We’ve had very little luck selling RPG books on eBay lately. Rather than go slowly through my back catalog, I’m dumping box after box of books onto the Internet for quick liquidation. The goal is to get these books out of my house. If they can go to good homes, so much the better. If they have to be donated or recycled, then so be it. I’m selling most for just a smidgen over shipping costs, just to make sure I don’t actually lose money getting rid of these. This is a sad part of a book’s life cycle, but it’s the way things go, I guess.
This sale will go on for about three weeks. Then I’ve got to donate, recycle, or pulp whatever’s left. We’re leaving our house and I can’t pay to move all these things again.
If you want a bundle of books, I’ll cut you a good deal. Remember, please, that even with USPS Media Mail books can be pricey to ship, and you’re paying shipping.
Like you, I imagine, I’ve been ruminating on this episode for days now. I’ve been wondering how to cover what we’ve been given here. With so many people writing about the episode, what is there left to say? That I have come to bury Lost, not to praise it?
The truth is, I’m not interested in arguing with the Internet about whether the finale did what it was supposed to. I’m not sure the writers entered into a contract with us viewers whenever they raised a question on the show. I am sure that many of the show’s questions can be answered by applying information that we have available to us, mixing in a bit of our own imagination, and tempering the resulting theories against the themes and tropes of the show.
Want to know where that air-dropped cargo came from, full of Dharma Initiative foodstuffs, back when? Maybe it’s the result of passing over the Island without the proper heading—it was flown in and dropped in the 1970s or 1980s and landed in the early 2000s because of the Island’s time-bending properties. Maybe that time-bend was specifically the work of Jacob, trying to help out the castaways, and maybe it was just chance. We may never know for sure, and that’s fair play.
I don’t personally subscribe to the notion that an ending must tie off everything in order to classify as a proper ending. The show didn’t need a singular message to be effective. It didn’t have to come here to tell us exactly one thing. It’s hundreds of hours of storytelling; it’s allowed to meander and sprawl. It’s told over many years, with a huge cast and crew; it’s allowed to reach out and explore. It’s subject to the interruptions of a sometimes uncooperative reality, where actors grow up and fans rebel against new characters; it’s allowed a few missteps and unfulfilled promises. Given the many factors, both practical and philosophical, which Lost chose to put into play, I choose to admire its ambition.
I think it’s good to ask questions, even if you don’t have the answers. I think it’s good to get an audience wondering. I think it’s good to provoke imaginations.
You’ve all seen the College Humor list of questions by now, yes?
That said, the finale is what it is. What happened, happened. If your take on it is more negative than mine, that’s valid. As you’ll see below, I have some practical issues with the finale, myself. So it goes.
I missed the wedding of my friends Marty and Shannon this past weekend, because I couldn’t make it across the country in time. A damn shame, truly. I wrote this little toast to be read aloud in my absence. I’m sharing it here despite the risk that it might not work unless you’re on the inside of it. So it goes.
So I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time, and I’m not about to miss it just because of something stupid like not actually being there. Thus I figured I’d write something and see if anyone would dare to read it at the reception.
Then I had to come up with something to write. Which is hard. It got so bad that I looked up “marriage” on Wikipedia.
Then I opened up a Word file and typed in the phrase “pause for laughter” three times. I figured I was halfway to a good speech by then.
We’re coming up on it, now. This is the last one-hour episode of the series, as you well know, and I can’t guess what two and a half hours of finale will look like come Sunday. We’ll find out together, I hope.
In the meantime, read the episode recap over at Lostpedia — which confirms what I suspected, that Michael Emerson really did have a black eye — and read on here for what may be the last book-club-style entry for the series. Because who knows what the last episode will inspire us to say or write.
Truth be told, I’ve never really thought of these things as recaps or reviews. While I tend to address the episodes according to their internal order, that’s just because I give myself 44 minutes to write these things every week, while the episode is playing back over lunch. But you saw the episode, you don’t need me to recite it for you. And this week, I’m more interested in asking questions and hearing your answers, than in hovering my finger over things that I thought were telling details.
For a proper recap, you’d do well to visit the episode’s entry at Lostpedia. For a sort of backhanded review of the episode, you could check out io9’s review. For my wannabe-book-club take on things, read on.
The following is a post from back when “The Economist” was a current episode of Lost. So, yeah, it’s old now. I post it here, now, to show how wrong I’ve been in Lost predictions, and to remind us all how much our knowledge and speculations have changed over the years we’ve been watching.
I found a million old photos of mine in a forgotten folder here, and I’m going to go through them and reminisce instead of doing any more work tonight. I’ll leave you with one of them now, and more, probably, later on.
Good night, you nefarious skinbags, and thank you for tuning into the Gist. Enjoy this orangutan.
This is from a somewhat out-of-date note I wrote to myself, intending to post here earlier. Still, it’s not too late to weigh in.
This is just a rough thought right now, but I may attempt to devise a new combat mechanism for Razed’s version of the Gumshoe system. To date I have been playing with the system as presented in Trail of Cthulhu and The Esoterror Factbook, to varying degrees, to make sure I grok them as they currently exist. They work.
Yet, still, I wonder if Razed doesn’t need something a bit different to help it feel distinctive, to give it a kind of action that’s frenetic and desperate, but not in quite the same way that fighting and fleeing eldritch horrors is in Trail of Cthulhu.
In our playtests to date, action in Razed has been chaotic and quick, but not always especially dangerous. It seems to be all or nothing — the characters emerge unscathed or almost dead. Like in Trail of Cthulhu, characters often find themselves outgunned and on the run… which is good for about half of the encounters in Razed. But Razed also needs to handle wilder, more frequent combat while simultaneously being more merciful. (There are not, after all, a lot of well-stocked and working hospitals left.) Razed isn’t necessarily about action-movie stars, but it does need to facilitate more action-oriented play sometimes. Characters need to be a little more adventurous than ordinary folk, at the very least.
It’s a balancing act. Sometimes, the right thing for characters to do is hide out, hold their breath, and hope the alien menace moves by without detecting them. Other times, the characters want to make a coordinated strike against their extraterrestrial foes, using their combined might to hurt the invaders. And sometimes you want to battle it out on the back of a moving truck. Razed needs to be able to handle all of that, with individual scenes playing out for different dramatic purposes, while still being recognizably Gumshoe.
It’s a tall order, and the best fit might be to subtly tailor rules that already exist. But I have a few ideas I’d like to test in actual play, too, to see how they work. Stay tuned.
This is an exciting time in the design of an RPG — when lots of ideas are still on the table. But it’s also a tricky time to write about, because I’m sure some spectacular failures still stand between me and the final game rules. I don’t want to get your hopes up for a new combat system when one may not be forthcoming, but I do want you to know that the combat mechanisms of the game are still open for debate.
