro page, which leads to a game where you increase your manliness by flinging poo.
And of course, no ability to pick a female avatar. But you can pick your mustache, so that's something.
I erected my MANLY METER up to 2849 manly points (I have chest hair!) before I got bored. Took about eight minutes.

I’m sure proud to say I designed a Risk game now.

Mike

Palin ran an administration so utterly amateurish and incompetent that they discussed sacking Woolten in conversations to Monegan on state trooper phone lines, in public etc. They were just begging to be caught.

When the Guardian ran the headline "Palin cleared of wrongdoing by Palin," the presidential race officially ended.

They were built by Halliburten under no bid contracts.

I have them hiring an all-contractor army in Chapter 7, with the rallying theme song:

Giant robots on the loose?
We'll kick them in their caboose!
If your country's really hurtin'
Don't delay, call Halliburton!

Mike

But that is when the U.S. busts out the starfighters and space cruisers we built with the alien technology hidden in Area 51. It really does write itself.

Did we bid those out to the lowest-cost contractor like we did with the V-22 Osprey? Because if so, I don't like our chances against the giant robots.

I'm currently working on the scene where the novel's plucky heroine resigns the presidency to lead Alaska's Million Moose Militia on a doomed assault on the now-airborne island of Japan.

Mike