It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Not exactly breaking news, but there’s been nothing else in White Wolf v. Sony for a while, so here’s the only thing posted in the PACER docket since early this month:
11/26/03 AGREED PROTECTIVE ORDER approved by Judge J. Owen Forrester. (see order for specifics)(cc) (dfb)
Sadly for our curiosity, there is no actual order attached. Yeah, I’m pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel here. I have no idea what this could mean.
Looks like it’s a go — Curt Schilling, Advanced Squad Leader owner, EverQuest player, and 20 game winner will be playing for the Boston Red Sox next year. It’s been a pretty surreal 24 hours; first Schilling posted a letter on the official Red Sox bulletin board, and then he dropped by the Sons of Sam Horn board for a live chat or two. Both appearances have been confirmed to a certain degree, although one never knows. The guy’s a computer geek, though.
But hey — the exposure to the Boston fan base appears not to have hurt in the least. Pedro will be better off not having to carry the team on his back. As constructed, this team wins the AL East. They may still add Keith Foulke, and there’s always the potential for a Manny trade. Gotta like this ownership.
Addendum:
“Don’t think for a second that seeing all these threads and reading this stuff didn’t leave an impression, thanks for the emails and well wishes, pretty sure I will be back from time to time, I’d drop in and chat but that rooms seems a bit full atm.”
— Curt Schilling, Internet bulletin board habituee
Man, you’re never gonna be able to tell Boston fans they don’t matter again. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I kept the cynical from my door for about, oh, 24 hours. Going to a warzone and cheering up the troops is a pretty good thing to do, even if the motives are impure. So, sure, I gave him points for that.
But then I stopped and asked myself why he brought the press corps along.
I gotta say. If I’m the President, and I’m worried about my security, and the purpose of my visit is to rally the troops — why do I need Fox News on that plane? Why am I taking the risk of letting reporters in on the story a few days early? I could just, you know, get on the plane and go and come back without bringing along a bunch of cameramen and reporters. If I gotta have pictures, I’m sure there are a couple of Army guys whose job it is to take pictures of things.
Wouldn’t it be safer for both me and the soldiers I’m meeting if I skipped the press coverage and kept the people who knew to the absolute bare minimum?
Cynical’s back. But I’m not the one who decided to heighten the security risk for the sake of positive media coverage.
WISH 74 is all about dreams and hopes:
Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?
I’m not an Amber player anymore, but I’d still kind of like to see Rebma… no? OK, I’ll come up with three others.
First off is a two in one, since the reasons I want them are similar. I would like to see the promised Heresy RPG. The background was cool and the card art was superb and I like games that use the Christian mythos quite a bit. Heretical cyberpunk hit all my buttons. I want Anoch’s Mystick RPG for similar reasons; the cards hinted at a dense intricate background which played to my love for conspiracy.
Mind you, in both cases I expect I would have been disappointed. It’s unfair to expect game companies to live up to my inchoate dreams, and neither of the sourcebooks would have been 500 pages long.
In lieu of these sourcebooks, I hang around people who make up cool conspiratorial stuff and that scratches my itch. I also read Eco novels. It works out OK for me.
Second: Trinity. Lots more Trinity. Preferably written by me, but really, any Trinity would do. In particular, I really sorely wish I’d gotten to work on the full-size aliens supplement. I wanted to write the Coalition chapters so badly. (Pause for a moment of self-indulgence.)
Since the supplement probably isn’t happening any time soon, I make up my own Coalition material, which bears a certain resemblance to what might have been published.
Finally, I’d like to see a D20 Modern Fantasy supplement, adapting the D20 Modern rules to fantasy usage, preferably from WotC. I’m pretty sure that D20 Modern characters are a bit weaker than characters of equivalent level in D&D, but I like the D20 Modern approach to classes somewhat more than I like the D&D approach. So a supplement which presented a beefed up set of classes would be vastly appreciated. Alternatively, of course, I could just start everyone at third level. (Tip of the hat to Gamma World D20 Modern.)
I’m futzing around with ljcrosspost, a new plugin that automates crossposting between MT and LiveJournal. If it wipes out all my LJ posts, I will be very sad.
… OK, it’s a nice plugin but it doesn’t really make it easy to customize the post title and it doesn’t provide easy access to the permalink — so I can’t easily create links back to the blog side of things. Maybe in a couple of revs. It’s a damned cool idea, though.
Tom Kratman responded to my recent discussion of his Posleen book over on my LiveJournal. Since that post is about a month old, I figured I’d be fair and provide a pointer to the discussion. If I’ve given people a negative impression of him, which I imagine I have, he deserves to have his defense seen.
Many, many, many, many, many people have expressed their displeasure with the rules of Quidditch. “Bah,” I have always said to myself. “Games don’t always make sense. Games evolve. The other players are important if the golden snitch isn’t caught.”
After having learned about Eton’s The Wall Game, which has been played at Eton for over three hundred years, I no longer feel any need to defend the existence of strange and nonsensical British schoolboy games. The Wall Game even has a method of scoring points which essentially ends the game in one fell swoop: scoring a goal is worth ten points, as opposed to the more common shys (worth one point), and games are generally scoreless ties anyhow. So if you score a goal, you’re going to win.
And the method of scoring goals is not symmetric between the teams. So quit picking on Quidditch.
Australia and the US have agreed that Australian detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be tried by US military tribunals. There are a number of points in the agreement, including a promise that the US will not seek the death penalty for any Australians. Also, the media will be allowed to observe the tribunal and the accused may have a cleared attorney as an advisor to his defense team.
The press release makes it really clear that these are case specific assurances which do not apply to Guantanamo Bay detainees in general. Pity.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the Crank Dot Net weblog is maintained using m4, make, and perl. What kind of a crank uses UNIX macro languages and makefiles to produce a weblog? But never mind that; it’s a very useful weblog if you’re searching for crankery.