A Dark And Quiet Room

Okay, I just went through the last month of violent crime reports from the Peoria Journal-Star and put them on Google Maps.

Peoria Violent Crimes 2008

And, as mentioned before, here are the murders for the year:

Peoria murders 2008

And, as a bonus, here are those two maps overlaid!

Peoria Crimes 2008

If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I may do the non-violent thefts on a separate map. If you’re interested in helping put in the older stories, let me know, and I’ll get you set up.

No, I’m not doing drug crimes (e.g. possession and dealing). First, I’m opposed to drug prohibition, so I don’t really feel like putting the effort into reporting it. Second, it’s hard to tie a drug crime to a particular place, at least from the sorts of reports that I currently have access to. Third, the point of these maps is to try to chart some sense of the danger that crime presents to people in various areas of the city. Possession and dealing simply don’t present a threat of bodily harm to those nearby.

Actually, that leads into a good point about these crimes. “Random crime” often isn’t. If you look into the news stories, you’ll see that many of these crimes were perpetrated on victims known to the perpetrator. Even in crime, it seems that it’s all about who you know.

I’ve been reading The Great Neighborhood Book recently. One of the points it made is that “rough” areas of town aren’t necessarily less safe than “nice” areas of town. Instead, it is often a matter of reputation, not reality.

With that in mind, I’d like to offer this map: Peoria Murders 2008

Notice that two of the three reported murders occurred north of War Memorial Drive. You know, in the “nice” areas of town. Also, notice that none of the three reported murders on the South Side.

(Why am I emphasizing the reported murders? Well, there is that little place on the north end of town, where nearly 800 citizens were murdered this year. But no one really wants to talk about that.)

Yes, there’s more to safety than just the murder rate. I’ve taken to watching the papers, and I know that there’s a lot of violence reported on the South Side.

Yes, this is just for 2008. If I’m so moved, I might try to root around in the Journal-Star’s site and see if I can find the locations of the 2007 murders.

Nonetheless, I think that this is somewhat significant for the core neighborhoods to note, especially in the Heart of Peoria and on the South Side, as we try to address the city’s perception of where we live.

Murder #3 for the year.

Well, except for these murders, of course, which are kept off the stat sheets.

Maybe we weren’t doing as well as I thought.

If you’re reading this and consider yourself to be a gamer, please do me a favor and register at Nearby Gamers. I’m already on there (as “greatwolf”, of course).

Very specifically, I’m hoping that more Peoria gamers will use this tool, because I’m trying to find you all for Go Play Peoria, and it’s not easy. And, after all, it’s all about my ease.

So, take a couple of minutes and sign yourself up. Soon, you will be able to see the constellation of nearby gamers unfolding on a Google Map near you. Isn’t that an exciting thought?

So, yeah, I wrote Dirty Secrets, a detective noir game. And that meant that I read a lot of the source material. So, trust me when I say that this sounds like something that I would have expected to find in the pages of a Ross MacDonald novel:

Rolling Acres woman’s death remains mystery

Police are releasing few details regarding the homicide investigation of a Rolling Acres woman found dead in her home Friday morning, to the dismay of worried neighbors….”She was a quiet woman,” Lowe said Saturday afternoon. “But she was the most wonderful person you would ever meet.”

Lowe met her neighbor when she moved in five years ago and said Finnegan would always check up on her and see if she needed help around the house.

Lowe returned the favor, recently watering the woman’s flowers while she was out of town. She said she’d planned to have dinner with Finnegan the night she was found dead.

“When I found out she was killed, I was so confused,” she said. “I can’t understand, why would someone kill her?”

Son arrested in Rolling Acres death

Police have arrested the son of a woman who was found strangled to death in her Rolling Acres home Friday morning.

Stark County deputies found John W. Finnegan, 20, sleeping in his mother’s car at a rest stop in Toulon early Sunday. He was detained in Stark County until Peoria police picked him up for questioning.

He was later booked into the Peoria County Jail on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of his mother, Mary T. Finnegan, 43, with whom he lived at 5513 Merrimac Ave.

Bond set for Peoria man accused of killing his mother

Bond was set at $2.5 million Monday for a Peoria man accused of strangling his mother last week.

The death occurred sometime Thursday, when John Finnegan, 20, entered his mother’s room, found her sleeping and “swiftly killed her emotionlessly,” Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons said in court, repeating what Finnegan reportedly told detectives.

Mary Finnegan, 43, was found dead around noon Friday, when her other son, 23, stopped by her house and found her naked and wrapped in bedding.

During a five-minute bond hearing in Peoria County Circuit Court, Lyons said the situation had “peculiar” overtones. He cited a “consensual but inappropriate” sexual relationship that had existed between John and Mary Finnegan for about four years. John Finnegan said he and his mother had sex the day before he allegedly killed her.

Finnegan initially denied killing his mother but later told police he felt like he was “bottled up with rage.” He also told detectives he sexually assaulted his mother’s body and then tried to kill himself.

Lyons said Finnegan first tried to drown himself in the bathtub before trying to overdose on various household medications and pills. When that didn’t work, he grabbed some money and left the house in his mother’s car.

He was arrested about 1 a.m. Sunday by Stark County sheriff’s deputies, who found him sleeping in the car. He was then brought back to Peoria.

The template seems to be fixed! I still want to do further fiddling, but at least it’s not throwing error messages every which way. Thanks, Billy!

Sorry for the mess, folks. It looks like my blog blew up. I know. I have an email in to Billy, and hopefully we’ll be able to get all this straightened out.

In light of my recent reading on the drug war, especially in West Baltimore, I really think that I need to read The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a trailer for the book and is worth a viewing.

Coates acknowledges that his father was not a good man, but still, actually having a father (flawed as he was) made all the difference in his life.

Our esteemed host Billy Dennis just moved the site to a new server. At some point in here, I actually want to create a new template to incorporate some sidebar material, especially because of Billy’s efforts to make this a blog network. Besides the fact that this is his site and he gets to do what he wants, I really respect this effort and want to support it as best I can. So, eventually I’ll have a custom template for this blog that will be closer to my “look” while incorporating the Blog Peoria Network items that he’d like to be present.

Plus maybe I’ll put my Twitter updates on the sidebar too. If you all don’t behave, that is….

I was talking with Bryan, and this walked out of my mouth. He really liked it and insisted that I should write it down. So, here goes.

When we talk about the Christian life, we usually think of a single path that we are all walking. As Christians, we share this path, and we help each other stay on the path, as we walk towards our destination. This is a true metaphor, but I think that there’s another way to look at this.

The Christian life is an explosion of light, starting at the center and radiating out in all directions. Each of us are called to follow a different ray of light outwards into the darkness. Now, we all participate in the source of the explosion, but we’re also traveling in very different directions.

This is okay.

In fact, this is good. And, it is vitally important to understand.

So much of our understanding of Christian unity is based on the idea that we will slowly change to become like each other. I think that, rather, our Christian unity is based on the idea that we will slowly embrace each other as we pursue the same God differently.

At one point, I would have fretted about all the denominations in the Church. “This is an attack on Christian unity!” I would have said. Now, I shrug without concern. Are these denominations learning to embrace each other as we pursue the same God differently? Then I’m cool with it. Indeed, let’s have more denominations that work this way! Let’s push out into all the different ways that we can be followers of Christ and put all of them on display before God and man!

This also affects what it means to be a leader in the Church. The job of the elder is to equip Christians for the work of ministry. But what is that work? What ray of light is he following? Because each Christian has a different calling, an elder must work on equipping them differently, perhaps even in opposite ways.

Bonus James Jordan reference: This seems to fit with Jordan’s insistence that life is cruciform, radiating out to the four corners of the world.

I’m posting this in various places, and I’m too lazy to edit. So this post might not make a whole lot of sense in the context of this blog. I’d apologize, but I’m not really sorry.

So, the new game that I’m releasing at GenCon is called A Flower for Mara.In this game, you take on the role of various relatives of Mara, a woman who died suddenly, and play through the first year after her death. I have various design notes here. In addition, this is a rough trailer that I’ve put together, and this is a sample of play from a test run back in January.

This game is in the tradition of Jeepform LARPing, which means that there’s lots of walking around and very little mechanical interaction within a scene. (Almost all the mechanics are dedicated to scene structuring.) It also has a Grief mechanic, which basically says that the only way for your character to overcome his grief is for you to share one of your own Griefs with the rest of the group. It’s all very powerful in play, and it works wonderfully…

…

…and I have no idea how to sell this thing at GenCon. I’m at the Forge booth, which is demo-focused, which is very cool and all. However, I’m not persuaded that a 15-minute demo would actually capture what is nifty about this game. Even worse, I’d be afraid that it would make the game look silly. “So, it’s time for a scene. Um, talk to each other for a while. Yeah, that’s good.”

The one idea that I have right now is to focus on a Family Gathering (as seen here and here). Essentially, the family gathers for a holiday of some sort, and the game cuts back and forth from the meal to soliloquies delivered by the characters to express their inner thoughts at the time. Working this inner/outer action could make for a workable demo….

So, anyways, I’m turning to the Internet for help and assistance. Thoughts?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Scott Dunphy recorded one of his games of Dirty Secrets and then went through the time-consuming process of editing it down to a manageable length. Well, relatively manageable.

Anyways, here are the links to the three parts of the recording:

Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 1
Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 2
Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 3

The third part has Scott’s thoughts on Dirty Secrets. I’ll let you listen to them, but I’ll give you a hint: he likes it.

Tonight I was stopped by state police at a checkpoint and asked to present my papers. I mean “license and registration”. And while I tried to figure out where the insurance card was, the officer strolled around my car, playing the flashlight over the vehicle. Apparently my papers were in order, because they let me go.

I hadn’t committed a crime, nor were the police investigating one. Rather, they were just doing a “safety check”. What does that mean? “Checking” to make sure that I have the proper documentation? “Checking” to make sure that I was sober? “Checking” to make sure that I wasn’t violating some law somehow?

What if I had turned around and gone the other way, instead of passing through their checkpoint? Would they have pursued to “check” that I wasn’t fleeing from some sort of crime?

I suppose it could be worse. I know someone who has been pulled over while walking by police and forced to show his identification papers.

Yesterday was July 4, when we celebrate men who had the chutzpah to think that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to free men. On the other hand, we decorate the tombs of the Founders and yet tolerate this sort of behavior.

Nay, not tolerate. Request. Ask for. Plead for. We grovel at the feet of the almighty State and beg, “Please, great State, save us from the drunkard and the drug fiend and the Al-Qaeda boogie man and the non-conformist with his uncomfortable ideas. Just keep us safe, and we will do whatever you say. We will carry special cards and take off our shoes and submit to strip searches on demand and whatever else you say. Just make sure that I don’t have to bear any sort of responsibility for my safety or the safety of my family. Please, take care of that for me.” We demand this sort of treatment, and so we get it.

Is this what you want? Is this the sort of America that you want to hand down to your children? A place where you need photo ID to walk down the street? A place where you have to fear the police looking over your shoulder, even though you are a law-abiding citizen? Personally, I was hoping for something better, but maybe I’m alone in my little delusions about freedom and liberty and all that stuff that we run up the flagpole and salute.

Once upon a time, being an American meant that you were a free man, and that you embraced both the privilege and responsibility that came with that freedom. Are you prepared to do that? Do you really want to be free?

Just checking.

On the one hand…

I’m sitting here, staring at our freedoms being eroded, and I find myself wondering why I’m celebrating today. Increasingly, we are a nation that wishes harsh rule from above, so long as it preserves our “way of life”. Oh yeah, and then we point the fist of the State at our neighbors to make sure that they stay in line with our way of thinking.

On the other hand…

I can still type up a message like this without being arrested.

So, anyways, Happy [This statement was censored by Homeland Security due to content potentially supporting homegrown terrorism; further investigations are pending.]

In which Brennan Taylor calls Dirty Secrets his pick of 2007.

The Voice of the Revolution, Episode 20