First of all, my apologies for the long delay between posts.
Earlier this month I was caught up in a short-deadline Forgotten Realms project
that absorbed all my time, and when I finished it, I went on a 10-day vacation
to Crater Lake, the redwoods, and the Oregon coast. For the last three weeks or
so, I’ve been fully engaged in other stuff, and I’m only now getting back into
the routine.
OK, on to my writing news… if you haven’t checked it out
yet, take a look at Prince of Ravens, my latest title. It’s available as an
ebook at amazon.com – here’s an address:
http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Ravens-Forgotten-Underdark-ebook/dp/B005UFN5SO/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
As I mentioned before, Prince of Ravens is a long-delayed
sequel to my 2000 novel City of Ravens. If you’d like to see a longer
discussion of the whys and wherefores of Jack Ravenwild in 2012, I took some
time a couple of months back to put together a little Q&A about Prince of
Ravens with my editor, Fleetwood Robbins. You can find that article at this
location:
I’m afraid I can’t say much about the project I was working
on so hard earlier in the month, other than to say that it’s an upcoming bit
Forgotten Realms fiction. I’m also still working on my military thriller (might
be another 6 to 8 weeks before I nail down the first draft to my satisfaction,
darn it), and I’ve had some discussions about writing a limited series comic
book. I haven’t ever written a comic book before, but if you work in writing
game products, you spend a lot of time working on art orders or art suggestions,
descriptions of the art pieces you want to see appearing in your text. The comic
book format looks like it will give me a chance to capitalize on that
experience, so I’m looking forward to trying my hand at it. More information on
that front when I can talk about it.
Gaming: I
just played a game of Kingmaker yesterday, only the 2nd or 3rd time I've ever played. Awesome! I love the absolute cynicism encoded
in the game’s modeling of factions, titles, events, and so on. However, one
thing drives me absolutely crazy about the game: PATHING. Kingmaker carves the
map of England into hundreds upon hundreds of idiosyncratic little territories,
and then gives you the ability to move five squares a turn. You spend a LOT of
time trying to figure out if your pieces are close enough to get where you want
to go. It’s ridiculous. The game would be improved tremendously by a simple
area movement system—like, England is maybe 15 to 20 areas, and your nobles can
move maybe 2 areas per turn (plus a bonus for a road). You’d get the same
relative speed, and you wouldn’t spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to
path out ways to move across the board. Pathing isn’t what the game is supposed
to be about.
I guess the lesson I would draw from this is simple: Keep an
eye on what systems your players have to engage to play your game. If a subsystem
or activity takes up a big part of the player’s time and attention, it had
better be what the game is about. Kingmaker isn’t about pathing through the War
of the Roses, so why make the players perform pathing exercises to play?
One other thing about Kingmaker… I wish the towns and cities
were more important. The best way to play is to never set foot in a city and to
keep your armies in the middle of nowhere. That seems like some bad simulation
to me—I think you’d need the markets and transport network of a city to feed an
army of any size. The game might be better if the towns and cities were the
places you needed to go in order to assemble large forces. Just an idea,
anyway.
Politics/Current
Events: There’s a lot going on these days—the Olympics, Chick-Fil-A, the
Colorado shootings, and God knows what else—but I’m going to keep it brief in
this edition of my blog, and focus on one particularly ridiculous claim in the
presidential campaign: Barack Obama has been a more responsible spender than
George W. Bush.
Here’s a chart that shows federal revenues and expenses
since 1940. These are OMB’s historical figures (except for 2012, which is still
an estimate because the year isn’t over yet):
Here’s the relevant portion of the table, which I’ve
recreated below:
Year Receipts Outlays Surplus or Deficit
2000 2025.2 1789.0 +236.2
2001 1991.1 1862.9 +128.22002 1853.1 2010.9 -157.8
2003 1782.3 2159.9 -377.6
2004 1880.1 2292.9 -412.7
2005 2153.6 2472.0 -318.3
2006 2406.9 2655.1 -248.2
2007 2568.0 2728.7 -160.7
2008 2524.0 2982.5 -458.6
2009 2105.0 3517.7 -1412.7
2010 2162.7 3456.2 -1293.5
2011 2303.5 3603.1 -1299.6
2012 2468.6 3795.5 -1326.9
The numbers are in billions of dollars, so the 2012 receipts
(for instance) are actually $2,468,600,000,000.00.
The reason that folks make the claim that Obama is not more
of a spender than Bush is because they’re trying to softpedal the last column.
The trick is to assign 2009 spending to Bush, not Obama, because the budget is
generally set in the fall of the preceding year (fall 2008, in this case), when
Bush was still in office. Okay, that’s fair enough: Obama had very little to do
with the 2009 spending. Then, if you use the 2009 spending as a baseline, it
looks like Obama isn’t doing anything that Bush didn’t do. In fact, expressed
as a percentage-based rate of change, it seems like Obama is even doing better.
But here’s the thing: Who the hell cares about minor fluctuations in the rate
of deficit increase or decrease when the *total* deficit is running at 1.3 to
1.4 TRILLION a year? It’s like when your wife comes home from a day of shopping
and announces that she saved $100 while adding $1300 to your MasterCard bill,
because she only bought things on sale. It’s irrelevant to the actual state of
affairs.
I want to point out a few things about the chart, and then
we’re done. First, Bush was not a particularly responsible spender; I find the
2003 through 2008 deficits pretty damned egregious. In my opinion, the proper
deficit is ZERO. The government shouldn’t spend more money than it takes in,
except in unusual circumstances. In this period, the unusual circumstance was
the Iraq war… and there’s a serious and honest debate that can be framed about
whether that money was well spent or not. But then we get to 2009, and the
deficit shoots to the stratosphere. What happened then? Did Bush go on a
gigantic federal bender? Well, sort of. The bottom dropped out of the stock
market (remember the housing bubble burst, subprime loans, derivatives, all
that fun stuff?), so federal receipts dropped by $400 billion as the economy
darn near collapsed. And then you had the emergency TARP spending of $700
billion to SAVE THE WORLD ECONOMY FROM TOTAL COLLAPSE. That right there gives
you $1.1 trillion, the sudden “extra” deficit that appeared in 2009 and can be
reasonably assigned to Bush, not Obama.
I’m of the opinion that we shouldn’t blame either president
for the 2009 spending. It was unanimously agreed that containing the damage in
2009 was necessary. Nor do I blame Obama for the fact that federal receipts
have been down $300 to $400 billion per year during his presidency, because the
economy has been terrible. I *do* blame Obama for permanently adding the TARP
expenditure, which was widely understood to be a one-time emergency measure, to
the new baseline for federal spending. If you want me to believe that Obama is
not that much more of a spender than George W. Bush, you have to explain why
he’s spending 3.6 and 3.7 trillion dollars a year instead of 2.6 and 2.7
trillion.
Oh, and if you let the Bush tax cuts expire, you increase
federal revenues by about $160 to $200 billion per year… so we’re still a
trillion dollars in the hole every year. Beat up on the 1-percenters as much as
you like, we still have to spend less money.
The Finer Things:
Powell’s Books, in Portland, Oregon. As we were winding up our Oregon vacation,
I gave my family the choice of working in one more day of driving up through
Cannon Beach to Astoria, or cutting over to Portland on highway 6 and spending
some time at Powell’s. The family voted for Powell’s. (This may seem like
sacrilege considering how pretty the coast by Cannon Beach is, but we’ve been
there half a dozen times, and we’d just spent six days on the coast.) Anyway,
Powell’s is one of the biggest independent bookstores in the country, and it’s
well worth a stop if you find yourself anywhere near Portland with a couple of
hours to kill. The place is amazing.
