WISH 76 (original) asks: A lot is made of the role of the GM in a game, but what is the role of the player? I’m not really sure if I can answer that one, since so much depends on the game. The single most important trick to master can be summarized as “support interaction,” which covers a lot — sharing spotlight time, making your character sticky, and so on. Most other stuff depends on the game, I think. ...

Good news (original), without question. Doesn’t make people on US soil a whole lot safer, but it may make a difference for soldiers in Iraq, and it’s excellent news for the Iraqi people. I could speculate all day on the possible effects of this. “Aha, now the attacks on American troops will slow down.” “Aha, now the Iraqis won’t feel the need for US protection and will demonstrate against the occupation.” “Aha, there will be a major boom in Saddam bobblehead dolls.” I don’t have any idea what will happen, though, so I’m not going to try and say something authoritative and convincing. I’ll just be happy the guy’s caught. ...

Everett Ehrlich starts out talking about the basic value of the Internet (original), which is that it makes it really cheap to gather and transmit information. I’d never heard of Ronald Coase, but the basic outlines of the theory as Ehrlich explains it make complete sense. The Internet allows very focused tribes to form very quickly, because one no longer has to look very hard to find other people who consider bowling shoes to be the pinnacle of modern art. ...

We’re restricting Iraqi rebuilding contracts to coalition countries. That’s pretty short-sighted. Bush’s take on it: “Coalition, friendly coalition folks risked their lives and therefore, the contracting is going to reflect that, and that’s what the U.S. taxpayers expect.” Actually, I expect Bush to choose the course which results in high-quality reconstruction at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. I suspect that opening the bidding to more firms will lower the costs. I would prefer, thusly, not to exclude non-coalition firms. ...

Well, mt-blacklist lasted a good month or so. I’m now getting hit by a clever guy who figured out that by varying the capitalization of his URLs, he can get past the simple filters. Course, I can complicate the regexp some, but it’s still fragile. Second order solution is the distributed spam database, which works pretty well as these things go.

I can’t tell if this (original) is a sporting event or brutality. Five competitors are going to run 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, then cap it all off by running the London Marathon, whose organizers came up with the concept. That’s certainly a challenge, and I admire the spirit of those willing to take it up. The competitors are legitimate marathoners, so it’s not a circus sideshow per se. ...

[Written while flying home Sunday night.] Ah, Butt-Numb-A-Thon, thy name is really hard to explain to friends when they ask you where you’re going for the weekend. It’s all worth it, though. I think rather than do the strict chronological rendition, I’ll talk about the two insane surprises first. Yes, we saw Return of the King. It was absolutely unquestionably magnificent. It was head and shoulders above Fellowship. It’s not perfect; in my eyes, Peter Jackson didn’t quite resolve the Eowyn/Arwen/Aragorn triangle cleanly. But that is quite literally my only caveat. Everything else was perfect, perfect, perfect. At the time I write this, I still haven’t slept. I’m sure there are better words for this movie. I just don’t have them, right now. I counted seven ovations during the movie, and as it wound to a conclusion, all you could hear in the theater were people crying. Perfect. ...

I appear to have survived Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5. Barely. Sorry to anyone who was hoping for updates from the theater; the security was exceedingly tight and I wasn’t allowed to bring in my laptop. Or my cell phone, or my pager, for that matter. I got stuck in Houston due to the New England snow storm, but I’m alive and more or less well in Boston today. A lot of lengthy posts about what I saw and Austin and so on are coming up. In the meantime, here’s Nordling on BNAT and Harry on BNAT.

There are more reports that Bush has sanctioned assassinations. Except they’re not assassinations, because the targets are enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force. Well, OK, but I really don’t want to see any complaints about atrocities if Colin Powell or Bush gets assassinated by Al Qaeda. If it’s OK to target leaders on the other side of a war, and we’re in a war, then it’s gotta be OK for both sides. ...

Curt Schilling’s online presence really caught a lot of Boston sportswriters by surprise. Bill Simmons went from a guy who wrote about sports on his personal web site to an ESPN columnist (original) and Hollywood writer. That probably should have been a wakeup call; the Curt Schilling chats definitely are. When fans can go to fan-run sites and get news before it’s hit the talk shows and newspapers, that’s got to be at least a little disturbing. I tend to think that most smart writers will embrace the new possibilities (original), but some are going to react poorly. ...