Via Unqualified Offerings, it’s the first song off Zevon’s next album. In MP3 format, no less. And the whole album “available as a stream” on August 19th, which is tomorrow.
Month: August 2003
Since my Typepad beta account will vanish sooner or later, I moved my Gen Con photos to a local gallery. If you saw them then, you’ve seen them now — nothing new there.
Another Monday, another mashup. What’s the Wayback Machine got for us today, Sherman?
“Um, it’s something about ‘true believers,’ boss.”
Right! Time to mash up the Fantastic Four! The Fantastic Four are notable among superhero teams for a) being a family and b) being the most blatant example of Jack Kirby’s “use the elements as inspirations” rule ever. It’s kind of a difficult mashup in that the characters are key to the concept, so you’d almost need to use pregen PCs. Perhaps we’re talking convention games, here.
My mashup follows.
The first flash mob with purpose probably won’t be political after all. Rather, it’ll be hordes of people handing out free comics. At the least, it’ll be a noble attempt, although I have an image in my mind of a bunch of people giving comics to each other rather than to random strangers. Also, the organizer is doing a piss-poor job of keeping it secret, which will minimize impact.
Helpful hint to flash mob organizers: the minute you write anything about your mob on a public forum, the media probably knows.
The first person who changed my life, I never met. He or she left some old SF paperbacks in a little villa on Green Turtle Cay, in the Bahamas — Perry Rhodans, as I recall — and I read them while I was ten or so and on vacation. They blew me away, far more so than the golf books. I haven’t stopped reading SF yet.
That’s why my dad’s friend Peter Olotka said “Hey, your son likes SF — he can share our room at Boskone if you like.” Dad said sure, and that was my first SF con. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I more or less stopped going when I hit college.
That wasn’t permanent, though, because I went on a youth group trip to China a year or so before I hit college. That’s where I met Stefani. Afterwards, she introduced me to her friend Pearl.
In college, Pearl met Susan, who organized trips to SF cons, which is why I started going to those again. Susan introduced me to Randomness. Randomess introduced me to TinyMUD. (The original one, at CMU, thank you very much.)
I met Gretchen on TinyMUD, and roleplayed with her on Amber, which is why I figured it might be worth taking a shot at San Francisco. Bruce, god bless him for this at least, got me the job at Netcom a few months after I got out there. That was my entry into high-tech.
I also met Rich on TinyMUD, and he’s why I can call myself a professional writer.
Time passed. Ambar suggested I come work for Altavista, which is where I got into management. I would have gotten into management at the other job I was considering at the time, but I wouldn’t have had one of the world’s biggest Web sites on my resume, and that made a difference later on.
Finally, Jamie Wakefield, who I’ve never met, wrote incredible articles about a game. If I hadn’t read those, I wouldn’t have applied for (and gotten) the job I applied for most recently.
And here I am.
There are many other people who changed who I am, and some of the people who’ve sent my life bouncing in wild new directions overlap with that category. But those are the people who’ve changed my life in terms of pinball.
For all its flaws, we must admire Google for knowing the length of a smoot. Alas, it does not know the value of a quatloo, but then again, neither do I.
On the other hand, while searching for quatloo valuations, I did find a proposal for an XML standard for Shadowrun. But I digress.
Smoots are real.
This entry exists solely for the sake of pinging Flutterby. The automatic Trackback RDF stuff doesn’t work yet, apparently — we’ll see if the discovery works better. (Answer: nope. Trying a manual ping…)
Testing again, now that Dan’s tinkered a little.
And one more time! (It worked.)
Pleasingly, Columbia just released the Once Upon A Time In China series on a two-DVD set for a mere twenty-five bucks or so. Each movie is on one side of a DVD, so there’s no quality compromise. Alas, they left out the commentary from their previous edition of Once Upon A Time In China I, but one can’t have everything and it was just a commentary from a Hong Kong film expert rather than anyone connected with the production.
The picture quality is great, blowing away my memories of the scratchy print I saw in the Towne lo these many years ago. And it’s three of Jet Li’s best flicks for $25. I can’t think of any reason other than having the single movie editions why a Hong Kong action movie fan wouldn’t want these.
I’m linking to this fairly amusing article on the Texas Democrat walkout not because I am shocked and horrified by the thought that the Republicans may try to delay elections, since I’m not. I could care less if the Republicans want to delay primaries; I see no real reason why primaries should be part of the legal framework of American elections. If the real elections happen without the Republicans selecting a candidate, well, that has its own rewards.
I’m more interested in it because it holds the hint of a deadline. The Democrats get to come back when it’s too late for the feds to redistrict and still make the candidate filing deadline… whoops, for the primaries. Wouldn’t you just know it?
Sigh. Institutionalized two-party system. What fun.
The Ultimate California Gubernatorial Recall Candidate List is a nice overview of who’s who, with annotations. “This candidate failed the Turing test in 1999.” Heh. And I didn’t know Bill Walton’s son was running.
Although I think he was too kind to Gallagher and Gary Coleman. They belong in the publicity seeker category.