Month: October 2021

Gaming Thursday: The Troubleshooters Aurora Casefiles

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The Troubleshooters RPG is a game based on the action, adventure, and mystery genre of Franco-Belgian graphic novels (aka bandes dessinées), especially those of Tintin and Spirou & Fantasio.  Now, if you’re like me, just that tagline is enough to excite you!  And if it does, you’ll be equally excited to know that the game is now out for all.  It’s a definite beaut, well put together with art and layout that do a great job to evoke the genre.  Even better, so do its rules, with the core system being solid enough and with some nice mechanical nods that provide support towards playing and creating those types of stories we love.

Having backed the Kickstarter, I received the PDF a few months ago and have greatly enjoyed diving into it.  And while I have no major issues with the base system, I immediately began wondering how it might play using the Aurora RPG Engine.

I think you can see where this is going…

Enter: The Aurora Casefiles!  A conversion that aims to bring the advantages of both Aurora’s dice mechanics as well as its narrative tools to the world of the Troubleshooters.   This is not attempting to design the game from the ground up; rather it strictly keeps as much of the core Troubleshooters rules and all its nifty subsystems (such as dice flipping, karma, dice challenges, duels, story points, and more) intact.  It’s the best of both worlds!

Snag your copy here (and the Aurora Engine document if you haven’t already), pack your camera, bring along your favourite white dog, a few companions, and let the adventure begin…

(Note that this conversion document only contains the bits that are necessary to modify the base Troubleshooters core rules to use the resolution mechanics of the Aurora Engine.  As such, you will need a copy of the core Troubleshooters RPG, which you can get direct from Helmgast here or also from modiphius.net)

Philosophy Tuesday

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There was a concept and a technique that I learned early on during my philosophical training:

Don’t look for what’s wrong.

Instead, look for what’s missing.

A clever little distinction there, for the former tends to hang us up, raise our hackles, and generally bog us down through muddy terrain as our ego and calculating self and identity and shame and all sorts of things gets involved.  It also can sometimes (often?) lead us to a dud prize: Congratulations, you know what’s wrong!  Now what?

Even more meaningful is the insight that often nothing is actually, truly, capital-W, wrong.  It may be unproductive or detracting, and may have deleterious outcomes, but perhaps Wrong isn’t actually there and/or isn’t so binary.  And so Wrong isn’t the best place to look.

Looking for what’s missing sidesteps all of that.  What’s missing looks for what, if it were present, would alter how things occurs for us and what would create new possibilities.  There are many avenues to display there, but the most fruitful place to look is often in who we are being in those moments.  When we shift our being so too do our actions shift, and thus so do the results also shift.  When we add in what’s missing the rut is broken and we get ourselves in gear in ways that may have seemed unfathomable before.  As a bonus, our experience also shifts to the better!

All of which is all great in the realm of mindfulness and philosophy.  But I also want to expand this into the realm of art, and specifically in the realm of critique.*  Because looking for what’s wrong not only can blind you to the work you’re exploring, but expressing a series of what’s wrong is often unproductive at either improving the work or the growth of the creator.**  What’s missing can provide way more valuable and actionable feedback and builds up rather than undermines.  Relate what caught your attention and was memorable, review your impressions, and express what was missing that would elevate the work and its impact even further.

With what’s missing our possibilities are opened, our art (including the art of living!) is strengthened, our excitement grows, and, above all, our spirit soars.

 

* As you might already see, this also works great for other critiques, be it performance reviews at an employment, coaching sports, and etc.

** If the foundation of the work doesn’t resonate with you, or if you think there’s something problematic, then that’s a thing too and certainly worthy of expressing, but both express it in that way and also you can still critique the rest of the work from what’s missing to elevate the craft.  Even if this particular work itself is discarded due to those primordial issues, what’s missing has helped to strengthen the creator, and the next work they create will be grander because of it.

Architecture Monday

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They say California is in love with their cars… which leaves lots of extra car and road bits around… so why not get playful and use them into your architecture?

Road signs for fences and railings and siding, hatchback glass for awnings, station wagon tails for a a gate, plus repurposed sheet metal and more!

Something fun by Leger Wanaselja Architecture

 

 

Electric Obfuscation

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I want to talk about this ‘article’ posted on USA Today that makes the claim that operating an electric vehicle is somehow shockingly more expensive than a regular car (and, thus, you should consider staying away).

Upfront, I will say I find this article is contrived and it does not align at all with my experience of electric vehicle ownership.  Quite the contrary:  owning an electric car has had significantly lower operating costs for me.  (It’s one of the reasons I love it so much.)

1) You likely won’t need to buy a home charger.  I can’t speak for every single electric car on the market, but I’ve not heard of one that cannot plug into a standard 120v outlet.  So there’s no cost there if you want to stick with regular L1 charging.

2) If you want to upgrade, at least with my Model 3  I could go to 240v charging simply by having a 240v/50A circuit installed with the correct outlet as the car came with an adapter.  This cost me a couple of hundred bucks for the electrician to run some cable and conduit.  Not very much.

3) HERE’S THE BIGGEST MENTAL HURDLE TO OVERCOME FOR MOST OF US.  Do you ever fret about leaving the house and needing to find a special place to charge your phone?  No, you do not, because you charge at home and can leave with a full charge.  The same is true with an electric car.  You plug in when you get home.  Even on an 120V circuit, you are getting ~5miles of charge per hour.  That’s not super fast, but a typical car will spend 10h or so in the garage from the evening and overnight.  That’s 50mi of charge, which will cover most people’s commutes.  If you have a 240V charger, then you can get a full charge in a couple of hours.*  Deadhead miles and time investiture while you wait for something to charge is, for the most part, not an issue.**

4) Their purported cost of charging, however, is where I take the greatest exception.  Where I live has relatively expensive power costs.  And I even pay extra for 100% renewable electricity (75% wind, 25% solar).  It’s well less than 30c per kWH off peak.  When I drive, my car is using <250WH per mile.  If I were to compare this to a 50mpg car, then to drive an equivalent 50 miles I would use 12.5kWH which would cost me $3.75 — and to be clear that’s both rounding up on the energy per mile I use to drive, rounding well up on the cost of electricity, and using a very high mileage car as a comparison point.  And I still end up a bit cheaper than a gallon of gas here.  Remove those artificial inflation points and my actual comparative cost would be less.

5) In addition, there’s almost no maintenance to an electric car. No belts, oil changes, spark plugs, wire, tensioners, filters, or etc. I’ve not had to bring my car in for servicing since I bought it 4 years ago.  This brings down the operating costs even further.

Between less “fuel” cost and less  maintenance cost, I estimate I will save thousands of dollars of operating costs compared to that of my previous gas-powered car.

In short, I find this article is narrow and contrived.  There are ways to make EV ownership more expensive, but why would you want to?  You could also write an article saying here are the things to watch out for to ensure you’re not making EV ownership more expensive, but that’s not what this article does either.   Of the “4 extra costs,” the first is not entirely necessary (the cost of a home L2 charger, and even if you do include the cost, over what timeframe did this study average it?  If you install it and own the home and EVs for 20 years, the cost becomes truly minimal), the second ignores the phone effect (you can charge at home), the third is non-universal (an EV tax?), and the fourth also ignores the phone effect (why would you need deadhead miles?  how many of these are they estimating?  what cost are they assigning it?).

I find this article misleads and that’s a shame.

* If you live in a rental unit without outlets, then this could be of concern and would need the landlord to install outlets.  But especially with economies of scale, that might not be that large of a hurdle.  Years ago, some of the parking lots at my University already had outlets to each stall to plug in your block heaters, which displays the ease of bringing power to parking.

** This is especially weird as the main instigator of this so-called study owns a Porsche.  You’re telling me that person couldn’t afford to install home charging and, while they sleep, get 200+ miles?

*** Let’s use their values, too, OK?  They say 33 MPG car at $2.81/gallon (certainly not there now), costs $8.58 for fuel (not including maintenance).  Let’s say your EV uses 300WH per mile.  100 miles is 30kWH times .30 per kWH equals $9.  Note my actual cost at home, using my actual overall efficiency and cost of electricity is about $5.40, but I’m rounding up to account for other people’s driving habits and costs on commercial chargers.  But even if it was $9, that’s not exactly breaking the bank, and you save much of that amount in lack of maintenance.

**** The article states that charging rates can vary by 100% on a week to week basis.  That one I really am curious about — I’ve never encountered that with any of the charging spots I’ve seen or used.  Electricity pricing in some states must be really weird.

Gaming Thursday

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It might… just be time… for a little bit…. of vehicular mayhem!

And lo did most of the goods from the new Car Wars 6th Edition arrive!  Definitively a different feel (both rules-wise and the aesthetic of the vehicles) than the old school game. For which, perhaps hilariously, I made dozens upon dozens of designs though played only a few times…

I’ve not done any test games of this edition yet, but looking forward to kicking the tires and lighting the fires to see what it’s got.

Wonder Wednesday

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I’ve just been introduced to these great works by Hilla and Bernd Becher.  There’s something cool within repetition that isn’t exact actual repetition. It’s like a harmony, where each overlapping individual thing produces a richer whole and thus a distinct experience.  On top of that, they can be truly intriguing,  inviting fascination with the collection and collectiveness and patterns and similarities and differences and organization of them all.

(Also, check out Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes series.  It is equally interesting and fascinating… especially when coupled with some great architecture and artistic placement such as at the Benesse House by Tadao Ando!)

Philosophy Tuesday

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“It is good to remember that love is (also) a verb.”

— expressed by many

A great reminder indeed.  Especially since, in many of the stories we hear or watch, love is presented as a thing that is either found, or that descends from upon high, or that is either there or not there and thus no different than an object, like a rock.  It becomes is a passive noun.

Hence that reminder that there is another side to love, a love that is active and agency-filled.*  Love is a way of being, and like all ways of being it is therefore capable of being created and brought forth in the moment, moment by moment by moment.  We can be present to love and can go further to be loving.

It is a practice!  And the more time we spend being loving, the richer and more resilient our relationships become, the less contempt we peddle, and the grander (and delightful and happy and…)  our experience of life becomes.

 

* Of course, it’s not that love isn’t also a noun, and that our emotions are not involved.  Love arises much easier when the right context is present, often when who we are being aligns.  Not to mention the complexity of the different kinds of love, for which the English language, at least, is deficient in differentiating.  There’s romantic love, familial love, friendship love, and our overarching love for humans and humanity.  So the key here is to simply not forget that love is (also) a verb and to not live as though it’s only a passive noun or as though it’s only a verb.  It is big and encompasses all.

Architecture Monday

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I like this, a building ‘rescued’ from it’s intended undifferentiated glass box origins, taking the raw concrete frame and building something that is more in tune with its context and the environment in which it sits.  With colour, pattern, and plenty of greenery, it is at once nicer to look at, nicer to be in, and nicer to the planet.

The whole idea is quite clever in a rather logical way.  The side of the building that sees the most sun in this hot and humid environment houses the stair core and other utility elements, creating a buffer to keep heat and glare out.  The other two sunny sides are surrounded by open-air balconies, two of which are encased in a colorful set of scrim, shifting in geometric patterns to create openings out of which plants poke their leaves towards the sun.  The other two levels are protected by the overhang and more potted plants.

Heat and glare are kept out, and you’re working next to a little garden oasis.  Even more so when you open the sliding doors and let the breeze flow through.  As a supreme bonus, check out the little reading nook, nestled into the walls throughout!

Sweet work.  A building that could have been a pillbox that instead found life as a nifty object that’s lush and creates a wonderful space inside, all while needing less energy to run.  That’s what it’s all about.

MGB Headquarters by Spacefiction Studio