aggienaut | Entries tagged with mick

   As we hurtle alone together towards more than 40 days of quarantine, with no clear end in sight, many of us are developing severe cabin fever. How can we connect and interact with our friends when we can't leave our houses and must assume they've become infected were-corvids??

   Recall, a bit ago I posted about the Best Game Ever: Telephone Pictionary. In short it's a drawing game that alternates between drawing and descriptions. I love it ... but it is not the answer to our current troubles, since, as I discovered when putting together that entry, it's rather tedious trying to get the drawings well-scanned and all -- much better as an in-person game.

   BUT!

   FEAR NOT!

   My friend Jib brought to my attention the similar game of Video Telephone Pictionary! Basically, the first person makes up a short story and sends a video of themself telling the story to the next person. Upon received the video, the rules we came up with were that you could watch it twice, no taking notes or anything, and then you record yourself telling the story as best you can recall it, and send it to the next person. One could have a set order but we just let each person choose from among those who hadn't yet received it, as coordinated through the group chat by Jib.

   Once they were all submitted we decided that first the first person would post theirs, then the last person, and then in order the ones in between so we could see how we got from point A to Point ... H. That order was fun because it immediately left us thinking "how the hell did we get from this to that?? ...but I'm just going to give you the progression in order here.

(1)    Here is how ours began, courtesy of Jib, 1:23 in length:

(2) I happened to be the first person after him:

As you can see I immediately forgot the cousins' family name, and then tried unsuccessfully to make the question of what he does and does not slap less of an innuendo. I think I kept what is bottom paddling and what is being slapped separate but these two issues soon became completely conflated, possibly as intended. I really wasn't sure whether Jib had quite intended to say "inclement" weather but I went with it. (1:36)

(3) Next up was our friend Greg's girlfriend Kristen, who later apologized that she was very stoned at the time but her retelling was pretty good and accurate. She used both the word mermaid and later "siren" to describe the mermaid, which I think is totally fair but going forward only "siren" was used henceforth. Because videos are a bear to upload I'll only upload one more from the middle and the last one. (1:37)

(4) My friend Mick was next:

I like how he really brought the paddling of bottoms full circle. (1:06)

(5) Okay the next one was Greg himself. And I think I'll post it too because actually a really fascinating linguistic thing happens here. When he says "siren" he says it like "s[weird transdimensional Australian syllable]n" and even the other Australians couldnt' figure it out and henceforth the "siren" was transformed into a "stone." Also, he appears to be naked. O_O (don't worry you never see more than his neck up) (0:41)

(6) Trent's is pretty funny. He recites it covering his eyes and there's a whole bunch of reduplication of "paddling bottoms." And of course "one day he heard a woman calling for help, she was a stone." (0:40)

(7) In Ben's the female stone becomes a genderless rock. (0:20)

(8) Mick's girlfriend Lozz:

   Hers is notably short, at 13 seconds.

   The whole thing took about 3 days to go through eight people.

After Action Report:
   The videos steadily got shorter. It looks like most people kept theirs within seconds of the person before them except when certain people shortened it significantly it never got longer again. I think to a certain degree people also consciously went through the people they expected a good retelling from first. If I had to put them in order of what I'd expect from them in story retelling fidelity I think it would have been in the order that they actually went. I had even expressed a concern to Trent that Lozz would turn it into a 15 second story and lo, verily, that's exactly what she did. Takeaway lesson: this seems to have basically policed itself but definitely worthwhile putting people you expect to heavily simplify the story at the very end.

   I think this was really fun and well suited to our current conditions. I don't want to start another immediately and burn everyone out on it but I think it could be a once-a-week thing. I'm thinking of starting another round myself a week after this one had begun (ie next Tuesday). To help prevent it getting compacted down to 13 seconds I think I'll try to have 2 or 3 key plot points, all while trying to keep it at about 1:30. Considering possibly letting everyone know the starting time so that if they get a 20 second video maybe they'll feel the need to fill space which might lead to some interesting additions. Also am thinking of adding a few relatively random objects to see what happens to them. [this was written on 2020/04/18, before round II below]

ROUND II
That was the week before last. Last week I started another round. As promised it had more plot points and things I hoped people would confuse.

(1)

A rather absurdist story about squids in trees and good goblins helping princesses. (2:06)

(9)
This time let's do the thing where we go immediately to the end:

   So.. wow! Now as you can see we were all dying to see how it had changed over the course of things!

(2)
   I sent it to Jib, who very accurately conveyed it to Kristen

(3)
   Kristen recorded it very accurately, and then tried to sent it to Ben, who sat on it for 24 hours before saying he wasn't going to do it. She then attempted to send it to her boyfriend Greg but he responded that he "doesn't wanna." Frustrated, she said she'd send it to Mick and if he refused she was done.

(4)
   Mick recorded it and then attempted to send it to Trent, who refused to participate ("I'll just ruin it"). Having lost half the participants from last week I scrambled to come up with replacements, and directed Mick to send it to my friend Sharon in Namibia.

(5)

Sharon did a delightful recording and after the revealing of all the versions several people complimented her on her soothing voice. Also as they were revealed, I noticed that by this point the story had still experienced almost no changing.

(6)

Next was my friend Dayo in Nigeria, who appears to be doing it while walking somewhere.

(7)
Next up was supposed to be my brother-in-law, Cristina's brother, who seemed like he'd be into this kind of thing. But I'm not sure what happened, possibly by a mere coincidence, his whatsapp appears to have crashed. Or else it scared him off of it. Either way I waited 36 hours on him and then reassigned it to my friend Tiffany.

(8)

After Tiffany assured me it hadn't become wildly crude (you never know! and keep in mind I don't see the middle iterations until the end!), and was mom-appropriate still, I had her send it to my mom, the legendary

furzicle.

(9)
   And finally, back to the second one posted above, Mick's girlfriend Lozz. Since she participated the week before I may have assumed she remembered the rules and not adequately re-explained them to her ... because this week she appeared to misunderstand the rules and instead of retelling the same story, appears to have just invented a continuation of it. But how funny would this have been if I hadn't put her at the end and it was in the middle??

Round II After Action Report:
   Once we lost all the unreliable story tellers, the story was TOO reliably retold! Ironically, Trent's fear that he'd ruin it was exactly what we needed him to do! It's unclear if the higher rate of attrition this time was because two minutes is thirty seconds too long, or just two weeks in a row burned them out.
   Also of note, while the drawing version of telephone pictionary tends to get more complicated with every iteration, as people assume every little detail was important and expand on it, this version tends to simplify the story over time.
   I don't think I'm about to try to rope my friends in to this again, but if you decide to do it, I recommend not letting anyone back out due to their lack of confidence in accurately remembering and retelling the story -- they are a critically important element! Possibly it might be advisable to put the unreliable narrators not all at the end but intersperse them in the middle. And maybe require the suspected high fidelity retellers to have a few drinks before participating!

   So we've been playing D&D every Saturday evening, as I've mentioned. I'm pleasantly surprised to find it's so much more than justy nerdily rolling die. Aside from giving us a solid reason to spend time together once a week, and ancillary things like I've really developed my salsa recipe, I've found it surprisingly links in to two favorite hobbies of mine. The Dungeon master, pictured above, has promised to give us all extra experience points if we write a "log entry" sort of thing about the day's adventure, which I've relished as a creative writing opportunity (and have yet to write from my own character's perspective though I might do so this week just to change it up). But also, perhaps most unexpectedly, because he provided pencils and paper for taking notes, and I find I'm sitting at a table with pencils and paper, getting to some degree intoxicated which makes one restless, and often things are happening that don't pertain directly to me so ... I naturally start doodling. At first it was just simple things (sailing ships are always a go-to for me) but then it was things or characters from the story (We made Ben nervous by saying the birdman was roosted directly over his face, or this saucy gnome named Coppershaft) or.. the people sitting across from me!

   Not to toot my own drum but I'm rather impressed with myself for the above picture of Mick and the below picture of Ben. For reference here's not the best picture of Mick but the only one I could find where his facial hair was the same as it was when I drew the picture. His eyes look square because he sits there with a laptop in front of him and what you're seeing is just the laptop screen reflected in his glasses. The effect is a bit cyberpunk but considering he programmes industrial lasers for a living that's quite appropriate!
   I went to look for a reference picture of Ben just now and apparently not only do I have none but on his facebook he has no photos more recent than 7 years ago at which point he looks in no way like himself. So Just take my word for it that this is what Ben looks like:

   It's funny I felt what I had didn't look like him at all until I made a very very subtle change to the shape of the mouth and voila there he was.

   Other miscelleneous D&D related thoughts: Dungeonmaster-face is really creative, he made these potions for us to actually drink when we needed to drink a healing potion. The tops are dipped in beeswax, of course.
   Also in the official manual the gold coins are this weird square shape with two concave sides. I feel very strongly the coins should in fact be coin shaped with twenty sides. You know, like the d20! So appropriate! My google search just now to provide that link satisfied me at least that most peopel seem to ignoring the stupid shape suggested in the manual.
   My character has three "retainers," of which one is an orcish bard. Once we were already started and I feel it's too late to retcon it in I have recently realized that orcish bards should totally have a highly ethically questionable musical "intrument" that is actually some kind of small animal that can squeeze and prod to make a melodious noise. And just to make it extra disturbing how about it does actually sound nice?

   Here's my own character, Krusk Thompson, a half-orc paladin. His mom was the orc. I am envious of his hat.

   If you happen to fancy reading my "log entries," here they are! I already shared the first one here but conveniently I had also written this quick note that covers the same vent very briefly, which I wrote mainly to establish the characters of the squire and the bard more:

( A Brief Note to the Arch-Curate of the National Geography Society of the Kingdom of Maford )

( Another slightly better full body one of the character )
Unfortunately I drew this too small to do much with the face or the hand over the face. Also there's a classic one of those boats I draw. I actually like this one because for this world I was trying to draw something kind of different from our historic vessels and was aiming for a cross between a viking longship and a Mediterranean galley (that weird waterline cross is because it was damaged, this relates to the storyline form before I joined). Also apparently we're transporting a magic orb.

( A Day Around Town )

( Davvydge Finally Catches Up )

An attempt at an orcish female, possibly our bard Blortessetrix. I was aiming for like decently-attractive-as-far-as-orcs-go. All pictures on the internet all seem to concur that orcs have large protruding jaws and its the LOWER canines that protrude; and as a face in general I think I failed in putting too much space between the mouth and nose, so I might erase the lower jaw and try to correct it.

( In Which Blortessetrix Suddenly Becomes a Player Character! )

I also decided to draw a "disturbingly sexy tentacled snail thing" just to, you know, disturb. Muahahahaha.

I'm looking forward to much future doodling and actually the quality of the portraits, which not to heap praise on my own work but I was really surprised myself when I woke up and saw what I had drunkenly done. It's all got me thinking maybe I should sign up for an actual drawing class. And I'm really wondering if there's something to this being able to do it better while drunk thing, I mean here's what I then drew the next morning while in wonderment of my abilities, to my immediate disillusionment:

Current Music: Vince Mira - The Story

   Just as I pulled into my driveway Friday, my friend Mick pulled up in front of the house. He had had business in nearby Colac. Mick works as a "machine programmer" for a laser etching company. I haven't been to his work but I picture it as some wild sci fi scene with lasers shooting everywhere. I always have very interesting conversations with Mick; soon we were discussing why I can't cut things while holding scissors in my left hand -- I hadn't realized it's actually because of the way the blades are set up, and thought it was just something existential about scissors. He mentioned there's even left handed and right handed tin-snips, and that the left handed ones are always green, to which I objected, that the left should be red and the right should be green, as the running lights on a ship are.
   Then we moved on to the symbols I was using on my beehives. If they have the highly contagious and deadly-to-bees disease of foulbrood, I mark them with unmistakable red Xs made with red duct tape. After 75% of the hives I got from this one beekeeper came down with foulbrood I automatically places a quarantine on those hives of that batch which didn't even have foulbrood symptoms, and marked them with a red slash of tape, ie half the X. It's interesting to note that a red cross and a red X look VERY similar, but I try to make sure my Xs don't meet at right angles. Once a hive has been infected with foulbrood, one must put the bees down immediately :( , and then either burn the equipment or you can send it to get irradiated at a commercial sterilization facility. Since there's a general ban on burning things outdoors here throughout the summer, and I had a lot of affected equipment, I've decided to take it down to the sterilization center east of Melbourne. I picked up the first batch of sterilized hives on Thursday, now how to mark them so they don't get confused with nonsterile hives?? I googled around for insternational standardized symbols for sterilized, you'd think there'd be one, but other than a circle with "STERILIZED" in it, there didn't seem to be one. So I got some green duct tape and slapped an = sign on each hive -- I figure that's as opposite of the red X as I can get.

   While Mick and I were chatting on my back porch, my dear friend Koriander called me (via facebook) from Washington state, where it was 2am and she couldn't sleep. We put her on speakerphone and for the next three hours she was part of our conversation, it was kind of fun having a long rambling group international conversation. When I sent Koriander the picture of the hives marked with the symbols, the sterile ones on the left and the nonsymptomatic quarantine ones on the right, Kori wrinkled her nose and said "that's alright but... the red ones should be on the left."

   I had been vacillating wildly all week about whether or not I'd go on this camping trip with the Invertebrate Group five hours drive from here. On Friday I got so far as opening an email to apologize to the organizer that I wouldn't be able to make it after all ... and it was at that moment that I decided I would go. To shorten the journey just a bit I crashed at Mick's place that night, since he's about an hour in the right direction. I'll spare you the overwrought travelogging on this occasion since I can only talk about rolling eucalyptus covered hills so many times (theory: writing every day will help you avoid cliches because the cliches will become your own cliches), but the last hour was winding up a very pretty lightly forested valley. And very excitingly, a goanna --a lizard nearly two meters long-- (possibly a lace monitor) darted across the road. I had seen goannas every day when I used to live in subtropical Queensland up north, but hadn't seen any down here in cold Victoria.
   Since the itinerary I'd been sent for this trip noted they'd come back to camp at lunch on Saturday, I'd timed my trip accordingly, leaving Geelong just after 7am and arriving at 12:46. The campground was a nice quiet place by a river in the forest. There was no sign of anyone, and no reception of any kind. I pitched my tent in a nice grassy spot under the trees, idled about a bit till 1:16 but still no sign of anyone. Consulting the itinerary, they were going to walk along the river before and after lunch, so I set off up the river.
   No sign of anyone but it was pleasant. It was maybe 80f, sunny but with a nice breeze and I was wading along upriver since there weren't really trails on the banks. Returned to camp around 6pm to find the group sitting around a table under the awning of an RV, listening to classical music and eating cheese on crackers and wnie. They had flipped the itinerary and had driven for the day to a nearby location they had been going to visit the following day, due to weather considerations. I had been feeling annoyed, as one might imagine, having driven five hours to join a group that hadn't been where they said they'd be, but they said they had waited in the morning and I realized I was probably entirely at fault myself since I never told them I w as planning on catching up at lunch not morning. The members of the invertebrate group turned out to be a bit on the older side, when I went out with them the next day we had to restrict ourselves to relatively even tracks. I greatly enjoyed talking to them though, and it was nice to be able to say things like "when you say 'European Wasps' you mean Vespula germanica I believe?" without feeling like the colossal blow-hard I'd ordinarily feel like for dropping scientific names into a conversation. Because common names often vary between countries I find in Africa it's often only by resorting to the binomials that we can be sure we're talking about the same plant though.

   I haven't had a lot of campfires while camping in Australia because I'm never sure if it's allowed. I would have thought it wasn't but a ranger had happened by and said it was, so that evening I had myself a little campfire by my tent, with a glorious panoply of stars visible in the gaps in the trees overhead. When I put the fire out and turned my flashlight on to my tent, there was ... what I can only imagine was a fox but I swear it was bigger than a fox, its tail was longer and less bushy. It moved like a fox though, darting away a bit, turning to look at me with it's eyes sparkling in the light, then darting further away. Maybe it was the Tasmanian tiger ;)

Yesterday, Sunday, March 18th - First I led the group to see the colony on the underside of a nearby bridge wihch I had first taken for bees, but were in fact wasps. I think they were Ropalidia revolutionalis as that's the only I'm seeing on a list of Australian wasps that matches their mostly dark brown appearance. With the group we examined many little beetles and other bugs but I found I definitely am mostly interested in wasps and bees. We found some clusters of "green and gold gnomia bees" roosting on some plants (they look kind of like honeybees, indeed one of the volunteers said she'd sent a picture to an entomologist who, granted, wasn't very interested in bees, and he'd said they were honeybees). Also a spider wasp trying to haul its hapless prey, a spider, back to its burrow.

   The weather was overcast, on and off lightly sprinkling, temperature in the mid 70s, it actually felt perfect. During the lunch hour during which we were back at the camp I enjoyed just sitting in my campsite reading, thinking about just how serene this place in the forest was.

   Ducked out around 2:30, though the rest of the group will be there through today. Drive back home was uneventful. On both the way in and the way out I was listening to Paul Theroux's semiautobiographical book My Other Life. I love his writing, which includes several book length travelogues, but his travelogues are so much more than travelogues, but philosophical journeys. His writing always inspires me to try my utmost to write as best I can.

   I went straight back to Mick's actually, since we had made plans to play D&D. I've never played D&D before, though I like to make D&D references, and I've been saying I was D&D curious for awhile. I think the rest of my friends were similarly interested and inexperienced at it. We'd been meaning to get together to do it for awhile, and they'd finally done so on some recent occasion when I was out of town. So this was the first time I was able to actually catch up with them. I played a criminal halfling (hobbit?) which I named Dillweed Tosscobble, and was disappointed to find my friends had all given themselves boring names. During the evening I slaughtered two wolves and a goblin. I'm looking forward to playing more so that maybe I'll have some ideas to write a sequel to the D&D entry I wrote awhile ago that I'm quite pleased with (set in our contemporary time, as envisioned by people in the distant future). I also have an idea for a story where the protagonist is a naturalist in the style of the great 19th century expeditionists, and journeys around a D&D style world studying and writing about the specific ecological attributes of the fantastic beasts of the D&D universe. Explore ideas like how does a sphinx fit into it's ecosystem? A cockatrice? What's the natural balance between roving bands of orcs and elves?

Next Adventure: I've signed up for night shift Tuesday night volunteering on the continuing wildfires about an hour West of here. I think I'll start work early tomorrow, sleep till the shift starts, and then just survive as much of Wednesday at work as I can.