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. ...

You don’t get to know who we arrested. The Justice Department might be correct; revealing the names of those detained post-9/11 could be helpful to Al-Qaeda. Assuming, that is, that Al-Qaeda is incapable of figuring out whether or not cell members were arrested on its own. Which is actually less snarky an assumption than it appears; the answer depends on the nature of the cell structure. On the other hand, with a properly defined cell structure, Al-Qaeda leadership wouldn’t necessarily know that a given detainee was an Al-Qaeda member either. ...

Advantage, moi. Well, more or less. Saith the Boston Dirt Dogs, with no cited source so it’s just a rumor: The real story behind the story: Manny asked the Red Sox put him on irrevocable waivers and insisted to Theo that the Yankees would claim up… so they called his bluff. Yes, that is only sort of close to my theory, but either way you’ve got the key element in place: the waiver was agreed upon by both the Sox and Manny beforehand. OK, what else we got? ...

Best eBay auction description ever (original). Read it quick before it ages out. In my heart of hearts I figure this is a clever scam, since the seller does a big trade in vintage items, but it’s still very funny.

So, the Red Sox put Ramirez on waivers (original). That’s whatcha call daring and surprising. My first reaction was that it was mildly insane; if the Yankees don’t take Ramirez (and they’re the only team that can), the guy’s going to be unhappy in the Red Sox clubhouse for the rest of his contract. But then I had my morning coffee and thought about it a little more. What if this didn’t come as a surprise to Manny? What if Theo Epstein sat down with Manny a week ago and asked him if he was serious about wanting to play for the Yankees? What if Manny sees this as the Red Sox offering him a chance to go where he wants to go? ...

For Mashup number fifteen, we’ll return to the classics of science fiction. Our subject today is the Foundation Trilogy, Asimov’s soft-SF series of psychohistory, galactic empire, and barbarianism. I’m more interested in the original three books than the multitude of sequels, but suit yourself for your mashups. The core concept of the trilogy is Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, with which Seldon predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire and manipulated events so as to minimize the time before another Empire would rise. Add in the backstop that was the Second Foundation — and don’t forget the psionics — and you have a lot of material to work with. Oh, and this is your sporadic reminder that there’s a game meme announcement mailing list. The only traffic on the list is announcements of new game meme posts; right now it’s just me and Ginger’s WISH. Now, on to my Mashup.

Hal Clement has passed away. Another of the greats… may he rest in peace. Tributes here (original).

Blogroll loading has been a touch slow for me lately, either since Blogrolling.com got a little slower or for some other reason. Thus, I put together a quick and dirty caching system which should speed matters up. If you see “(Cached.)” under one of the blogrolls, now you know why. See the extended entry for the code used; no support or warranty is available. You’ll want to know a little PHP to use it.

Bubba Ho-tep ought to have been great. I mean, hey: Elvis, JFK, Texas, and a mummy. What’s not to like? I think the problem was that the setup creates a certain gonzo expectation, and the movie doesn’t want to be gonzo. The movie wants to be a tragi-comic exploration of old age in a nursing home, with a dark sarcastic twist in the form of the mummy. It works pretty well on that level, but it sabotages itself because, hey — it’s Elvis! Funny! ...

I was gonna do a long review of Gamma World, but, well, here. I liked the design of the book much more than that guy, but his comments on the mechanics are right on target. The community rules are both really inspiring and kind of disappointing. The idea of using PC stats to represent a group of people is great; I can’t remember where I first saw it (might have been Vampire, actually) but this is a really good implementation of it. Except that several of the stats have no game effect, and there’s no meat behind most of the ratings — no explication of what they mean. ...