It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Midnight in New York. It’s a Quicktime full-screen panorama; I don’t know if Windows users will be able to see it, but I think so. That whole site is just chock full of goodness. Ten years from now we’ll be looking back on this like we look at ViewMasters today, I imagine.
There, that’s my unrepentant futurism for the year. Speaking of futurism, go read the best weblog post of 2004. The year’s early yet, mind you, but damn Rob is smart.
Tired.
Synchronicity of the night: “Hey, what’s Leon Marr’s name doing on that mailbox?” “Oh, he’s in California.”
Phil Carter notes new rules for military tribunals (PDF), including a right of review, and does a far better job of analyzing them than I would. So go read him.
John Clute’s review of the new Heinlein novel is great reading. It makes me want to read the book, which was somewhat unlikely given that I’m not so fond of posthumous literary exhumations. It also takes down Spider Robinson about as nicely as you’ll ever see it done.
Anita Mui, one of my favorite Hong Kong stars, died today. I guess she was better known for her singing, but I really admired her acting. I first saw her in My Father Is a Hero, but she was also pretty special in Heroic Trio, Executioners, and Drunken Master II. This makes me sad.
“Why is there a Mashup there?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
This entry, by the by, will probably not become a googlewhack, but only cause all of you are gonna use “Buckaroo” and “mashup” on your pages. C’est la vie.
Where was I… ah, yes. Mashup #21 is Buckaroo Banzai, goofy flagbearer of 80s sci-fi pulp. All the men want to be Buckaroo Banzai, and all the women want to look at him misty-eyed across the floor of Artie’s Artery. The movie is really a revamp of Doc Savage; you’ve got the mysterious ultra-competent leader and his henchmen, each of whom has a different specialty. If you dial down and focus on the movie’s plot, you’ve got a fairly standard alien invasion plot mixed with a kind of a pod people riff and some multiple dimension stuff which doesn’t entirely matter. More important, though, is the deranged hipness which permeates the entire thing. You could say that Buckaroo Banzai is a mashup itself: Doc Savage plus 80s style. You wouldn’t be far wrong.
Truth is, I don’t much care what Dean supporters will do if he loses the primaries. I think Dean’s veiled threats are pretty childish; they’re also stupid. He’s not gonna tell his supporters to stay home, and the vast majority of them will vote for the Democratic nominee anyhow. I also agree with Atrios on this one, in that the real question is what happens to Dean’s campaign machine.
In the ideal Democratic Party world, he keeps running it on behalf of the primary victor. In our world, he probably tunes it down and keeps it humming so as to keep himself well-positioned for 2008/2012, unless of course he gets the VP nod, which is what he’s angling for when he makes threats about taking his toys and going home.
Whatever. For me, the interesting question is what Dean does with his apparatus if he wins. Dave Winer has been kvetching about Dean for some time now (hm, I wonder why the search function doesn’t catch the first link, there… oh, because Dave didn’t write his own search, he just lets Google do it for him). What it boils down to, excepting the whinging about Dean not using Dave’s software, is that Dean isn’t doing things other than campaigning with his grassroots.
I think that’s reasonable during the election. But what will he do afterwards? He’s got all these people who badly want to make the country a better place, and he has the tools he needs to point them in a specific direction. Will he send ‘em over to be distributed proofreaders? Will he encourage them to run SETI@Home? Will he ask them to join house-building projects?
In my minarchistic view, Dean’s grassroots is the sort of organizational structure that has the potential to enable the kind of government structure I want to see. I don’t fool myself into thinking that Dean’s going to use it like that after the election, but even from the political junkie point of view, I’m damned curious about his intentions.
Distributed Proofreaders is one of those cool things enabled by the Internet. Project Gutenberg has the problem that proofreading OCRed books is painfully time-consuming. So what do you do? You farm out the proofreading one page at a time.
It takes a few minutes to proofread a single page; you do five, and you’ve made a difference. Come back the next day and do five more. At the moment, Distributed Proofreaders has provided over 25% of Project Gutenberg’s 10,000 books. It’s neat. Plus I got to proof some James Branch Cabell — in fact, I just proofed the last page of The Eagle’s Shadow.
There are also teams, in the tradition of distributed processing projects. I set up Population: Too (misspelling intentional for obscure reasons), and anyone’s welcome to join. I’m fairly certain that with some steady work we could overcome both Poland and Team New Jersey, although Team Canada’s hundred thousand pages seems out of reach.
WISH 78 asks:
Do you think allowing one player to play more than one character in a game is a good or bad idea? Does the style of the game make any difference? What about the format (FTF, PBeM, etc.)?
Well, you wouldn’t want multiple characters in a LARP, I imagine. (I joke!)
I think that playing two equal characters face to face is generally a bad idea. I was in a game recently in which everyone had two players, and while I enjoyed the game, I gotta say I would have enjoyed it more if I’d been able to focus on one PC. If you’re playing in a purely tactical game, it perhaps makes more sense, but I like exploring personalities.
Troupes seem to work better. I’m defining “troupe” as “one primary PC, and multiple secondary PCs,” in Ars Magica fashion, which is perhaps a little too specific but it’ll do for a working definition. I expect this is purely psychological; a troupe-style game allows me to concentrate on a single PC, with the others being adjuncts. (I really looked forward to Amelia Wellstone’s band of street kids. Alas.)
I s’pose I had multiple PCs back on AmberMUSH, come to think of it. Usually only one primary, though. There, the trick was maintaining a serious amount of separation, and occasionally going through contortions to avoid having PC interests intersect. It was really more like having separate PCs in overlapping campaigns.
About Cheaper by the Dozen: Roger Ebert is wrong, and pretty clearly wasn’t paying close attention to the movie anyhow, since he has a couple of factual errors in his review. So, no, it’s not a three star movie. 1.5 stars, maybe. Not funny, not charming, kind of depressing. Me, I like my cheerful uplifting Christmas movies to be about success rather than failure.