Speaking of indie RPGs, there are eight interesting games here. They were all written in 24 hours flat. Some of ‘em work, some of ‘em don’t, I think they’re all interesting experiments. We really need to schedule a regular indie gaming night, maybe monthly.
Population: One
The first public draft of Into The Sunset (120K PDF) is now available. What’s that, you ask? It’s my little ten page roleplaying game of romantic comedies. Take a look if you like that sort of thing, and comment if the spirit moves you.
It’s cool to link to it, but please don’t stick it up anywhere else. Right now it’s under copyright; when I decide what I want to do with it I’ll most likely release it under a Creative Commons license. At that point it may well turn into an HTML document as well.
The Hugo nominations are out. Pretty classy field this year. I’d have to choose The Scar for best novel, but it’s a close call over Bones of the Earth, and I kind of think the latter will win. Michael Swanwick has three other nominations — could be a very good year for him.
Oddly, the Sci Fi Wire list is different. They have “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (by Ted Chiang) in the Best Novelette category instead of “Madonna of the Maquiladora”, by Gregory Frost. Normally I’d believe Locus, but Ted Chiang not getting nominated seems so unlikely.
I didn’t think much about the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt” (Quicktime video) when I heard about it. I figured it’d be a kind of novelty thing, like most of the aging star covering once-edgy alternative music songs are.
OK, I was wrong. It’s amazing. Go watch the video. Wow.
US comes out against ridding the Middle East of WMDs. Film at 11.
Yeah, I’m simplifying. But not much. Syria introduced a Security Council resolution that would require all Middle Eastern countries to rid themselves of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The US said “No, no, the time isn’t right.” That means, of course, “We don’t want to make Israel give up their nuclear weapons.”
I have to grudgingly admire the acumen of Syria. Not only did they make the US object to a positive resolution, they nudged us into admitting that the Security Council matters after all. Odd; I could have sworn Bush said that the Security Council would be irrelevant if it didn’t vote to allow us to invade Iraq. Why do we care what resolutions Syria introduces?
Answer: because even if we don’t care, most of the rest of the world — including the UK, Spain, Italy, and Australia — does. And we are not capable of defeating the rest of the world singlehandedly. From a military perspective? Quite possibly. From a financial perspective? Not a chance in hell.
Heh. I was speculating earlier today that the Iraqi National Museum looting might have been pro art thieves. Through sheer luck, it looks like I was right.
Someone should tell those Marines to redo their sign in Arabic, but I’m glad they’re awake now. The FBI is on the job, too. Right reactions, even if we got the initial actions wrong.
What I’m thinking is this: a vast, ancient elven empire, called simply the Empire, that dominates the western half of the continent. The elves are neutral, shading towards a kind of practical lawful evil, but only a little way. Just a dark grey. The only exception to the elven domination in this part of the continent is a northwestern peninsula, which is populated by a resolute kingdom of mountain dwarves. Underneath the peninsula, there’s a kingdom of drow which survives with assistance from the Empire. The drow kingdom is a cult of personality, worshipping the Living Presence of their goddess. The Living Presence tells lies about his kingdom’s power, and his people believe him. The mountain dwarves would like to reclaim the tunnels and caverns, and they could probably manage the drow on their own, but the Empire? No way.
Off the coast, there’s a small string of islands, very advanced culturally, populated by a race of island dwarves. I’d have to write up the subrace, but think of otters. They are not particularly friendly with their mountain cousins and they really don’t like the Empire.
There’s also a single island which was settled a long time ago by a subrace of wood elves who rejected the militaristic ways of the mainlanders. This is a subject of much friction. Fortunately, this island (and the two dwarven kingdoms) have a mutual defense treaty with the humans who live across the sea. It’s believed that the humans have mastered enough sorcery to do huge amounts of damage to the Empire in a conflict; nobody wants to find out what the cost of such a conflict would really be.
The most important city of the campaign is a settlement on the coast of the Empire, which was deeded to the humans a hundred years ago. It’s a key city, because it’s the best place for humans, dwarves, and elves to mix freely. The drow don’t go there. Everyone else does. It’s corrupt, vital, and very much alive. There’s another human settlement a little bit south, administered by a different human nation: it tends distinctly towards the evil. I suspect the humans there are necromantic.
(The correspondences are not intended to be exact.)
A lot of people are saying that Michael Jordan had the best year ever for a 40 year old NBA player, and I guess I gotta agree with that. Look at these numbers: .483 from the field, .363 from three point range, .826 from the stripe, 7.7 assists and 1.7 steals per game in a mere 27.7 minutes…
Oh, sorry. That’s John Stockton at 40. OK, OK.
Shooting .462 from the field, with 7.8 rebounds per game, 4.7 assists, and 20.6 points per game, it’s… damn it. Karl Malone.
Jordan, bless his indecisive little heart, shot .445 from the field, .291 from three point range, .821 from the stripe, had 6.1 rebounds per game, 3.8 assists per game, and 1.5 steals per game. An even 20 points per game, too.
If I’m choosing up teams, I think Malone has it by a whisker or two. He won’t hit as many three pointers for you, but the rest of his game is clearly better. Malone doesn’t actually turn 40 until July 24th, but there’s no reason to think he couldn’t turn in about the same numbers next year; the guy keeps in shape.
The Stockton/Jordan choice is more difficult, because they fulfill such different roles. Still, Stockton is a better shooter despite playing the position that doesn’t demand good shooting, and 7.7 assists per game! At his age! In fairly limited minutes! Insane skills. I think in general you want to fill the PG slot before the SG slot, too, so I pick Stockton over Jordan. And Stockton is a legitimate 40, so there you go.
I might as well make some bad predictions about the NBA playoffs, right?
First Round
Spurs over the Suns, because rookies can only lift you so far.
Kings over the Jazz, because… well, it should be obvious. The Kings are hungry.
Mavs over the Trailblazers, cause the Trailblazers just can’t handle the playoffs.
Lakers over the Timberwolves, because the Lakers have enough talent to get past the first round.
Pistons over the Magic, despite Ben Wallace being out. The Magic are nowhere this year.
Nets over the Bucks, cause the Nets have a lot of talent which will carry them through this year until Jason Kidd leaves.
Pacers over the Celtics, which I really hate to say. It should be an interesting series, and the Celtics could win it if they got on a streak, but they won’t.
Hornets over the Sixers, which is a bit of a gamble but without Coleman at his best the Sixers are in trouble.
Second Round
Lakers over Spurs, because Shaq is in Duncan’s head. I could easily be wrong here but that’s my guess.
Kings over the Mavs, because in the end you gotta play defense.
Pistons over Hornets, because defense wins championships.
Pacers over Nets, because they’ve been on that interesting roll all season and Isaiah found himself a good system.
Semis
Kings over the Lakers, because it’s the year. The Kings are solid all the way through and the Lakers are severely flawed.
Pacers over Pistons, because lack of offense does not win championships. You can’t play 4 on 5 on the offensive end, and the Pistons have such a broad offensive scheme that Wallace simply won’t make as much of a difference as he does when he can focus on a few players.
Finals
Kings over Pacers. West versus the East. You know how it goes.
This guy popped up in my referer logs the other day, and it turns out that he actually links back to an old post of mine. I’ve changed my opinion a bit since then, after I realized that it’s fairly trivial to write a script that validates referers. All need to you do is grab the page listed as a referer and check to see if it really contains a link back to your site. It’s only a first level technique — there are ways around it — but it would certainly catch what Joel is doing.
Thus, while Joel says there’s nothing that can be done about his technique… he’s wrong. Admittedly, I haven’t integrated my script with my general purpose log analysis scripts but in the cases where I have noticed referer spam I just update my config file and tell the scripts to ignore those referers.
I stuck my script in after the cut. It runs over an active log file, tosses out referers it’s seen before, validates new referers as per the technique above, and emails me a note when it sees a valid new referer. It will not work out of the box on your server, but it should be kind of clear what needs to be updated if you’re a perl coder. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.