It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Fifty years from now, the caricatures of Islamic extremism denoted by the term “Islamofascist” is going to look about as bad as the caricature of Japanese militarism displayed in this poster and this poster.
The parallel extends in all kinds of directions, in my book.
A while back I mentioned the anti-immigration attempt to take over the Sierra Club. Followup: the white supremacists lost. Good times.
I was irked that John Kerry wasn’t releasing his military records, but he fixed that. The difference between Bush’s definition of releasing and Kerry’s definition of releasing is pretty substantial. Kerry put his military records up as PDFs on his web site, and anyone can see them. Bush showed his records to reporters and gave some of them 20 minutes to review some medical exams.
In all fairness, I don’t see Kerry’s military medical records on his web site, and I think they should be there. I still believe there’s a difference between handing your records out to a small group of reporters and making them available online for anyone to see. Someone at the Kerry campaign gets the Internet.
I don’t know how to listen to Live365 stations easily on my Mac, but I am fairly certain that someone reading this will be happy to know that there is a 24/7 Muppet music radio station out there.
In Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey is running against Arlen Specter in the Republican Senatorial primary. Toomey is a hard-right conservative who currently serves in the House of Representatives. Specter is a center-conservative Senator who fails many hard-right litmus tests, most noticably by being one of the handful of prominent Republicans who supports abortion rights. Both Bush and Rick Santorum have endorsed Specter.
This is one of those wedge issues — Bush’s hard-right supporters can’t be pleased that he endorsed someone so centrist, particularly since he differs with the Republican Party on such a hot button issue. Run, Roy, run!
I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though.
I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average.
Worth watching, and I have another Venoms movie to watch (same actors, not a related plot), and I’m looking forward to that one. Just not as much fun as the other Shaws I’ve seen so far.
Justin suggested the Titanic as a mashup subject, and that seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I’m not going to use the movie as source material, since I’ve never seen it, but don’t let that stop you.
Mention Count: 2.
In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows:
Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death.
You can get more Drama Points by trading in experience points or — more interestingly — acting in a number of ways which reinforce the genre. For example, self-sacrificing heroic actions earn Drama Points. The GM also has the option to give out Drama Points when he takes over narrative control of a situation. For example, if he narrates that a PC is knocked out without warning, said PC gets a few Drama Points in exchange.
Since Life and Death on Winter Hill is a short-term game, I don’t think it makes sense to hand out experience points. I’d cut out the middle-man and just grant 4 or 2 Drama Points per session, depending once more on the power level of the character.
What are the genre conventions I want to encourage? I do actively want this to take place in the Whedonverse, so I think giving out Drama Points for witty lines makes sense. Drama Points for angst doesn’t make as much sense. Loyalty, on the other hand, is fairly important. Perhaps 2 Drama Points every time someone makes a difficult decision involving loyalty? I’m not sure exactly how to codify that. Possibly Loyalty should be an disadvantage in character generation, much the same way as Honorable is in the base rules.
I’m also thinking about other ways to use Drama Points as narrative currency. I want to give players narrative control over NPCs, both because I like making players do my work for me and because I think I can leverage that control for more emotional involvement. (More on that in a later post.) It seems like you should be able to invent an NPC for 1 Drama Point, and take over long-term control of an NPC for something like 3-5 Drama Points.
Movable Type 3.0 beta testing starts this Monday, April 19th. You can apply to be a beta tester now.
From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast:
“Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.