Via Alas, a blog, here’s a free source of living will documents.
Author: Bryant
Here’s the plan:
FanTasia 2005 takes place from July 7th to July 24th of this year. I’m going for either one or two weeks of that period; haven’t decided which yet, won’t decide until the schedule is out, which will be sometime in June. I’ll be renting a furnished one-bedroom near the venues, and anyone who I know and don’t mind sharing space with is welcome to come crash there for any or all of my visit. I figure it’s my God-given duty to inflict weird and fantastic movies on people, see.
My coverage of last year’s FanTasia begins here. If you’re interested but not sure if you’re invited or not, drop me a line. I’ll post more when the schedule is out, including recommendations.
A while ago, some of my friends were bandying around the idea that 1999 was the best year for movies in our generation. Others agree.
Li asks, “What alternate-historical setting would you most like to play in, and why?” She mentions S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket books, which are pretty good as alternate history gaming settings go, but I’m gonna go in a different Stirling direction: The Peshawar Lancers. The science and politics are horrendously unlikely but it’s a great pulp setting if you can ignore that.
Abstract Appeal, a blog run by a Florida lawyer, has a summary of the Terri Schiavo case. He includes a painfully stark summary of her medical condition, and links to various rulings in the case.
I could get all political, but you know whether or not you think the federal government should be deciding if a woman with no cerebral cortex should live or die. Either way, it’s sad that she’s being used as a political pawn.
Andrew Hackard (a member of the Role-Playing Game category jury for the 2005 Origins Awards) notes that Lumpley Games didn’t submit five copies of Dogs in the Vineyard, so it wasn’t eligible for an award. Given that, I gotta back off some of my criticisms of the awards this year. Who knows how many submissions actually qualified for the voting?
Answer: not. The big snag in forming an Iraqi government is, as expected, whether or not Kirkuk winds up in Kurdish hands or not. Add to this the Kurdish insistence on maintaining their own separate militia, and what you’ve basically got is a demand for functional independence plus a big chunk of the Iraq oil reserves.
It is, to say the least, difficult for the Shiite majority to agree. Turkey is still very edgy about Kurdish independence. I don’t know how this gets resolved, short of the Kurds compromising.
It is perhaps relevant that the current leader of Iraq, Allawi, has absolutely no incentive at all to resolve this crisis. The moment a new government is formed, he’s out in the cold. Well, he’s leader of the minority bloc — but if he was in any position to be part of a coalition government, he’d already have done so, and the Kurds wouldn’t be a problem.
The 2005 Origins Awards nominees have been announced. The nomination process was very different this year; in each category, a jury voted on the nominated products in order to select five nominees. Some of the results are fairly interesting. At first glance, I can’t say I think the process was a success.
The Best Role-Playing Game category is fairly heavy on the retreads. In particular, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game is not a new role-playing game by any definition. The Authority RPG is borderline. A new edition of GURPS seems reasonable — oh, but of the five jury members for this category, two of them were Steve Jackson Games staffers last year. Well, OK, then.
And there’s no wholly new product among the nominees. Surely at least one of the five top products from last year was fresh and new?
Best Role-Playing Game Supplement, which shares the same jury as Best Role-Playing Game, has two GURPS supplements on the list of nominees. Gotcha. I will say that I agree that all the nominees I’ve read on the list are very good. Um, but there are six nominees listed, and the rules say there should be five.
I can’t really claim expertise on the other categories, so I won’t comment on them. The full list of nominees is in the extended portion of this post, for the curious.
Iraq has a government. Or not.
My friend Jere pointed out, quite accurately, that the question isn’t really “what did the kid in Kentucky write about?” The question is “when did we start arresting people for writing stories, no matter how disturbed?” Or, perhaps, “when did we stop trusting parents to raise kids and deal with problem situations?”
It’s probably relevant that the biggest policy victory (pending) for the Democrats over the last few years has been Social Security, on which issue they’re coming down on the side of the government protecting people. We really like being protected these days.