Why do you do roleplaying games?

I was asked the hardest question in an email, a while ago, and then I had to answer, and now that I go back to it, looking at it, it sounds very much unlike me. Why is that? Why does your own speech of the past sound so alien a bit later?

From: Juhana Pettersson
To: Olle Jonsson
Subject: Re: Interview yes!

So, Olle, why do you do roleplaying games?

OK, I do role-playing games because I get to **tell the beginning** of stories, I get to **do the talking**, and **pull people into “my trip”**. When the feedback effect of the players’ minds starts churning **I get electrified** by the creative momentum. The **pliancy of the material**, the “softness of the wares” so to speak, is the main thing with role-playing games, to me. This softness allows for real-time editing of the story in very direct ways, which in turn allows for **the exploration of limits in the players** – how far can we take this?

Something like that.

What kind of a question is that, anyway?

Skype, friends

Just came back from a conference in Norway. Cold, friends. But very sunny and friendly.

Met up with millions of good poeple again, and now we all need Skype, the free (as in beer) phone solution for us who have a computer and a headset. Headsets are cheap, and most laptops already have the microphone inside them, so those of you with laptops just have to put on the headphones.

Especially the folks in the expat community (read: Joc Koljonen) need you to install the application, which is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. And it is a small download.

In the making of the now-tested roleplaying scenario The Upgrade!, my gang of Jeeps held phone conferences (yes, conferencing works, too!) to add productivity.

I hope to be able to report on the conference itself real soon. The book, yes, the book: am reading it. Jiituomas and Mike Pohjola are already read. Eetu’s text is next, I guess.

**Edit**: Like this: callto://olleolleolle you can link to the Skype username on a webpage, or in an email. Clicking the link makes the browser ask what application to open this type of connection with, and after the user has selected Skype once, all links like that will work seamlessly. Neat, huh.

Theatre of the political kind

Yesterday evening me and my Luisa went to see our friends in Livingstone’s Kabinet, who were doing a theatre show called **Once Upon a Time: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus**.

We got free tickets, as Luisa knows the director, the band and the owners of the theatre venue, and because she’s so lovely.

The programme says the show’s based on “Calamity Jane’s left-behind letters”. The star of the show was not the band, but an actor called Andrea Vagn Jensen. (Tall, thin and good-looking. This has some importance, as we shall se later on, dear reader.)

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Edit PHP with SciTE

If you edit PHP using SciTE, you should get more productive with it!

You can press F5 to run the current program and get output to a console.

Most web developers do not associate the console with making web pages, but there are gains in your development speed.
No webserver is involved when running the PHP executable as is. No overhead, just what PHP outputs after interpreting your source code.

When you press F5 in SciTE you run PHP with its standard parameters. This might be at odds with your
current host for your current project. Say, the error_reporting setting is way too low, and spouts
meaningless notices at you, slowing down your eye-scanning.

Not acceptable.

What we do is configure the command line that launches the PHP executable from within SciTE. I did that like this:
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