Vienna focuses on how women use the city and makes the place better for all

Slate, in the article at http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/09/20/urban_planning_for_women_let_s_all_move_to_vienna.html, referenced some facts about Vienna, which apparently a) studied how people use the city and then b) acted upon that, improving the place. Especially for women, but in fact everyone benefits.
===

In 1999, city planners asked residents to fill out a survey about how they use public transportation, and found stark gender divides in how people spent their time—and therefore how they used the city. 

The majority of men reported using either a car or public transit twice a day—to go to work in the morning and come home at night. Women, on the other hand, used the city’s network of sidewalks, bus routes, subway lines and streetcars more frequently and for a myriad reasons.

====
And so this is what Vienna did:

They started the long process of reorganizing infrastructure to ease intra-neighborhood running around, instead of just focusing on commute-based transportation. That means wider sidewalks and more ramps for pedestrians pushing carts and strollers, closer schools and drugstores, and more courtyards where children can run around while you run errands. 

Awesome. 

Also, though, THIS is what I think of when I hear 'Vienna'....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U-NHTW2-Ps

Best D&D with teens ever = fewest rules ever

I had a recent role-playing-game experience that was really a knockout, and it came from dropping nearly all the rules.

I had a weekend where I was going to be gone on Saturday, while my 13-year-old daughter was hatching a plan to have some friends over to play "D&D" on Sunday. The kids don't really know what D&D is exactly, but they know they want to try it.

She needed a gamemaster who knew how to play, and tried to draft her 16-year-old brother, but it looked like a recipe for sibling sabotage. So she asked me, and I had absolutely nothing prepared.

(Well, I have a basic setting idea I'd been wanting to use, and you'll see how that plays out.)

But during the morning I had an idea. I was thinking about how most startup games get devoted to character generation, and it occurred to me -- what if we established all character abilities during play.

I applied to that a rule cribbed from Donjon, helped by me not having read the Donjon rules in a long time, so that I forgot most of how to use it.

So we ended up with just one mechanic: abilities defined as using some number of 6-sided dice, with rolls of 4+ treated as 'successes', and each success allows you to state a relevant fact of the world, Donjon-style.

Each player got 20 dice and started with one ability chosen. The setup was this: the characters start out in a giant canyon, waking up, with amnesia, knowing only one thing about themselves.

This idea came from my Catastrophe Canyon setting, which includes the idea that drinking canyon water causes various forms of amnesia.

After that, we started play, and most of the encounters they had derived from facts that they established through successes. It really worked rather well.

Each time they tried something, they could decide to assign from 1 to 6 dice to it, from their 20 total.

I'll probably want to post some more details later -- like the cake-monsters they fought because one player's successes 'found' some cake under a bush, and I turned that into a living cake with humanlike feet...  but let me just say that this game session accomplished everything I'd hoped for.

One of the players had even played 'real' D&D before. I warned her in advance that what we were going to do wouldn't much resemble that, and she was game.

Worm is a serialized superhero on the web. Worm is wow.

I'm really enjoying this story of a girl in high school who has super powers and is just now ready to start using them publicly, who has to figure out how to keep her secret identity and carve out a hero identity:
Worm
http://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/

 I'm going to try and mention a couple of things about it that might grab you, and then I'm going to point out a few cool things from a comic geek perspective.

Okay, let's set the hook a couple of ways:

• Girl in high school must resist using her super powers to destroy her bullies.  I mean, if you went through high school and didn't at some point think, "wow, it's a good thing I don't have laser vision, because I'd just fry half the people here in a weak moment," then dude, you were part of the problem.
• Girl sets out to begin publicly using her powers, immediately meets both heroes and villains; forms relationships with both, setting her on a path where she's going to be pulled in both directions.

I like that she's had the powers for a while. I like her point of view. I like that she has a plan for becoming a superhero.

The story paints a world where superpowered people are pretty common, where society has come up with some interesting was to integrate them, or not integrate. The author has clearly thought about the ramifications of super powers in interesting ways. Kids discuss metahumans in ethics class. There are blogs about the "capes." There's media from an alternate world that some mad scientist contacted.

The comic-book dichotomy of heroes and villains is soon complicated. Villains get  a chance to talk about how they see things.

The worldbuilding goes further on how superpowers work. Powers seem to be connected in some way, and that interests me, because having a rationale for all powers is kind of the obvious way to make a comic-book world make more sense -- HEROES did the same thing of course -- but it also tends to kill the comic-book feel. Comic-book worlds have dozens of heroes with wildly different origins. So far the feel of Worm is of a world with lots of wild heroes, yet it's clear that powers have some things in common. For example, a common limit is mentioned, of powers not working inside someone's body, so that for example a force-field power can't be used to put a bubble in someone's heart and kill them instantly. That's a tremendously useful limitation.

This girl's got problems. In fact, she's kind of got all the classic Spider-Man problems. Bullying at school, led by an intense alpha kid. Missing a parent. And since her power is the ability to summon and control bugs, well, the parallels are fun.

But it's the writing that does it. You're intensely in her head as she deals with all of her problems. It's about relationships and choices and pain. The bullying is scarily intense. I'm loving every episode so far and I've read 13 episodes so far. So, enjoy!

Steampunk in real life: first biological gear discovered, in an insect

This is particularly weird and wonderful...an insect that locks its legs together with gears, to synchronize a jump.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/the-first-gear-discovered-in-nature-15916433

A plan to end street harassment (of women) forever

Quote:

I have a plan that will stop street harassment for all time. It goes like this:

• All women are now allowed to carry swords.

• All women get 20 free hours of sword training.

• All women are allowed to cut a fool without suffering legal consequences once per calendar month.

Fine points and clarifications......

From: http://flavorcountry.tumblr.com/post/58803431035/my-plan-to-end-street-harassment-forever

My favorite writing tip from Worldcon this past weekend

I was lucky enough to get to go to Worldcon this weekend. I only spent a day. Chiefly, I learned that a day is not enough time.

I found myself comparing it to Armadillocon a lot, because that's my only other recent convention experience. The main thing I'm looking for in a convention is panels about writing, and this one had them in plenty. On the Saturday I attended, nearly every hour had two panels of great interest to me -- which meant I found it hard to take time out to eat or go to the dealer room.

But I was going to give my favorite writing tip. This one came from a short-story panel featuring Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelley, Vylar Kaftan, and Cat Rambo. I'll state it like this:

"You'll be tempted to show character using backstory. Don't."

I found that one profound, because I'm always struggling with long backstory/flashback sequences bulking out my stories, and readers find they drag. This statement made me realize that backstory is the FIRST thing I think of for adding characterization.

I took this idea home and immediately cut a long sequence from my current story, without much pain.

The other thing I wanted to mention about this tip was that I walked away from the panel thinking that it was Michael Swanwick who said that. But when I checked my notes later, the tip actually came from James Patrick Kelley. I figure I attributed it to Swanwick just because he's more well known, and that is eye-opening.

Why Your Great Big 90s Comic Book Collection Ain't Worth Much

I feel oddly vindicated by this article: I never felt my comics collection was going to have future value. I always collected stuff because I wanted to have whole complete storylines available for my reading.

http://www.tcj.com/american-pickers/

Nowadays my 90s comics -- runs of Spider Man and The New Mutants and Dr. Strange -- suffer from poor storage and the occasional attacks of my children, who can't seem to put them back. When I started collecting again after college, I stuck almost exclusively to trade paperbacks and graphic novels, which have the virtue of fitting neatly on a shelf. Today I only keep the comics that fit on a single tall thin bookshelf, and periodically purge the ones I don't think I'll reread.

Holly Lisle's one-pass editing method

I think this Holly Lisle article deserves some review:

http://hollylisle.com/one-pass-manuscript-revision-from-first-draft-to-last-in-one-cycle/

I got to it on a tip from Rebecca Schwarz. I'm trying to iterate over this process right now, but it's taking me a while.

My first reaction to it is to point out that one-pass is a misnomer. It's really two passes: a heavy editing/markup pass, and then a complete retype.

Nothing wrong with that. I see that one-pass is a catchier concept. And the actual method fits how I work very well -- I've done this before: do a hardcopy markup and then, instead of entering the markup in the prior version, type a new version from scratch, incorporating the markup as you go. It frees you to use completely new language, but the markup serves as a roadmap. It's great.

However, my writing process for the past couple of years has involved MANY complete retypes of each story, which I now see needs to change. I used to pride myself on that, now I see it as indulgent. I'll have 10 such drafts sometimes.

So far this is what I've learned from trying this out:

1. I've gotten away from marking up hardcopies at all, but it remains super useful. I'd begun to use it only for proofing, but it's a great way to do high-level revision. You can't beat the ability to flip back and forth and mark on the text.
 

2. Lisle says she can use this process to edit a book in two weeks. I assume she has no other job. Me, it's taking me more than two weeks to edit a 10k-word short story.

3. The main thing that distinguishes this, I think, from other processes is a focus on resolving ALL of your issues with the story in the one editing pass.  One of the reasons I end up with man passes is that I'll put off some issue to a later draft, preferring to isolate it and handle it. That's good in terms of splitting a project into small tasks, but I've clearly taken it too far.

The Big Father Essay uses permutation to drive new language

The following piece, really more poetic memoir than essay, is both a moving read, and an interesting experiment in how to make prose:

http://atlengthmag.com/prose/the-big-father-essay/

The writer used a method of permutations of sentence types (which he describes in detail). This forced him to think about sentence structure constantly.

The result is the sort of prose-poem that I really like, with a dreamy, stream of consciousness quality mixed with beats that hit you like a midday hailstone.

Yeah, ok, it made me wanna get fancy. Check it out. You won't be disappointed. I believe I found this on Metafilter.