The antepentultimate WISH (original) asks: What are three games or settings that you’ve bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you’d really like to try? What interests you about them and why? Nocturnals from Green Ronin; I like the unique genre niche carved out by the creepy heros, and the sourcebook gives me so many details to play with. Just — cool. Pacific Northwest-feeling monsterpunk. Dogs in the Vineyard, because I dig the clerical harshness of it all. I’ve played a lot of clerics and I usually enjoy it even though I never do it by choice. Religion in gaming fascinates me. ...

Someday I want to read a book on what exactly happened in Iraq last week. The Iraqi Governing Council chose a Prime Minister (original), ignoring the UN envoy and the US. Or maybe the US pushed the IGC into doing its bidding. But then the IGC forced the issue and chose a President over the objections of the US and the UN. Adnan Pachachi was offered the Presidency, but turned it down. And now the IGC has dissolved itself a month early. ...

Nuadha says I should mashup Planet of the Apes. I have no fear of the damn dirty apes! We all know the basic plot, right? Statues of Liberty are optional. Start your engines for this, our fortieth mashup.

Go Liralen! Go Cera! Go Ambar! The Population: Too team has proofread 7,000 pages for Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. That is an awful lot of text and I am deeply pleased to have had a small part in getting such productive proofreaders involved in the project. If anyone’s interested in proofreading for a good cause, check PGDP out. You only have to do a page at a time, there’s no commitment, it’s really easy, and every little bit helps.

My current favorite piece of gaming slang is “lasersharking.” “Hey, you know, that game concept would be better if the sharks had lasers on their head.” Lasersharking. Leave the poor concept alone; not all concepts need lasers to reach their full potential. Rifts is all lasersharking, all the way to the bottom turtle.

The Boston Globe bought (original) the Boston Dirt Dogs. I guess this means that there’s been a truce on one front in the sportswriters vs. fan site war.

If the Chalabi story is true, it’s an incredible intelligence coup for Iran. The short form is that Ahmad Chalabi may have been an Iranian agent for the past several years. If this turns out to be the case, then the information he passed the US — information which helped Bush make the case for war — was generated and shaped by Iranian intelligence needs. That’s an astoundingly impressive piece of work, which may in the end be ranked up there with Eli Cohen.

Since we decided to stop attacking Fallujah, it’s turned into a theocracy (original). This should come as no surprise to anyone. I don’t think that crushing the city would have been productive either; you’d have gotten entirely different problems. Maybe it’s worth allowing the city to become an independent state in order to minimize the risk of Sunni unrest. Mostly it shows how many unpalatable alternatives we have in Iraq.

Current Gmail users have a couple of invites to the beta to give away. This has resulted in many offers of firstborn. In order to organize these offers, a clever person invented gmail swap, where people can post offers and the lucky few with gmail invites can pick the cream of the crop. For the record, this one is the cream of the crop. But only if you’re an Asheron’s Call player who’s easily amused.

This is probably the final post on the draft rumors. First, I looked a little deeper into the way Congress.org works. The original draft rumor was a Soapbox Alert, not an Action Alert. Action Alerts are associated with the organization that produced them; Soapbox Alerts have no attribution. Turns out anyone can post a Soapbox Alert. Anyone at all. There’s no way to tell who posted it and there seems to be no filter before a Soapbox Alert hits the site. I.e., there is no more accountability behind the original rumor than there would be from a message board posting on some random message board. ...