pete_darby

Cubicle 7 Entertainment and John Wick are pleased to announce they have signed a publishing agreement. This partnership will see Cubicle 7 bring award-winning author and game designer John Wick’s games to a wider audience through distribution and retail stores.

“I’ve enjoyed John’s games ever since he designed 7^th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings for Alderac Entertainment,” said Angus Abranson of Cubicle 7 “I carried on following him when he left the mainstream industry, set up his own company – Wicked Dead Brewing Company – and produced some fantastic games such as Cat and Thirty. It’s an honour to now be able to work alongside John and help bring some of his newer, and future, games to the wider audience they deserve.”

HOUSES OF THE BLOODED is the first book to be published through Cubicle 7: a game of Ambition, Lust and Revenge. Thousands of years ago, the ven ruled the world. They were a passionate people, obsessed with Romance and Revenge, opera and theater, and all the forbidden delights their decadent culture provided. In the end, that which made them beautiful was also the key to their own destruction. Houses of the Blooded is a game about tragic obsession. Set in the fantastic world of ven myth and legend, players take the roles of powerful characters bent on conquering their world, destroying their enemies and possessing all they desire.

“I'm very excited,” said John Wick. "My end goal has always been to get as many people playing my games as possible. My partnership with Cubicle 7 will help make that happen."

About Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd

Founded in 2006 Cubicle 7 Entertainment was set up by Angus Abranson and Dominic McDowall-Thomas, two gaming entrepreneurs who wanted to create a games publisher fostering some truly iconic brands. Since then the company has published role playing games from a growing list of properties including Victoriana, SLA Industries, Starblazer Adventures (based on DC Thomson’s 80’s Starblazer comic series), 7th Circle’s Chinese fantasy Qin and is releasing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, under licensed from the BBC, in October . In June 2009 Cubicle 7 announced it had joined the Rebellion Group. You can find out more at www.cubicle7.co.uk

About John Wick

John Wick is the co-creator of Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, both of which have won Origins Awards for both Best Roleplaying Game and Best Collectible Card Game. He founded the Wicked Dead Brewing Company with Jared Sorensen and recently started John Wick Presents! as a company devoted to creating games for adults, children and families. You can find out more about John and his games at www.johnwickpresents.com. 

http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2009/07/a-day-in-the-life-sex-crisis-hotline-counselors-in-this-weeks-chron-column.html

http://www.tinynibbles.com/?p=2751

Self-portrait.

In this week’s SF Chronicle column, I describe a day observing counselors for a sexual health crisis hotline/front line volunteer service here in San Francisco. Yes, like SFSI. Here’s a snip:

I’m on my way to visit the offices of a locally-based, national sex crisis hotline; to get there, I decide against a detour and perambulate up the street that goes right through a set of notorious San Francisco housing projects. It’s sunny and hot. I pass by three young African-American girls jumping up and down on an abandoned, stained mattress. They’re shrieking and laughing so much it makes me smile too. I’m guessing they aren’t allowed to jump on the bed at home. Lots of guys are hanging out in groups on porch fronts; I stand out. They all watch me walk by, and we nod a cool “hi” in each other’s directions as I pass.

I arrive at the sex-crisis hotline offices across the street, and they show me around. The walls are covered with resources arranged floor to ceiling in alphabetical order: AIDS/HIV to Clinics; STD and Sex Worker Support to Transgender Youth and more, all with local and national numbers, and Web site URLs. It’s flanked with whiteboards and updated STD-infection rates; I focus for a minute on San Francisco’s monthly report for June tacked on the wall. There was a spike.

A woman ushers me in with a warm hello, then rushes out of the office to help someone find the bathrooms; the phone starts ringing. I am alone, wondering if I should pick it up. Just when I’m about to make a decision, she rushes back in and grabs the line. Her voice lowers and she starts gently talking to someone with apparently a pretty serious question.

The first help call is a young couple that is about to have sex for the first time. They are nervous and I can tell it’s taking a while for the outreach volunteer to help them ask direct questions about first-time sex, but either they don’t know how or are afraid. They’re a heterosexual couple; they want to know how to “do it right,” if it’s going to hurt, and how long “sex should last.” They don’t seem to be asking about birth control or STD barriers. (…read more, sfgate.com)

http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2009/07/the-porn-industry-blames-the-internet.html

http://www.tinynibbles.com/?p=2747

Image by elaisted.

In the short NYT piece Lights, Camera, Lots of Action. Forget the Script. they discuss the gradual demise of scripted porn movies and the increase of all-action porn. In the article they talk to Steven Hirsch at Vivid, who blames the short attention span of Internet porn consumers. But I don’t think it’s that simple — porn has been moving away from being able to make really bad scripted porn movies profitable for several years now. Sure, you can blame the Internet and its ease-of-ADD browsing for the death of the porn feature, or you could see that consumers were already moving away from crappy. badly acted, poorly lit, lame, sexist and just generally unrealistic features and toward reality porn long ago. It’s not the Internet — it’s freedom of choice. It’s elementary. Are you going to jack off to something obviously contrived — a very poor film with 5-6 predictable, very fake sex scenes acted out by the same actors and stereotypes — or are you going to look for something you might believe is real? With people who don’t look like porn actors, with no pretense of pizza guys, and a context of “reality porn” spontaneity (even when it’s carefully staged to look impulsive like Bang Bus)? Or how about people who actually look like they’re getting off?

Consumers want context, reality, and ease of consumption. Not Barbie playing pirate and obviously faking it for $59.99 on a DVD. The free market is what’s killing porn’s poor business models (like the DVD feature).

Anyway, here’s the NYT piece:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread — “vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts. (…read more, , thanks A!)

Which would you rather wear...

Act V, Scene 2b: A) To a doubtful Horatio, Hamlet defends his decision to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

As noted last time, Horatio is the character who doesn’t push back against Hamlet. So it’s significant that he now privileges his role as audience stand-in over his position as Hamlet’s supporter and confidant. Like us, he protests the harshness of R & G’s fate. Stung, Hamlet simultaneously concedes the point and shifts the blame to Claudius. If he hadn’t killed Hamlet’s father and married his mother, he wouldn’t have set Hamlet on this corrupt path, letting “this canker of our nature come in further evil.”

This beat ends in dramatic defeat for Horatio, who, failing to get the assurance he seeks, shifts to the more comfortable pragmatic issue of how quickly Claudius will get news from England. If only by default, that makes it a victory for Hamlet. So we score this with one up and one down dramatic arrow for our two remaining PCs.

B) Another oleaginous courtier, the buffoonish Osric, shows up to issue an invitation. Hamlet befuddles him with a stream of contemptuous verbiage.

Once again, an apparent intrusion of comic relief introduces a darker note. Just as Claudius has corrupted Hamlet, he’s turning the court into a haven for clowns like Osric. Osric has no choice but to cheerily deflect Hamlet’s scorn, giving him a (somewhat cheap) emotional victory. But since Osric is a ridiculous lackey figure, we feel he deserves it.

C) Osric lays out the terms of the wager and duel with Laertes.

A pure procedural beat, this exposition sets up the final confrontation. We know that Claudis and Laertes are scheming to secretly kill Hamlet, so his acceptance of the duel increases our fear for him and thus counts as a procedural down moment.



Full map here.

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.html?m=July&y=2009&d=10