Most game books have a section where it attempts to describe what an RPG is. I guess they do this in case someone who has never heard of gaming has somehow found their book. I
think this is silly because if someone is under a big enough rock to
not know what gaming is they're unlikely to ever find your book.
Well, I’m really expecting you not to know immediately what on
earth I’m going on about. I’m not even sure I know where I’m
going…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 21, 2010 at 7:11pm —
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For a while, I've been rough-drafting a Zine. It's called "Player's Handbook," and it's a guide to having adventures in the real world the same way you do in games. The organization is a play on that of the typical tabletop RPG book. I've decided to finish up the drafts and post them, a chapter at a time, on my Evoke Blog. So look for the Tag "Player's Handbook" over the next couple months.
Added by Andrew Jensen on March 21, 2010 at 7:08pm —
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Among the many labels I stick decoratively to my personality, I like to call myself a steampunk. You probably think that means I wear goggles on a tophat (true) and have an etched brass case for my iphone (false). Or maybe you've never heard the term, but I doubt that. In any case, I'm going to let Bruce sterling describe what I mean by steampunk because he's so much better at it than I am.
People like…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 21, 2010 at 6:30am —
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I sometimes feel that everyone is a little bit like Harry Ziedler in Moulin Rouge: A bit too excited by electricity. It's not really hard to see why, Electricity makes modern society possible. I'm sitting up in the middle of the night at a desk lit by an electric lamp, heated by an electric space heater, writing on an electric computer. But there's a world of other energy types out there, and I some days we only seem to think of them as things we can turn into electricity.…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 21, 2010 at 5:52am —
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Earlier I was describing Evoke to a friend. Summing up, he said "So your like Black Ops Peace Corps?"
In the stories on the front page, It's made clear that the operatives
and the organization focus on keeping their actions a secret. That's
what differentiates what Evoke Agents do from standard disaster relief
workers. And I think more than one of us may be asking "Why?" Why does
Evoke…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 21, 2010 at 3:00am —
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I consider myself a permaculturalist. I'm not certified, as the cla**** are long and expensive and far away. Sometimes I have the time but not the money, other times I have the money but not the time. So it goes. I've gotten a fair bit of practice in my own lawn, but I've spent far less time working than I've spent reading. So I probably haven't earned the title, but I use it anyway.
One of the key concepts of permaculture is that your homestead is an ecosystem, and each plant,…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 7:00pm —
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In keeping with my current theme of having both global and local sources of necessities, my food security approach isn't going to be about gardening. Sure, I garden myself. In fact, I'll be planting gardens most of this summer. But to be frank, growing all your own food is full time work. I tried it during superstruct, and the simple fact is that for staple foods, growing your own only makes sense if you have absolutely no access to other sources. Also, we have a lot of people here with far…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 6:12pm —
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OK, so I know that this post is supposed to be about who I'm going to follow. And I'm supposed to choose 1 innovator. Well, I'm going to do that, but implicit in this is exercise is exposing our fellow Evokers to people I think they might want to follow. So I'm adding two other people to my post who I already follow and who I have the priviledge of calling friend. But first, the actual mission.
My Innovator to follow Mary Lou Jepson. She was one of the cofounders of OLPC, which…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 4:50pm —
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I live in University city, MO. The biggest food security problem around here is that all of our food isn't from around here. We're a pretty typical semi-urban neighborhood: too close to the city to be abandoned, to far away to not be a suburb. The houses are old and solid and easy to retrofit: It's a hobby of mine. I personally live within walking distance of a grocer: my neighbors thing not having to drive to get their food is green living.
Any disruption to the distribution of food,…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 4:14am —
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The greatest idea I took away from superstruct came from Vinay Gupta. It was a "Needs Map." It consists of concentric circles that represent, abstractly, distance from you, and it was divided into 6 sections. Food, Water, Shelter, Healthcare, Energy and Security were the necessities tracked. The distance from you went from Self to Family, Community, Municipality, Nation and the Global. The idea was that you weren't Secure in any necessity unless it was provided both Locally and Globally. A…
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Added by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 12:30am —
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