Messages - vDiplomacy

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10 Jul 17 UTC	Yup...nope
10 Jul 17 UTC	Good game.
10 Jul 17 UTC	http://www.vdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=31545 is the same game with me playing Russia. Want to try it that way? I'll PM you the password.
10 Jul 17 UTC	You should have it. Let me know if you have any trouble. This was the first time that I've played GvR. It seems rather unbalanced in Germany's favor. I'll be interested in playing it against you as Russia to see how it goes if you're up for it.
11 Jul 17 UTC	I'm a couple days away from a reversal, schedule is packed. I'll DM you for the rematch. I do think there is a balance issue but there also may be a skill issue :)
11 Jul 17 UTC	Sounds good. Let me know. It'll be interesting to see what happens. My bias isn't to think skill as you play a lot more heads up than me, but we'll see what happens. I enjoyed the game.
11 Jul 17 UTC	Note: I leave for a 23-day vacation on 8/1. If we start to approach that date, I'll want to run a 2-day clock. As with this game, I'll nearly always beat that clock, but my max-time that I might take will go up as some days I'm doing things such as flying across the country and another day I'm driving from Florida (the main vacation spot) to Atlanta, which is 10 hours, etc. I don't mind if we carry into that period, but will need the extra buffer. What that looks like is 8/1 - fly from Cali to Florida. 8/17 - drive to Atlanta and spend three unusually busy days seeing friends. 8/20 - drive to Clemson, SC and stay there overnight, to be in ideal range for viewing the complete solar eclipse on 8/21. Then two unscheduled days, ending in Tampa again and flying back to Cali. So you can see... enough time to log in most days is easy. But once in a while, I could get clipped. Where are you, curiously? US? We seemed to be active roughly at the same times of day. Also, I'm open to setting a time and doing this live with you with something like a 10-minute clock. Most of the heads up games I've played here are live. I look forward to hearing from you.
11 Jul 17 UTC	I'm in Oregon until 8/12, then I am in Egypt for the school year. I'll line up a game pre 8/1 and after that, we'll have to wait and see if I have a reliable connection :) Mighr be a few weeks before I get an internet installation working in my as yet unrented apartment.
12 Jul 17 UTC	Wow, that's a heck of a trip for school. What takes you from Oregon to Egypt? Are you from Oregon or from Egypt (or elsewhere)? I've never been there. I'd like to go sometime, but it is a mildly scary place to me, particularly given that I'd be traveling with two small children. We've been all over the western Med (why do I feel like I'm talking about Diplomacy? ;-) ), but haven't been further than the west side of Italy. One of my best friends is from Turkey and goes back regularly. We're planning a trip, probably next summer, starting and ending in Turkey, and probably including an Eastern Med cruise. But that'll still leave me without seeing Egypt. As with Turkey, it is a lot more enticing with a local guide. (I'm not fishing for an invitation here... I'm just explaining why I'm willing to visit Turkey which is also a little scray, but not Egypt.) I will say this - I know some people from Egypt in this country that I love, but they're very American so it hardly counts. I think they're even second-generation, though I know that they visit. The only place that I've encountered culturally Egyptian people was in Marseilles. They have have an Egyptian ghetto there, and it is close to the nice beaches. Not knowing what it was, we wandered into it. It was basically the only place is Marseilles that didn't suck. The people were so unbelievably kind. The food was amazing (I stand by the statement that most of the food I really enjoyed in a French city was Egyptian food, even though that surprises people.) The French people were snotty and unpleasant, near universally. The Egyptian people were kind, loved the kids and invited us to their homes. That experience is what really sparked my interest. Yeah, I'd like to see the pyramids. I'd particularly like to see a certain burial chamber in Beni Hasan for some artwork that I've studied closely from pictures, and would find it a kick to see in person. You see, I'm a performing magician. My kids are following in those footsteps, and for 9 and 11 years old, they show signs of greatness if they elect to stick with it. (No pressure from me, and they're pretty young to guess.) But I spend a lot of time writing and directing magic for them, and they've done larger shows than I have! (Granted, I could have grabbed most of those shows for myself, but I more enjoy seeing them get them than advancing my career. My daughter has literally been on stage with Penn & Teller, Mac King and Michael Carbonaro. Kids get a huge bonus by being kids and being cute.) Anyway... one of my specializations is the cups and balls. I truly love that medium. It is unquestionably the most ancient magic still performed, and unquestionably goes back as far as ancient Rome. Cicero and Seneca both describe it unmistakably. But does it go back even further? There is a Chinese version of the act that uses two bowls that is almost certainly older than the (known) Roman version, but by a slight margin. That particular burial chamber in Egypt has pictures of what might be the cups and balls, and if it is, that more than doubles the known age of the art. I've seen it both in video and still pictures. I can envision the room clearly in my head having spent so much time looking at it. It would be an amazing kick to stand there and see it with my own eyes. (The two best scholars of magic that I personally trust who have seen it personally conclude "Maybe" and "No" respectively, if you're curious. This isn't a question well-answered by archiologists or anthropologists, fwiw. To make a good opinion, you have to judge very subtle things about the hands, where the person is looking, etc. There are unquestionably cups and balls on the table. But is it portraying the trick? To know that, you have to understand it and its possible variations really well, so you need the odd mix of a scholarly bent and intimate knowledge of the trick to judge it.) Anyway... if you have time, tell me a bit about what takes you there. (Or what brings you here.) I have to go because what I should be doing right now is getting the kids up and doing final run-throughs for a show they're doing tonight. It is a little 75-seat dinner theater, and the guy didn't give us a time limit. (He also said that we could all perform, but I couldn't find a good way to make them other than "assistants" with us all on stage, so I wrote it for them alone.) Without the time limit, we decided to push it further than anything they've done before. It'll be roughly 30 minutes with five major effects and some small stuff in between. 2 of the five major effects are effects that they learned how to do for this show. We're really under-prepared. Not enough practice on the final two. One of those requires a special prop which my daughter broke last night. As fate and joy would have it, it is for a trick primarily done by my son who now wants to kill her and is doing the stunt with something I made personally and which will require a lot more sleight of hand than should have been required. Good times. They're not even aware of the bit that I'm most worried about: They do a trick where they levitate a random audience member horizontally about 4 feet off the stage. It's a relatively mundane trick with a prepared assistant, but making it work with someone who is chosen from the audience is much scarier. When they realize what is happening to them, they often freak out. There are a dozen or more little things that you have to do to make it safe. If, for instance, they realize they are floating and try to look under themselves, they roll / tilt to the side so much that they'll fall and hurt themselves. The way you avoid that is by having their head dangling back so far down with their eyes closed that they simply can't look there without a lot of rather slow movement, giving you time to intervene. I'm used to that and they're not. They've done the trick for an audience of 200 before, but it was with one of their teachers as the volunteer and it was, all-importantly, rehearsed once before it was done and with me hovering nearby. That one rehearsal is much more important than it seems. The effect is so powerful that the volunteer knows the moment at which the thing that they "knew" was holding them up goes away and they don't know why they're staying in the air. If you've done it once, you know everything is ok. On your first time, you might react with joy, excitement, fear or several other things and have to be well-controlled. I've done it with new volunteers many times. To get them ready, I took the whole rig to a park with a little amphitheater and set up and entertained park-goes for hours, having them do it over and over again. I figured that I'd just cope with it if someone fell at the park. The had not one slip. So... big audience, a stage they've never stood on before (and can't rehearse on), a selection of volunteers that is smallish. At the park it was small, but we always waited until they picked someone out before we started the next practice. Here, they have to do it on the beat with the best they can spot. Short and skinny is ideal. The taller or heavier the person is, the more exactly they have to be placed. The restaurant is called, "The Rib Trader" and, well, it might have a hefty group. They have to pick the best person visible from under the lights and make it work. And if the person falls, that's way worse at a professional venue. jitter So I'm off to get us ready. I have to light the inside of a box (which has a live animal appear in it in a great effect, but as of today, without light inside it, would appear as though they were just encouraging it to come out of the dark back side of it, or perhaps from behind a curtain), drill them on the last two effects, make a sign that is a comedic prop in the levitation, and a few other things. Show is in 9 hours. jitter Catch you for the new game soon!
13 Jul 17 UTC	This may have been the most interesting thing I've read in my time here :) Forget press, let's talk about your kids! I'm a Oregonian, mostly. Family moved here when I was far too young to have a vote. I teach HS theater and when the school I'd been at for a dozen years decided to drop 4 of the 5 course titles of theater and consolidate to a single generalized course offered 2 periods a day, they invited me to not be in charge of it any longer. So, I found a different job. The International Baccalaureate program includes a massive focus on Arts and so being a full time theater teacher at an IB school is an easy choice. Deciding to go to the one in Giza was a bit more of a stretch, but the wife and kiddo were up for an adventure, so that is the story.
14 Jul 17 UTC	That's fantastic! How old is the kiddo? I had no interest in theater in high school or college and it is probably the only thing I've later come to wish that I had done. Acting on stage is far more important than the technical perfection in magic. Some of the most amazing performances that I've seen featured very little technically sophisticated magic, but were delightful story-telling, comedy and drama. An idea that I only became aware of years into doing this is that good acting is often just appropriate and convincing reaction. It's really important in misdirection. You can actually "make someone" look in the wrong place. And you can do the dirty stuff. But this is a very uncompelling. You know just when and how you were fooled, even though it works. What you do instead is to make somewhere else so compelling to look at that everyone does, and then the hidden dirty stuff is never suspected. We talk a lot about motivating actions, and where the "event" is... where the audience should be focused. Rarely, this is a bang or something. More often, moments of amazement are used. You can chain a lot together that way. In the course of events, you show something truly amazing. People are so raptly staring at it, that for a second or a bit less, you can be setting up anything right in front of their eyes. Then when you reveal that, you can repeat. Youtube any decent performance of the cups and balls. This is how every single one of them works. There are very tricky hand movements that make things very hard to see, but in the end, when we show you the ball that has penetrated another cup, in that surprising moment is when we're shoving an orange under a cup for a finale. If you were free to look anywhere, it would be hard to do that without being seen, but it has become the standard ending of that trick. But mostly it is acting. It is having an event occur in a hand at eye level and then being surprised when you open your hand to find it empty. People are caught up in what you are feeling. They look at your face to see that emotion. They look at the hand to see what's made you feel that way. They look at what moves. They look at what you look at. They look and what you talk about if you're talking. With all of that happening, the other hand can be doing just about anything. There is an odd detachment. The other hand might be doing something incredibly complex and difficult, such as cutting a deck of cards at a precise spot blindingly fast, at a specific point previously marked with a pinky shoved in it. But you can't think about it. The amazing thing... the event, is your left hand being shown empty on the opposite side of your body and at eye level while your other arm is hanging at your side. It's up here. And your attention and heart have to be there or their eyes won't be and they'll see your wrist twist while you fix a deck. It's taken forever to get even decent at this, and I've many miles to go. I think your students would have found much of this far easier than I did. "A magician is an actor, playing the part of a magician." is probably the most famous quote in magic. My kids certainly find this aspect of the stuff far easier than I do. They do after-school drama at their elementary school. They've even done some youth theater. I see some of amazing comic timing in my son (the 11-year-old) that I've seen from his stage performances of things like Black Adder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Monty Python. It does bleed through. Last night's show was by any measure the worst one our family has put on. We just weren't well-enough practiced, at least recently, even on the tricks they knew really well. They had errors minor or major in every effect they did. And they still made the crowd love them and have fun. And they were happy with the show. I later realized just how little others saw the errors. One of the tricks is a levitation. A volunteer from the audience is laid upon a board resting over two folding chairs. A cloth is wrapped around her, mostly to make it more discreet. One of them holds the board and one chair is removed. Then suddenly, the board is removed and the volunteer continues to float. This is invariably shocking to the crowd and noisy and amazing. So they forgot to wrap her. That cloth drapes to the floor. With it out of place, she is essentially laying on a table with a tablecloth. Worse, moving the board away with the cloth wrapped around it can easily tip the thing and spill the volunteer! At the last moment when it could safely be done, I did a first that completely mortified me. I called out, "Wrap!" from the audience. I drew attention, and even the volunteer looked at me. It was fixed and the trick progressed. Sounds pretty terrible, right? Here's what it looked like to other people. After producing a live animal out of thin air as a first trick (That trick worked perfectly!), they say, "Since this isn't a paying venue..." *nasty glare at the MC "... we have to go to a brief commercial break." Eye of the Tiger starts on speakers of the club. They put sweatbands on and start exercising. The music dies off and they start selling their exciting new exercise program. They get a volunteer. Has she ever tried "planking?" Yes. "Well, this is nothing like that." They get her in position, and introduce the extra bonus available if you order today, The High-tech Exercise Assistive Devices (HEADS) which are two helium balloons that are then tied around the legs of the volunteer. "Wrap!" My son looks at me, nods when he gets it, turns to the volunteer looking at him now and improvs, "Don't worry! We have a 90% survival rate with this trick." The crowd cracks up. The kids wrap her, remove chair and board and everyone sees her float perfectly. Alex says now, the HEADS are only for beginners. They can be removed once mastery is achieved. While he's saying this, Lily is brandishing the scissors and sharply on "masterly" she cuts the ribbon and the balloons float off above. They freeze on the sentence and look at the balloons for three beats, each other for three beats, the audience for three beats and Lily says, "Sometimes mastery can be achieved verrrrry quickly." Big laugh. Alex yells, you're doing great, 30 more seconds, and they reassemble the thing and she gets to her feet, takes the applause and returns to her seat. What a difference from inside and outside my head. And so much of it is how they carry themselves on stage. Other saves in other tricks were just as cool, but when you said "Talk about your kids." you probably had some sane sense of how much I might actually type. ;-)