Well, crap. US Airways lost my reservation. No Dundracon for me. Damn it. I’m really pissed off but I don’t feel like ranting.

Well, I’m of three or four minds about this. OK, so Mike Meyers has struck a deal to do what he’s calling “film sampling.” I.e., he’s gonna insert himself or other actors into old movies. Remixes. See also Kung Pow. I want to see what Meyers does with this concept, cause I think he’s comedic gold, even after the last two Austin Powers flicks. But I hate the way the Variety story calls films “properties.” But I think that this sort of remixing will demonstrate the value of having more creative works in the public domain, since it’ll show what people can do given the right to edit. Except that Meyers isn’t gonna be working with public domain movies. And how the hell does this jibe with the whole ClearPlay issue? Are they really saying “It’s OK to screw with the director’s original vision as long as you own the rights to the movie.”? ...

Japan has threatened to launch a preemptive strike on North Korea. This is pretty much right on the edge of violating the World War II surrender terms. Possibly those are obsolete and should be reconsidered anyhow, but I’d like to see that done under less frantic circumstances. Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Northeast Asia right now. Edit: Thanks to my anonymous commentor for correcting my geography.

You know, I think next Valentine’s Day I’m going to Paris (original). That’s just cool.

Nothing funner than slamming in a Movable Type upgrade (original) first thing in the morning before I take off to sunny California. Looks immensely cool, though. Let me know if you see any problems. It’s worth installing, though, for a myriad of reasons readers won’t notice. Better text formatting HTML allowed in comments (hm, OK, that’ll be noticable) Creative Commons license support (gotta turn that on) The above was egregious, but also tested the text formatting. As usual, let me know if anything breaks. ...

I was looking for a way to permit random people to submit entries to Movable Type, and there’s not really any way to do it out of the box, so I wrote this CGI. It is not entirely polished; in particular, it ought to use a config file and of course the HTML is gonna need to be changed. It also ought to display a success page. However, I realized last night that I was going to wind up modifying it substantially to meet my specific needs and that it wouldn’t be so generally useful post-modification, so here you go. Note that unless you add NoPublishMeansDraft 1 to your mt.cfg file, submissions will be not be posted as drafts. More details on that here. Edit: Mmm. Yeah. Sorry about that; I stuck the CGI off in the extended entry bit.

Gotta remember to do Game WISH (original) next week, if I have time, which I might not, since I’ll be at Dundracon and other West Coast points all weekend and my weeks are innnnnnnnsane!

After getting Sorcerer (which I will talk more about at some point) and reading Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition (ditto), I got all fired up to write up a little discussion of using the former to run a game set in the environment of the latter. Then Rob MacDougall beat me to it, so I just posted my thoughts in the thread he started. Man, I’m getting some good gaming out here.

So the Onion went and asked a bunch of celebs who they could take in a fight. I gotta say, if you respond to that question with “I believe in non-violent solutions” or words to that effect, you’re kind of wimping out. This is the Onion. Have a sense of humor. Maintain your principled stance on non-violence by saying “Nobody, because I have a principled stance on non-violence and I’d just curl up into a little ball even if it was Nancy Reagan coming after me.” ...

In honor of Jon Carroll’s 2/11 column, and inspired by my friend R. Francis Smith, I present the Candidate X Store (original). Candidate X: he doesn’t like killing people. It is, in my mind, a perfectly chosen phrase. Everything there is priced at cost; I don’t make any money off ‘em. The slogan is thanks to R. Francis.