There was a conversation I once had with one of my regular patrons, a civvie who worked the electronics store, whose daughter was one of our regulars. I’d run into him at the trolley station, on the way to one of my Sunday shifts, and he asked me what I was reading. “Clausewitz’s On War,” [...]
Categories: For Writers, Observations from Work, The Library, The Real World |
Tags: exceptionalism, rants, real world, writing | 
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Thursday morning at the office I’ve been assigned to until my library reopens. It’s still early, nobody looking for SAC or the Relief Society or even the Education Office, so I’m trawling through Reality Hunger looking for quotes to engage in one-sided conversation with. One of my new officemates, reading the previous day’s paper as [...]
Categories: Observations from Work, The Library, The Real World |
Tags: CDC Zombies, Observations from Work, real world, teaching | No Comments »
A bit over a year ago, I mentioned military reading lists as a source of inspiration. The Marines’ version of the military reading list (known as the Commandant’s Reading List, though I’ve never been entirely sure how much control the Commandant actually has over it) is one of those staples of working at a Marine [...]
Categories: Observations from Work, Reading Through the Ranks, The Library |
Tags: book reviews, Commandant's Reading List, library | 1 Comment »
More than a year ago, I talked a bit about in-groups and out-groups, and the role of PCs between those groups. In-groups make for excellent distinctions between sets of characters, but there’s one other thing they can do in both stories and games to further involve the audience in the story. See, the thing about [...]
Categories: Concepts, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Observations from Work, Technique, The Library, World-building |
Tags: connecting with the audience, identifiers, in-groups, roleplaying, World-building, writing | No Comments »
RPG Blog Carnival June 2010, hosted at Campaign Mastery, is on inspiration. So I’m going to look at some of the things that inspire me. I’ve already talked about nonfiction books as an inspiration source, but I’m going to narrow my focus even further: books from military reading lists.
Yes, members of the American military (at [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Inspiration, Observations from Work, The Library |
Tags: original posts | 3 Comments »
Yesterday, I talked about the uses of a weekly routine in grounding a story or its characters in their world. The advantage, of course, is that it creates a set of predictable yet limiting events, gives people a feel for what the patterns are like. But there’s one other trick that can be done, once [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Observations from Work, Technique, The Library, World-building |
Tags: background, disruption, roleplaying, routines, weekly schedules, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Routines are a natural human behavior, whether the people engaging in them choose to admit it or not. And one of the most common routines in this day and age is the weekly schedule: the things that happen on this day, or these days, week in and week out. It’s not just an interesting observation, [...]
Categories: Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Observations from Work, Technique, The Library, World-building |
Tags: background, roleplaying, routines, weekly schedules, World-building, writing | No Comments »
In honor of Census Day (*pauses to let people mark their calendars*), I thought I’d revisit learning from the Census, as I was doing last year, with a look at the people in the field now.
Back when I started my Census work, the workforce was made up of listers. Now, as one of my friends [...]
Categories: Observations from Work, The Census, The Real World |
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After yesterday’s riff about minimum skills, I figured I’d better give a nice thorough example. And where better to demonstrate a range of minimum skills than to look at what’s expected of the friendly neighborhood Marine library technician?
Needless to say, there are the standard requirements, the kinds of things you’d expect from a library employee [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Observations from Work, The Library, The Real World, World-building |
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It started with my boss worrying about the future of the library as a viable structure again. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and I’m pretty sure the fear is unfounded, but it got me thinking about why I’m so sure the library isn’t on the way out. And that why, [...]
Categories: Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Observations from Work, Technique, The Library, World-building |
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