Hey, I hear I’m going to be at GenCon. So, they say, are some of you. I am not going to post my full schedule because nothing horrifies me more than people knowing where I’m going to be. Shudder. However, I will be at the Indie RPG Awards on Wednesday night around 9, and before that I will swing by Nicky Blaines since there’s a rumor that some people I know will be there, if they don’t mind me crashing the party. Hopefully the fine people at Nicky Blaines will have forgotten me from last year. ...

Zatoichi reminded me of Twin Peaks. Where David Lynch uses the iconic FBI agent as the entrance point into his off-kilter Pacific Northwest, Takeshi Kitano uses the iconic figure of Zatoichi as the entrance point into bushido. Now, obviously Kitano isn’t Lynch — there are no midgets — but there are distinct similarities in the precedence Kitano gives metaphor over reality. Does it make sense for a group of peasants to dance in the middle of a long shot? Does it matter, if the metaphor is there? ...

If and when I run that 70s Boston Angel game, the WhedonWiki (original) is gonna be a useful resource. Kind of a pity they don’t let anyone edit, but I can understand why — the spammers are getting aggressive about using wikis to improve their Googlerank. If I were doing spam fighting at Google, I’d be seriously considering removing wikis from the pagerank equation. (Bill, I still need a name for that wiki. Give me one and I’ll set it up.)

Reuters theorizes that all those intentional walks to Barry Bonds may be lowering viewer interest in the World Series. I’d have thought the low ratings might be due to the late start times for East Coasters, myself. The games don’t end till near midnight. Families aren’t going to be watching these, you know?

Jere dug up a fascinating piece (original) describing the contents of a laptop formerly used by Al Qaeda. I sorta hope the journalist made sure the government had a copy of the hard drive while he was investigating, but either way, it’s a great article.

If you were in the mood to get a taste of some cool Asian movies, there are two film festivals coming up in New York and San Francisco. New York has the New York Korean Festival (original), running from August 13th to the 22nd. I haven’t seen any of those movies, but I do hear good things about Memories of Murder (original). The Uninvited (original) also got good reviews at FantAsia. Meanwhile, over in San Francisco on the same dates (original), the Four Star is running the 8th annual Asian Film Festival (original). Note in particular Battlefield Baseball and Azumi. Hm, and not one but two Shaw Brothers flicks: One-Armed Swordsman and Lady General Hua Mulan. Old school 60s swordplay movies, both of them. Plus they’ll be showing both Ju-on and Ju-on 2. ...

On the Kill Bill: Volume 2 DVD, there’s a deleted scene — Bill throws down with Michael Jai White. The scene was intended to show how bad-ass Bill was, but Tarantino decided that it wasn’t really necessary. He was right, but it is a true pleasure to watch anyhow.

I just realized that you can subscribe to specific del.icio.us tags just like you can subscribe to specific users. So now any time someone posts something and tags it as “coh”, it shows up in my inbox. Sweet.

Kerry’s advocating a neighborhood watch program to keep an eye out for terrorists. This wasn’t so palatable (original) back when it was Ashcroft’s idea (original), and it isn’t so palatable now.

This is a follow up to my earlier post on Jim McCarthy and Off Wing Opinion (original), in light of further contemplation on my part and Eric’s post-mortem post (original). On reflection, I’m pretty comfortable saying that there are potential issues here. Blogs may not be newspapers, but allow me to quote Jim on using blogs for PR: “Blogs opened up a new front. It was a process of germination. The plan was to construct ideas with the media that would act as a filter so they would read subsequent pieces of information with the lens that you created.” ...