It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
I’ve been meaning to do this mashup for while, and this is probably a good occasion. Let it roll: it’s Harry Potter time. Any book is fine, or all of them, or whatever suits — one of the elements of the series that I really like is the time progression, although I’m not confident that Rowling won’t screw it up, but do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the mashup law.
(Hm. I should use Al next Monday.)
Ray Bradbury has pretty strong opinions about Michael Moore.
“Michael Moore is a screwed a—hole, that is what I think about that case,” Bradbury said according to an English translation of the story. “He stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission.”
Continued the author: “[Moore] is a horrible human being – horrible human!”
When asked if he agrees with Moore’s political positions, Bradbury replied, “That has nothing to do with it. He copied my title; that is what happened. That has nothing to do with my political opinions.”
No doubt. Sort of like that scumbag who stole a line from Macbeth for his book.
Seventeen years ago, I spent a month in the People’s Republic of China on a youth tour. There were 40 Western teens — mostly from the United States — and 20 Chinese teens on the tour. We travelled together for a month, from Beijing down through Shandong Province; we climbed Tai Shan, drifted along the Huang He by boat, stayed in Wuhan for a few days, and finally wound up in Shanghai. It was an amazing experience.
I met a lot of people on that trip. Stefani later introduced me to Pearl, her freshman year roommate. Pearl in turn introduced me to Susan, who got me back into the SF con scene. I met Leon through Susan, and Leon introduced me to TinyMUD, which is how I got my first job in the tech industry. It was a rather important month in my life.
I also met a few people whose names I’m still uncomfortable using in public, because… you never know. The Chinese kids we travelled with were all smart highly educated children of Communist Party members from Beijing. At the beginning of the trip, they were highly doctrinaire around us. By the end? Everyone had loosened up. There was more trust. The more radical among them were willing to admit to being uncertain about the rule of their parents.
We exchanged addresses at the end of the tour. Some of us kept up our letter writing — circumscribed, always, and careful, but knowing each other well enough to read between the lines.
A little more than fifteen years ago, the tone of some of the letters changed. Got more excited. Something was up.
Fifteen years ago, the world saw this.
We stopped getting letters after that. I don’t know why; I like to think it’s simply that writing letters to Westerners were unwise, but I know it’s possible that some of my friends died in the protests. Unlikely, though; not many students did. But… you never know.
Either way, Tiananmen Square was very personal for me. I’d spent an afternoon there, looking at the monuments and being amazed at the scale of the place. I had, at the time, a little wooden fan with a picture of the Square on it. I knew people who were probably there when the tanks rolled in.
Never forget.
The only thing I really don’t like about MT-Blacklist is that I have to fiddle around and cut and paste URLs and click a lot when I want to mark a comment as spam. This is mostly my own fault for using an old CRT-based mail reader, but still. So I wrote a little script that takes an MovableType comment email as input and runs MT-Blacklist on the comment. Now, whenever I get comment spam, I pipe the email alert to this script and the comment spam goes away.
This works for me. It may not work for you. No warrantee, etc. Test before using. Requires the CPAN modules WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser.
George Tenet resigned yesterday. This is kind of odd for a number of reasons.
First, some background: George Tenet is not exactly a friend of Bush. The split has been fairly clear since Tenet left Bush out in the cold on the “imminent threat” question. There’s also been plenty of speculation that the CIA is not pleased with the Bush administration about the Valerie Plame issue. The popular conception among Washington-watchers is that CIA and State are more or less aligned in an effort to blunt the impact of neocon foreign policy. Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans was a successful attempt to create an alternative channel by which intelligence on Iraq could reach the President.
This should in no way be interpreted as putting the CIA in a good light. The OSP could have been the best, most honest intelligence group in the world and the CIA wouldn’t have been pleased to have another competitor. Turf wars are a terrible thing. All we can say at this point, assuming the speculation is accurate, is that the CIA is not a friend of the various neocons in Bush’s administration.
So: the first question is whether Tenet quit or was fired. If he was fired, why? If he quit, why?
If he was fired it seems likely that he’s going to be the scapegoat for Iraq failures. This is darned risky, given that he’ll have little reason not to fight back since he’s out of a job. You also have to wonder how much the CIA likes Tenet; does Bush want to piss off the CIA more than it already is? Maybe he thought about it and decided it was worth it. But it seems like an odd choice, particularly when you’ve got Doug Feith as a more direct scapegoat with less ability to fight back. Maybe Feith knows where too many bodies are buried.
If he quit, is he just fed up? Does he have an agenda? Will he be writing a book? Will it come out before the elections?
It’s unusual for news like this to be announced on a Thursday; you want to announce big personnel changes on a Friday so that there’s no weekday news cycle chewing over the ramifications. Did Tenet force Bush’s hand with a threat to leak the news himself? Did Bush just blurt it out accidentally?
And I’m not even going to get into the conspiracy theories that link this and the Valerie Plame affair — but man, it’s bad timing for Bush to announce this the day after the news comes out that he’s consulting a lawyer.
You can see what I mean. This raises about a million questions, few of which will ever get answered.
Bush is ready to hire a lawyer in case he has to testify in the Valerie Plame case. This is quite right; you should be ready to hire a lawyer if you suspect you may be the target of a grand jury investigation. Clinton hired a lawyer, Charles Ruff, during the Whitewater investigation.
Mind you, that came after Ken Starr began his investigation. But if there’s a chance you’re being investigated, it makes sense to be prepared.
Hey, I have my game schedule for The Black Road.
Slot 1: Le Cygne: The Lost Swan of Amber
Slot 2: If You Can’t Take the Heat
Slot 3: Nine Losers in Akron (Amber/Kill Puppies for Satan)
Slot 4: My Life With Corwin (Amber/My Life With Master)
Slot 5: empty
Saturday appears to be my day for Amber-flavored indie games. This should be a whole lot of fun.
The antepentultimate WISH asks:
What are three games or settings that you’ve bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you’d really like to try? What interests you about them and why?
Nocturnals from Green Ronin; I like the unique genre niche carved out by the creepy heros, and the sourcebook gives me so many details to play with. Just — cool. Pacific Northwest-feeling monsterpunk.
Dogs in the Vineyard, because I dig the clerical harshness of it all. I’ve played a lot of clerics and I usually enjoy it even though I never do it by choice. Religion in gaming fascinates me.
Hm, and I kind of want to play something really heroic — doesn’t have to be superheroes, could be heroic fantasy or heroic transhuman or whatever. But there’s nothing out there that’s grabbing me. HeroQuest, but that’s not a new release. Charnel Gods (which Rob will be running soon), but that’s not a new release either. Big heroes. Larger than life heroes. Maybe Fireborn? FFG is doing such good setting work these days.
Oh, speaking of which, honorable mention to the Horizon series. Grimm and Spellslinger whet my appetite for gaming something fierce.
Someday I want to read a book on what exactly happened in Iraq last week.
The Iraqi Governing Council chose a Prime Minister, ignoring the UN envoy and the US. Or maybe the US pushed the IGC into doing its bidding. But then the IGC forced the issue and chose a President over the objections of the US and the UN. Adnan Pachachi was offered the Presidency, but turned it down. And now the IGC has dissolved itself a month early.
I think I’m glad in the abstract that Iraqis are asserting themselves, but I don’t know enough about the people involved to have an opinion on whether the decisions they’ve made will lead to greater freedom in Iraq.
In the spirit of Neel Krishnaswami’s recent post on sports games, today’s mashup is Hoosiers. It could be any sports movie, but I happen to like basketball a lot. I guess if you’re a football fan or something it’s OK to break away from the pack and do Any Given Sunday; the Mashup Ninjas will not pay you a visit. This once only.
Hoosiers is a nice simple story. Washed up coach comes to small town with a basketball team and teaches them how to win a championship. (Mostly discipline.) He alienates people with his fancy coaching ways but it turns out that in Indiana, winning is more important than anything else. He also finds love and redeems the town drunk.