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Population: One

Swords and scenery

March 21, 2003
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Whoof, that was a whole lot of Malazan Empire. Yep, you betcha. I liked Deadhouse Gates a lot, and I am pleased to report that it continued to progress along lines quite different than Gardens of the Moon. The differences in setting and characters are most obvious, but around halfway through the former I realized that whereas Gardens is a novel about places, Deadhouse Gates is all about journeys. The centerpiece of Deadhouse Gates is the deeply harrowing march known as the Chain of Dogs, while Gardens revolves around the struggle for Darujhistan.

I can’t say I agree with Erikson when he talks about how his novels confound expectations about who’s good and who’s evil; I guess compared to the banality of Robert Jordan they’re pretty revolutionary, but Erikson’s far from ground-breaking. Indeed, at a certain point, the desire to subvert the reader’s expectations regarding such matters becomes fairly pedestrian itself. The Malazan Empire books aren’t there, but I do hope Erikson continues to focus on interesting plots and characterizations and doesn’t get too deep into making sure everyone has a dark and a light side, yatta yatta.

I’m going to take a break before the next book. One could overdose.

Parse your eyes!

March 21, 2003
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My little RSS project has foundered on the shoals of RSS parsing woes. If you have a raw apostrophe in your RSS feed, well-behaved RSS parsers will fail. Isn’t that fun? Amphetadesk works around this by just using XML::Simple directly, which I suppose I could do, but I’m kind of lazy. Mark Pilgrim wrote a nice ultra-liberal RSS parser but it’s in Python. Learning enough Python to make use of it would be easier than writing my own code using XML::Simple, I think. Maybe not. Not tonight, anyhow, either way.

Actually, what would be ideal is if everyone redid their tools to provide me with valid RSS… no? Well, OK.

Hm. (You can tell, perhaps, that I am talking out loud here. You may wish to cross to the other side of the street.) You know, somewhere in my parsing process something is unescaping the escaped apostrophes. Oh. OK, so upgrading to the current version of the XML::RSS module does help a lot. Perhaps I’ll write some HTML generating code to go around it. There’s hope yet.

Also: I am slowly experimenting with using Brad Chote’s Textile adaptation as a text filter. It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I’d need to hack MT a little so that links showed up in the proper format when using the bookmarklet. It’d be healthy for me. But not tonight.

Noble words

March 21, 2003
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Because I think it’s worth highlighting the extremes of human dignity, I link to the speech Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins delivered before battle. This type of man is one reason why I wish both our soldiers and British soldiers well.

“We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.” And:

“I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.”

News of the day

March 20, 2003
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Some things I’ve been reading lately:

Where is Raed is a blog belonging to a young guy living in Baghdad. “air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.”

Kevin Sites is a CNN reporter who’s blogging from Northern Iraq; the blog is not affiliated with CNN.

Christopher Allbritton is on his way to Iraq. Throw him ten bucks if you’ve got it; his series for NPR on his travels in Northern Iraq was very interesting and he needs the cash to get back there. Yay independent journalism.

International CLEARCHANNEL

March 19, 2003
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The Chicago Tribune reports that many of the recent pro-war rallies were sponsored by Clear Channel. Clear Channel is currently lobbying against proposed regulatory changes that would limit its ability to expand. This doesn’t diminish or negate the sentiments expressed by those attending, but it sure raises some interesting questions about Clear Channel.

Open and shut case

March 19, 2003
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Danger has released a developer SDK for the Sidekick, with some interesting restrictions. Namely, user-developed applications can’t be transmitted to the Sidekick over the air unless they’ve been approved by both Danger and (at present) T-Mobile. Let the recrimination phase begin!

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that part of the Palm’s success was the open SDK and the resulting flood of applications. I want to play IF on my Sidekick… oh. OK, then. (I swear I did not find that link before I chose my sample desired application.) Still, you get the point.

On the other hand, saying that closed-development machines won’t make it in the consumer market is just silly.

The open question, I think, is whether the Sidekick is more like a TiVo or a Palm. The average consumer doesn’t care whether or not he can write applications for his cell phone, or even if there are a lot of third party apps. If the Sidekick primarily appeals to the average cell phone user, the ease of use of the SDK won’t matter. If it’s a high end tech toy, it will be an issue. And let’s remember that despite the avid adoption by the geek market, the Sidekick is intended as a hip teenager-oriented tool.

In other Sidekick news, Danger and T-Mobile released the new software release last week. I can now auto-lock my phone without worrying about not getting phone calls. In an unexpected side benefit, my battery life has been extended by around 50%, which means I can forget to plug it in at night and still have a cell phone in the morning. I don’t know if this is because the keyguard saves a lot of battery life or what, but it’s nice.

Historical perspective

March 19, 2003
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Weird little Cheney interview. He says, referring to terrorism, “[T]he United States and the president have been forced to come to grips with issues that our allies to date have not yet had to come to grips with…”

And I really don’t understand that. Has he somehow missed the Red Army, or more recently the Chechnya terrorists who took over a theater in Russia? Shining Path ring a bell? Or, hey, how about the IRA and the Basque separatists? It seems very clear to me that many European nations on both sides of the debate have seen more than enough terrorist activity to get a very clear idea of the issues.

WISHful thinking

March 19, 2003
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The WISH of the week:

Do you (or your GM) ‘play favourites?’ Do you feel you have to justify your answer? Do you have a horror story to share?

I agree with Greg Morrow’s comments (follow the link above), with some additions. Favoritism shows up most often as spotlight time, a concept I find tremendously useful when thinking about balance. It doesn’t matter if Bob the Paladin can deal out more damage than Ernie the Weedy Cleric if Ernie does all the negotiations and it’s a socially oriented campaign.

Favoritism is rarely, in my experience, a case of the GM giving one player lots of cool things. It’s usually a case of feeding one player spotlight to the detriment of others — and the GM can always do that. It’s easier to do that without feeling unfair, too, since you’re just directing the story in an interesting direction.

Now, there is another form of favoritism that’s even subtler and in some ways more insidious — campaign discussion. What happens when a GM spends a lot of time talking about a campaign with one of the players, but not others? The same kind of spotlight problem, but the other players can’t see it. The effects are still there, though.

(And nah, nobody I’ve played with a lot over the last five years has had either of these faults in anything more than the most minor ways. I share Greg’s worry that I hog spotlight, though.)