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oliverarditi · 5 years

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The book closed, the world continues

The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the earliest pages to indulge in lengthy passages of exposition, that make little sense within the narrative, either as reflection or conversation. Such digressions will be familiar to readers of fantasy and science-fiction, and are often forgiven, as long as there is a good story once you’ve gotten past them. Authors of such fiction, I guess, tend to fall in love with their background materials. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact I would argue that the world-building that subtends some fiction constitutes a literary form in its own right (and I should also issue the disclaimer that it’s my own current creative focus); but writers need to recall that when they are telling a story, they are telling a story, and have faith that any well-conceived world will emerge in all its glory as glimpsed through the spaces in the narrative framework.

For the most part writers’ love for their own world-building is misplaced. The vast majority of secondary worlds that I have encountered are derivative and unimaginative, with very little to tell us about the primary world – and I am also happy to argue that the primary intellectual duty of secondary-world fiction is to disclose insights regarding the ‘real’ world. M.A.R. Barker’s love for his world of Tékumel is far from misplaced, however. For the reader persistent enough to plough through the early expository excursions, there waits a decent enough thriller, set in a truly magnificent world. It’s a minor tragedy that Barker did not have an editor committed enough to his work to send back his manuscript and tell him to re-write it, because the irony is that while I struggled to retain any information from his lengthy passages of exposition, his world emerged for me with exotic, polychromatic clarity from the social interactions and personal perspectives of his characters.

This for me is a product of two factors. Firstly, the holistic, linguistically focussed approach, and sheer staggering quality of Barker’s world design; and secondly, the fact that he writes his characters as products of their societies, and thinks through the ways that those immersed in them would understand their social, cultural and material context. The characterisation at an individual level is quite patchy, with the exception of the two central characters, Ridek and Trimesh, who are both fairly cookie-cutter inhabitants of their social contexts, but the beautiful thing about the way that they are written is that they come across as the not-hugely-interesting protagonists of a thriller set in a real place, rather than as fantasy stereotypes. They are like the objects that begin to mysteriously appear in the primary world in Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, refugees from an encyclopaedia of the imagined.

The plot is well-constructed, well-paced and engaging, although it is continually impeded by contrived opportunities for its characters to either reflect internally on aspects of the world, or to explain them to other characters. Had this scene-setting been restricted to the earlier chapters, the book as a whole might have been more readable, but I fear that its readers now will primarily be those, like me, who are as in love with Tékumel as Barker was. There is a lot to love: his cultures are diverse, and like his languages draw more on Far Eastern and South Asian primary world cultures for inspiration than they do on European ones. Their histories are long and complex, punctuated by the same kind of unpredictable happenstance that characterises the history of the primary world. The languages themselves are things of enormous beauty, phonologically fluid and complex, morphosyntactically exotic to European minds, and possessed of a coherent historical and cultural logic in themselves. They are present in this book exclusively in the form of proper nouns (although there is some discussion of language among the dramatis personae), but the complete linguistic systems that underlie them produce a coherence and conviction that is hard to fake. There is a divide among authors of secondary world fiction (other than those rare visionaries like Barker and Tolkien, that develop functional languages) between those that do make the effort to fake that coherence, such as Ursula K. LeGuin or G.R.R. Martin, and those often talented authors that do not, such as China Miéville or Patrick Rothfuss, and it is one that is fundamental to the issue of whether or not their worlds feel as though they continue when we have closed the book.

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eiproject · 4 years

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Tink Tinker (Osage Nation) is Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches courses in American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies. Tinker is a frequent speaker on these topics both in the U.S. and internationally. His publications include “American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty” (2008); “Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation” (2004); and “Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide” (1993). He co-authored “A Native American Theology” (2001); and he is co-editor of “Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance” (2003), and Fortress Press’ “Peoples’ Bible” (2008). This lecture is made possible through the support of Gerald Facciani ‘13 M.A.R., the Native American Cultural Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

#OsageNation #TinkTinker #Theology #Denver #Colorado #Native American

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moontemple85-blog · 5 years

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NPC Note Card database - Tutorial

Want to have a simple, yet potentially very extensible NPC database? This tutorial will show you how to use Google Sheets and Google Forms to make one, accessible from any device that can handle Google Drive.

Last year, I made mention of a NPC database that I wrote in Microsoft Access that would allow me to not only track the various NPCs, but also automate the generation of "events" that would affect the NPCs.

This approach to tracking NPCs was inspired by Tony Bath's Hyborea campaign and his book "Setting Up a Wargames Campaign". Tony recommended the use of index cards (this was written in the 1960s!) for tracking NPCs ("generals and personas") in the campaign. This was the method that Professor M.A.R. Barker used in his Tekumel campaign in the 1970s. According to Jeff Berry/Chirine Ba Kal, Barker had over 1,200 notecards of NPCs!

I've tried Obsidian Portal's NPC/Character tool. I tried using a homebrew Microsoft Access database solution. But neither really met my needs for something that was simple as a Rolodex of note cards.

Enter Google - specifically, using Google Sheets and Google Forms. It's not a perfect solution, but given that I use Google Docs extensively already for my campaign, it fits into the flow. And it is simple like the note cards!

This tutorial is going to show you how I did this - maybe you'll like it! It's pretty simple to set up, and aside from a couple of restrictions, I see a lot of possibilities! I hope you'll try it out and let me know what you think.

1. Go to Google Drive and create a spreadsheet (Google Sheet). (If you don't have a Google Drive account, it's pretty easy to set up.)

2. With the spreadsheet open, rename it to what you want to call your file. I called mine "NPC/PC Card File".

3. Now click on the Tools menu and choose the "Create a Form" option. A new tab will pop up in your browser with a Form created that has the same title.

4. Now you're going to create your card file fields. I wanted to keep this simple, so for now, I'm creating three fields - Name, Location and Notes. I want Notes to give me lots of room for free form text, but the other fields don't have to be too large.

5. For your first field, change the title to "Name" and the type to "Short Answer".

6. For the second field, click the "+" to the right of the form. In the new question, change the title to "Location" and the type to "Short Answer".

7. For the third field, click the "+" again. This question's title is "Notes" and the type is "Paragraph". This allows you to type in a lot more information.

NOTE: Before you close this form editor tab, see the URL in the browser address bar? Go ahead and select that and copy it somewhere, maybe to a Notepad or a document somewhere. You're going to need this URL in a minute.

8. Close the Edit Form tab and switch back to the spreadsheet. You will see that a new tab has been added to your spreadsheet, called "Form Responses 1". Go ahead and click on that tab and you'll see three columns named after the form fields you've created, plus a column called "Timestamp".

9. To test this out, refresh the page. Click the Form menu and select "Go to live form." A new tab will open with the form you just created! You'll be able to fill out your note card and submit it.

10. Go ahead and do so, then come back to the spreadsheet. If the entries aren't already there, they will appear in a few minutes as Google updates the response. Viola! You have created and tested your new card file.

Now this is pretty cool, but there are some immediate limitations. How can you go back and update existing cards? Can you modify the form to add additional fields, if you want? Can you modify the order of things, both on the form and spreadsheet? How can you use the data?

So I'll cover a couple of these right now. And another blog post to cover how to use the data.

You can go back and update existing cards... but it requires a bit of additional work to set that up. It's not quite as easy as just updating the spreadsheet itself.

Google allows people to go back and edit/update form responses, but they don't make it easy. You can't just modify the data in the spreadsheet. For whatever reason, Google has the responses stored elsewhere and uses that as the source of truth, even though you can see the responses in the sheet.

To do this in a simple way, we have to use some scripting that will automatically add a link to each row that allows you to click it and come back to the form to update the note card!

If you are familiar with programming, this will not be too difficult. If you are completely unfamiliar with coding, you can copy and paste all this and follow step-by-step to get you to where you need to be.

11. Insert a column between the Timestamp and Name columns. Title it "Update".

12. Click on the Tools menu and select "Script Editor". A new tab will open in your browser to a screen that looks like what you see in step 13.

13. On the right side is the editor area.

There's some code already there. Select all of that and delete it. Then copy what is below and paste it into the editor area.

var formURL = 'https://docs.google.com/forms/d/FORMID/viewform'; var sheetName = 'Form Responses 1'; var columnIndex = 2 ;

function getEditResponseUrls() var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName(sheetName); var data = sheet.getDataRange().getValues(); var form = FormApp.openByUrl(formURL); for(var i = 2; i < data.length; i++) if (data[i][0] != '' && data[i][columnIndex-1] == '') var timestamp = data[i][0]; var formSubmitted = form.getResponses(timestamp); if (formSubmitted.length < 1) continue; var editResponseUrl = '=HYPERLINK("' + formSubmitted[0].getEditResponseUrl() + '","Update")' // var editResponseUrl = formSubmitted[0].getEditResponseUrl() sheet.getRange(i+1, columnIndex).setValue(editResponseUrl);

Once you've pasted this, you have one thing to change. Remember that URL we saved earlier in step 7? It probably looks something like this: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/9abcb8NrHyezqnZ0q4IYfrGKo3KGn5vc_3b5FA3KDZxI/edit

The part of the URL in my example that is bolded/italicized is a form ID. It's between the slashes. You have to copy that form ID and in the code you just pasted, line #1, there's some text that says FORMID - replace that bit with the form ID.

So you go from this: var formURL = 'https://docs.google.com/forms/d/FORMID/viewform';

To this: var formURL = 'https://docs.google.com/forms/d/9abcb8NrHyezqnZ0q4IYfrGKo3KGn5vc_3b5FA3KDZxI/viewform';

(or whatever your form ID is... it's going to be different).

14. Click the File menu and choose the "Save" option. You will be asked to give a name to the project. I called mine by the same name as the spreadsheet/form: "NPC/PC Card File". Click the OK button with the new name and now the code is saved.

15. Now this next bit is a pain the rear. What we need to do now is to set up the function so that it can be used by the form and spreadsheet.

These next steps are what I had to do using Chrome as my browser. I don't know if you'll get the exact same thing in another browser, but hopefully something similar.

a. Click the Run menu, select the "Run Function" option and select "getEditResponseUrls". You should see a message pop up with something like below.

b. Now comes the weird part. Click "Review Permissions". A new browser window will open up and ask you to sign into your Google account.

c. Once you do, you'll get this big ugly message! Google tries to help people with security and warns them when they're doing risky things. Because you're probably not a verified developer through Google's services, you'll see this. But don't worry, we can continue!

d. Click the "Advanced" link. The warning window will expand a bit (you might have to scroll down). Now, click the "Go to NPC/PC Card File (unsafe)."

e. You will see a permissions window letting you know that this script will edit your spreadsheet (which we want, so we can can edit the data) and it will view/manage your form (which we want so we can show the form.). Click "Allow".

f. The window will close. You might see some quick updates as the function runs.. but nothing happens. That's OK! We're almost done!

16. We have to make it so that this script runs when you submit the form. To do that, we have to create a "trigger".

a. From the script tab, click the Edit menu and select the "Current Project's Triggers" option. A new tab will open up.

b. This new tab has a lot in it, but what you want to do is click the "create a new trigger" link or the "Add Trigger" button.

c. A form will pop up. Select "getEditResponseUrls" for function. Select "On form submit" for event type. The other fields should say "Head" and "From Spreadsheet". If not, make sure your form looks like below. Click "Save". It may take a few minutes, but you'll come back to the triggers tab and you'll see your new trigger.

17. OK, we are done with all the hard stuff! You can close the triggers tab and script tab. Go back to the spreadsheet. Click the Form menu and select "Edit form". A new tab will open with the form in it.

18. To the right on the form tab is a gear. Click it and you should see the Settings. Check the "Edit after submit" option and click save.

19. Now let's test this out! On the spreadsheet tab, click the Form menu and select "Go to live form" option. On the form, enter a new NPC and submit it. When you click back to the spreadsheet tab, you should see the following:

20. You should see the underlined "Update" link, click it - and you'll be able to go back and edit that NPC's card.

OK, now you have something useful! You can create and edit NPC cards. Just by using this spreadsheet and the attached form.

To add a new NPC record - just click Form/Go to live form menu, from the spreadsheet. To edit an existing NPC record - just click the "Update" link on the row of the NPC in the spreadsheet..

A couple of caveats:

1. You can go ahead and delete the first NPC record (without the link) - there's no easy way to go back and edit it so that the update link will appear. To do that, just right-click on the row number and select "Delete row".

2. If you edit the spreadsheet directly, those changes do NOT flow to the form or vice versa. You have to use the form to make edits. This is a limitation that I'm OK with, but keep that in mind.

Now, if you're like me, you'll probably think of a couple of other fields you might want to add that you want to track. Fortunately, with the form, you can do that.

Just remember - you have to make changes through the form. You can safely, add, edit, reorder the fields on the form. You'll see added fields back on the spreadsheet. Deleted fields or reordered fields won't make changes to the spreadsheet. You'll have to do that in the spreadsheet itself if you want.

You can also "hide" the Timestamp column. I did and everything still works OK. It just looks nice and the "Update" links are the left-most column.

I hope you'll give this a try and let me know what you think!

Source: https://chgowiz-games.blogspot.com/2018/11/npc-note-card-database-tutorial.html

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marymosley · 5 years

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Getting Beyond the Checkboxes: Delinquency Dispositional Orders

Editor’s Note: This is the first post by new SOG faculty member Jacqui Greene. Jacqui is our resource in juvenile justice/juvenile delinquency and we’re excited to have her at the SOG and on the blog. This post is, and her future posts will be, cross-posted on the SOG civil blog, On The Civil Side. Welcome, Jacqui!

Dispositional decision making in delinquency cases can be complex. A list of 24 dispositional alternatives are available pursuant to G.S. 7B-2506. The choice among them must be driven by the disposition level allowed by G.S. 7B-2508 and the five factors outlined in G.S. 7B-2501(c). How much information must a court consider in making this decision and what findings need to be in an order of disposition? That question was not clearly answered until May of 2018.

G.S. 7B-2501(c) requires that courts impose dispositions that fall within the statutorily prescribed level system and that protect the public and “meet the needs and best interests of juveniles, based upon:

(1) The seriousness of the offense;

(2) The need to hold the juvenile accountable;

(3) The importance of protecting the public safety;

(4) The degree of culpability indicated by the circumstances of the particular case; and

(5) The rehabilitative and treatment needs of the juvenile indicated by a risk and needs assessment,”

How these statutory requirements translate into practice was a point of confusion prior to May 2018 when the court of appeals published In re I.W.P. 815 S.E.2d 696 (May 1, 2018). The holding in this case resolved conflicting decisions and made it clear that the court must address each of the five factors listed above in an order of disposition.

Requirement to address all five factors in G.S. 7B-2501(c)

Beginning with the decision in In re Ferrell, 162 N.C.App. 174 (January 6, 2004), the court of appeals developed a body of case law that emphasizes the importance of consideration of each of the statutory factors. At issue in In re Ferrell was an order of disposition that transferred custody of the juvenile to the father based solely on the fact that the juvenile has missed forty days of school. The court held that consideration of this one factor alone was not sufficient.

Three additional cases built on the need to make findings related to the 7B-2501(c) factors, relying on the precedent set in In re Ferrell. In In re V.M., 211 N.C.App. 389 (April 19, 2011) the court of appeals held that a dispositional order on which pre-printed boxes were checked indicating that the juvenile was adjudicated for a violent or serious offense, a level 3 disposition was authorized, and that the court had received, considered, and incorporated by reference the predisposition report, risk and needs assessment did not adequately address all of the G.S. 7B-2501(c) factors.

The court of appeals also found the findings of fact on the disposition order insufficient in In re K.C., 226 N.C.App. 452 (April 16, 2013). Here, an order with an offense categorized as minor and courtroom discussion of both the needs for the juvenile to understand the significance of victimizing others and a “report” that was not described in any way or provided on appeal was not sufficient.

The court did subsequently offer an example of a dispositional order that adequately addressed all five factors in In re G.C., 230 N.C.App. 511 (November 19, 2013). The order made several written findings that included:

that the offense was premeditated, willful, and extremely serious, speaking to factors (1) and (4);

that the juvenile continued to deny the allegations, had indicated that sex offender treatment would not benefit him, and that he had symptoms of ADHD, speaking to factors (2) and (5); and

that the juvenile’s family still lived next to the victim and that the two families had an ongoing relationship, speaking to factor (3).

The need to address each of the five statutory factors established through this line of cases was subsequently contradicted by the court of appeals in In re D.E.P. 796 S.E.2d 509 (February 7, 2017). The court explicitly held that the holding in Ferrell had been mischaracterized in the cases that followed and that the trial court is not required to make findings of fact that expressly track each of the G.S. 7B-2501(c) factors, especially factors that are not relevant to the particular case or for which no evidence was introduced.

This new holding in In re D.E.P. created a direct conflict with Ferrell, V.M., K.C., and G.C. The court of appeals addressed this conflict directly in I.W.P., holding that Ferrell and its progeny control, as direct conflicts in jurisprudence must be resolved by following the older of the two lines of cases. In upholding Ferrell and its progeny, the court restored the requirement that each factor in G.S. 7B-2501(c) must be considered when entering a dispositional order.

How much is enough?

While it is now clear that dispositional orders must address each of the five factors in G.S. 7B-2501(c), question may remain regarding what findings are sufficient to satisfy this requirement. A body of largely unpublished decisions points to some themes.

Check boxes are often not enough

The juvenile disposition forms provided by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC-J-461, AOC-J-475, AOC-J-462, AOC-J-468) include pre-printed check boxes to address many, but not all, of the findings required to determine the appropriate disposition. They also include a large blank area for other findings with a note inviting statement of any findings regarding the five G.S. 7B-2501(c) factors. Several cases have held that simply checking the pre-printed boxes is not sufficient to address all the factors required by G.S. 7B-2501(c). V.M., In re R.D. 223 N.C.App. 210 (October 16, 2012), In re D.T.F. 215 N.C.App. 389 (September 6, 2011). These decisions emphasize the importance of providing other findings regarding the statutory factors in the blank area below the note.

Findings about other facts are not enough

The court has repeatedly asserted that written findings of fact in dispositional orders need to specifically speak to the enumerated factors. For example, written findings in In re J.C. 195 N.C.App. 785 (March 17, 2009) that included place of commitment, acknowledgement that the juvenile had made progress in the MRT program, and that the juvenile was fingerprinted and photographed and entered a notice of appeal were not sufficient because they did not address any of the five statutory factors. The court has also held that findings of only the delinquency history level and the fact that the predisposition report and risk and needs assessment were considered and incorporated into the order do not sufficiently address all five factors. R.D.

Predisposition reports with risk and needs assessments are relevant to the factor analysis

Several unpublished decisions have found the information provided in the predisposition report and risk and needs assessment to be relevant to consideration of some of the G.S. 7B-2501(c) factors, and, if these reports are incorporated into the order, can serve as relevant findings of fact. Facts such as risk level, school behavior issues, lack of adequate parental supervision, unmet substance abuse needs, and the youth’s readiness for drastic change included in predisposition reports that were incorporated into dispositional orders have all been found to support the trial court’s consideration of the rehabilitation and treatment needs of the juvenile (factor 5). See In re D.O.B., 213 N.C.App. 422 (July 9, 2011) and In re R.A.T., 189 N.C.App. 530 (April 1, 2008).

It is critical that a predisposition report and risk and needs assessment received and reviewed by the court is explicitly incorporated into the order of disposition and provided as part of any appeal. Several cases have been remanded for new dispositional findings because the box indicating that the predisposition report was incorporated into the order was not checked. See In re J.P.M., 184 N.C.App. 188 (June 19, 2007), In re M.A.R., 189 N.C.App. 209 (March 4, 2008), and In re K.D.A., 191 N.C.App. 251 (June 17, 2008). Both K.C. and In re J.M.C., 793 S.E.2d 285 (November 15, 2016) were remanded in part because reports that were referenced were not provided to the court on appeal.

The bottom line

While each case presents its own unique set of facts that are relevant to the factors in GS 7B-2501(c), it is clear that dispositional orders should contain sufficient written findings of fact to show that all five factors were considered when making a dispositional decision. Some of the pre-printed information on the forms is helpful to this end and use of those check boxes, as well as provision of relevant written findings in the blank box provided, is key. In addition, predisposition reports with risk and needs assessments should be clearly incorporated into the order and provided to the court for any appellate review.

The post Getting Beyond the Checkboxes: Delinquency Dispositional Orders appeared first on North Carolina Criminal Law.

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