Axodys 10C Edition

Nick Rolovich is going to be WSU's next football coach and after learning a little bit more about him over the last couple days I couldn't possibly be happier with this outcome. He's a young, quirky, and energetic coach. He achieved a lot at Hawaii with limited resources. He runs a pass-centric run and shoot offense that will work well with our existing personnel, but perhaps more importantly he runs the ball a little bit more and in fact specifically mixes in quarterback runs as part of his ground game. The one question I have at this point is what kind of defense we can expect from him and how he is going to go about improving our team's achilles heal this past season.

CougCenter has a bunch of great coverage:

• Who is Nick Rolovich?
• Unfamiliar with the Run and Shoot? Here’s an introduction to Nick Rolovich’s offense
• Nick Rolovich will be WSU’s next head coach

This video from a couple years ago when he was miked up for practice really captures his personality and player rapport. He seems like an awesome guy to play for.

My boys and I finally get in our next Tiny Dungeon session in what will be an ongoing campaign. I had intended to do a fair amount of preparation, but the best laid plans tend to fall by the wayside when you're a member of a family of eight¹. Today I ended up having roughly one half hour to pull something together before we started playing. I had a couple kernels of an idea going forward, but nothing as solid as I would have liked. Looking though one of the Tiny Dungeon Zine pdfs I have at my disposal I discovered an Adventure Generator engine in the rulebook that helped solidify my plan and then some supplemental material on goblins that also helped.

The idea behind the Adventure Generator is that you have a set of five 6x6 tables that you use to fill in the blanks of a statement in the form: The Adventurers must VERB the SUBJECT in the PLACE, while dealing with a HINDRANCE and opposing the ANTAGONIST. I rolled two dice five times and this was the sentence I came up with: The adventurers must RETRIEVE the GOBLIN from ENEMY TERRITORY, while DEALING with a BROKEN PROMISE and opposing the NECROMANCER. As it happened this matched up really well with what I was already considering and so I jotted down a couple more specific things on a 3 by 5 card and we were ready to go.

I had originally planned for the session to go for about an hour, but we ended up going for closer to an hour and a half. The funny thing is that there didn't end up being any combat whatsoever. There were several tests requiring dice rolls, a fair amount of roleplaying/talking, and at least one chase scene, but no actual physical violence yet. There were also some funny moments and my favorite idea from the session was a popular puppet show in the bazaar that recounted the adventure that they just had at Dragonspire, but rather than being factual Corrick and Elrick are portrayed as the bumbling sidekicks to a recurring hero puppet named Greensleaves who doesn't exist in real life.

We ended the session after the two heroes caught the Goblin in question, but the remaining three pieces of the generated sentence still lie ahead. I plan to do more preparation on those items before we play again, but I really shouldn't need to do too much more additional work. Overall I was quite pleased with how easy it was to cook something up and make it fun enough that an hour and a half went by quite quickly. Even though I didn't have very much prepared before we started it all came together pretty nicely and this bodes well for a lot more low preparation fun ahead.

1. Plus cat now so basically nine in terms of family members that require at least some time and attention.

Sounds like Hawaii coach Nick Rolovich is gaining a lot of internet and Twitter buzz as a frontrunner in the WSU football coaching search. His name was brought up on Podcast vs. Everyone and I think he sounds pretty promising to me. Unlike potential candidates Alex Grinch and Graham Harrell he actually has head coaching experience, and while he doesn't run the Air Raid style he does run a Run and Shoot passing offense that has some similarities (and I think I heard was ranked 4th in the nation for passing yardage) while still utilizing the run. With Max Borghi back next year, WSU absolutely has to take advantage of his running abilities more whatever they do.

We had our first really significant snowfall of the winter today. The roads in Spokane were slick, but not impassable on the routes I ended up driving; everyone just slowed down as we adjusted to the conditions. The constant snowfall did make it hard for the crews tasked with clearing the roads and sidewalks around campus to keep up though. Ultimately that led to Gonzaga closing early for the day and sending all of their employees home. Shortly after that was decided the high schools in the area decided it was in their best interest to let students out early as well, and cancel all the basketball games scheduled for tonight. So with all my plans for the evening out the window I headed home.

Shortly after I finished shoveling our driveway for the first time Mary and some of the younger kids decided to get in some sledding on the little slope across the street from our neighborhood. I took a very brief break inside the house and then followed them to join in the sledding fun. I didn't have snowpants on and got pretty wet by the end, but it was worth it to have some fun with the family and get some pictures.

It was also finally cold enough for Mary to break out the matching scarf and hat set that I gave her across the last two Christmases. The scarf pattern is one of my all time favorites and this year after not having very many good gift ideas in early December I had the bright idea to see if I could find a matching hat pattern. Luckily I found one easily and it only took me a couple hours of knitting a day for about a week to finish it in time for Christmas.

Mike Leach agreed to a contract with Mississippi State today ending his eight year tenure with Washington State. He did a good job during his time in Pullman, but could never quite get over over the hump when it came to the Pac-12 North Championship falling 1 win short in 3 of the last 4 seasons. Despite his regular season success and the regularity with which we reached bowl qualification, his indifference to changing up his approach to the Apple Cup and lack of success there (1-7 over eight years) during the Petersen era grew quite old by the end. His tired appeal to the superiority of UW's talent as was a particularly hollow argument. He's been working on an exit for a few years now and frankly I'm surprised he didn't get a shot immediately after last year's record season. I do feel like he should have been able to better than Mississippi State, but I wish him well and hope he can surprise some people in the SEC.

All eyes are now on WSU AD Pat Chun as he searches for a replacement and I feel pretty good about his ability to get a strong candidate for the position. He did an excellent job picking Kyle Smith to replace Ernie Kent, with the basketball program and although they lost to Cal on the road tonight just got a huge win against UCLA last week.

Out of the various potential candidates mentioned, Oklahoma defensive coordinator Alex Grinch would be my first choice because of his impact in the same role at WSU. During his stint two years ago the defense improved dramatically. Unfortunately I suspect he's a higher quality future head coaching candidate than WSU is liable to land at this point and probably going to hold out for a higher prestige job. If he's not interested then Graham Harrell, the current USC offensive coordinate appears to be another potential possibility.

That said, I wouldn't be shocked to see Chun come up with someone completely unexpected if it's not going to be one of the guys I've mentioned. Pullman is a unique challenge to recruit players to and I'm confident he's going to make a wise choice based on who he thinks can get the job done there. I look forward to seeing how this all shakes out.

I am a longtime fan of interactive fiction games. The first game that I ever purchased with my own money for my family's Apple IIe was Zork I. On a career day in 6th grade I dressed up in a button-down shirt and slacks and declared that I wanted to be a text adventure game programmer for Infocom after I graduated from MIT with a software engineering degree. None of that ever really came close to happening, but I played a lot more classic Infocom games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and did attempt to create a text adventure game¹ in middle school using a custom text adventure system that my cousin Brian created and shared with me. Unfortunately I never quite got it fully working without crashing, but I'm kind of impressed with my younger self for my concept and my cousin for attempting to create a game making system like that for the Apple IIe even if it's pretty cliche by modern standards 30+ years later.

When I got to college in the early 90s I continued to have an interest in creating text adventure games and eventually latched on to the interactive fiction scene that revolved around rec.arts.int-fiction forum on usenet. I learned about the shareware TADS (Text Adventure Development System for creating text adventures and ordered a copy so I could create the next great text adventure, but never completed anything of note. I also became aware of Graham Nelson's work on Inform 6 at this time and got interested in using a tool that was based on reverse engineering the original Infocom Z-Machine based games I had grown up loving. I definitely wanted to make a text adventure of my own, but never quite enough to make it happen.

Twenty five years later I continue to have an interest in the interactive fiction scene and even subscribe to a couple Text Adventure related podcasts. I'd still like to create some interactive fiction games of my own and potentially enter one in the long running IF Comp. The two most dominant systems these days are Inform 7² and Twine³ and I'd actually like to try my hand at creating games using both systems at some point because they both offer some really cool functionality. As always it remains a matter of time and motivation. I continue to have the interest, but probably not enough focus and time at this point.

1. My opening premise was you were a character with amnesia who awoke in a dungeon cell where you were imprisoned and had to find a way to escape.

2. More traditional Infocom style parser based an amazing IDE.

3. Web and hypertext-centric focused.