A while ago, some of my friends were bandying around the idea that 1999 was the best year for movies in our generation. Others agree (original).

Li asks (original), “What alternate-historical setting would you most like to play in, and why?” She mentions S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket books, which are pretty good as alternate history gaming settings go, but I’m gonna go in a different Stirling direction: The Peshawar Lancers (original). The science and politics are horrendously unlikely but it’s a great pulp setting if you can ignore that.

Abstract Appeal, a blog run by a Florida lawyer, has a summary of the Terri Schiavo case (original). He includes a painfully stark summary of her medical condition, and links to various rulings in the case. I could get all political, but you know whether or not you think the federal government should be deciding if a woman with no cerebral cortex should live or die. Either way, it’s sad that she’s being used as a political pawn.

Andrew Hackard (a member of the Role-Playing Game category jury for the 2005 Origins Awards) notes that Lumpley Games didn’t submit five copies of Dogs in the Vineyard, so it wasn’t eligible for an award. Given that, I gotta back off some of my criticisms of the awards this year. Who knows how many submissions actually qualified for the voting?

Answer: not. The big snag in forming an Iraqi government is, as expected, whether or not Kirkuk winds up in Kurdish hands or not. Add to this the Kurdish insistence on maintaining their own separate militia, and what you’ve basically got is a demand for functional independence plus a big chunk of the Iraq oil reserves. It is, to say the least, difficult for the Shiite majority to agree. Turkey is still very edgy (original) about Kurdish independence. I don’t know how this gets resolved, short of the Kurds compromising. ...

I had this entry going where I was trying to contextualize M.I.A. and talk about influences and stuff, but screw it, truth is I don’t know about about the British music scene to do that. So here’s a 17 meg QuickTime video. Square-wave synth beats — very video-game — with a melodic poppy rap going on over them, and a tribal chorus that takes over the song by the end. The imagery is pop violence; her father is (to some unspecified degree) connected with the Tamil Tigers. Careless appropriation of terrorism chic? Conscious rebranding? Damned if I know. ...

The 2005 Origins Awards nominees have been announced. The nomination process was very different this year (original); in each category, a jury voted on the nominated products in order to select five nominees. Some of the results are fairly interesting. At first glance, I can’t say I think the process was a success. The Best Role-Playing Game category is fairly heavy on the retreads. In particular, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game is not a new role-playing game by any definition. The Authority RPG is borderline. A new edition of GURPS seems reasonable — oh, but of the five jury members for this category, two of them were Steve Jackson Games staffers last year. Well, OK, then. And there’s no wholly new product among the nominees. Surely at least one of the five top products from last year was fresh and new? Best Role-Playing Game Supplement, which shares the same jury as Best Role-Playing Game, has two GURPS supplements on the list of nominees. Gotcha. I will say that I agree that all the nominees I’ve read on the list are very good. Um, but there are six nominees listed, and the rules say there should be five. I can’t really claim expertise on the other categories, so I won’t comment on them. The full list of nominees is in the extended portion of this post, for the curious.

Iraq has a government. Or not (original).

Sure, you can listen to a lot of interesting singles by way of MP3 blogs — but SXSW just published a BitTorrent torrent containing 2.6 gigs of music (original) from bands which will be playing at this year’s SXSW. That’s 713 songs and almost two straight days of music. Boston locals who want a copy of it without the 1+ day download period should get in touch with me.

Read this first. I spent a while pondering this one during my vacation, and I think the system is a modified Feng Shui with revamped templates. Not as many hit points, to get it more gritty — possibly even a wound system. Steal the madness meters from Unknown Armies and turn them into corruption meters and you’re good to go.