The MacArthur Foundation announced its 2003 MacArthur Fellows today. It’s such a great concept: $100,000 a year for five years so that you don’t have to worry about anything but your work. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Category: General
rebelcoyote has pictures of a kitten on a tank. I dunno, there’s probably some big political significance to this, but all I can say is “awwwwww.”
This is the Isabel picture I’d been looking for; saw it once, couldn’t find it again, now I have. Amazing. randomWalks has more picture links.
Snopes is tracking that tanker picture. I think it’s Photoshopped; the sea is too calm.
Edward Tufte posted some links to rather striking GIF animations of air traffic patterns over the United States. You can see the waves of FedEx planes taking off from Memphis, for example. He also has a link to an animation of air traffic patterns on 9/11/2001, which is striking in a different way.
It being Tufte’s site, someone’s noted (accurately) the problems with the data presentation.
In the fine tradition of Deb’s big list of historical links, here’s another quick link to another fairly comprehensive link collection. It’s everything you wanted to know about underground tunnels, more or less. There’s even a Mormon Church subcategory. Thanks to Chris T. for the heads up.
Today is a very special day, by the by, for reasons which will become apparent tomorrow.
The clever and studious Brant has discovered and shared with us Deb’s Historical Research Page, which is simply brilliant. As Brant says, “Generally I don’t trust sites whose title involves the name ‘Deb,’ but I’ve made an exception in this case.” Awesome collection of links.
Every now and then someone writes a really good document on interacting with non-techies for techies. Here’s one about giving status reports. As I changed from a techie into a manager with delusions of techieness, I could feel myself beginning to want the strange things Richard Threadgill talks about therein.
The Pentagon needs blood donors. If you have a DoD affiliation (the Armed Services Blood Program only accepts blood from people with a DoD affiliation), it’s a good time to give. If not, the Red Cross always needs blood.
Let’s wrap this puppy up, shall we?
In my frenzy of Gen Con recapping, I missed two purchases. First off was Mechanical Dream, a product of my lust for weird French RPGs. Alas, Steam Logic Editions is actually from Quebec. However, that minor flaw doesn’t seem to have kept them from producing the sort of surrealistic dream of a roleplaying game that I expect from the French. It’s a bizarre industrial fantasy world without any humans at all; the social structure of the world is predicated on a specific kind of fruit. If you don’t eat one every week, you die. I have not yet penetrated deeper into the system than that.
Also, like everyone else at the show, I got Arcana Unearthed. It’s got a lot of really solid rules innovations, unsurprisingly. I like what he’s done with spells, and I like what he’s done with templates (extending them to weapons and spells). I really like his approach towards non-human PCs, as well; it’s a lot like Savage Species but a little more relaxed. Most of these mechanical tweaks could be imported into an existing campaign easily.
On the other hand, the book as a whole is tied very tightly to a given setting. Cook’s work on reimagining the classes is great, but it makes Arcana Unearthed almost useless for implementing an existing setting in D20 terms. You can simulate the Grey Mouser pretty well with fighter and rogue levels; you can’t do a damned thing with him under Arcana Unearthed rules. In a weird sort of a way, it reminds me of Talislanta and Jorune — the setting is not quite as baroque, but it’s certainly a deeply variant take on the whole fantasy concept. This is not a bad thing per se, it’s just going to be interesting to watch how it does in the market.
The AltaVista saga continues: Yahoo’s buying Overture. The purchase price is 1.63 billion, which is pretty damned impressive. You gotta figure the AV and Fast purchases made the deal much more attractive to Yahoo, considering that those portions of Overture will allow Yahoo to replace Google as their search provider. Congratulations go to my compadres at AltaVista.