I don’t really read the RPGnet forums, cause they are big and bulky and populated by flamers. (Not unlike the blogosphere.) Fortunately, people occasionally point me at the good threads. Here’s one entitled Campaigns I Have Never Run (but want to), which is now up to 11 pages of weird little campaign ideas. I could just use this, and never have to come up with an original campaign idea for the rest of my life. That’s not saying much, mind you, given the rate at which I GM.
Population: One
The UN weapons inspectors found their first irregularity today; a bunch of equipment tagged by previous inspectors has gone missing.
This is important for a few reasons. First off, it’s evidence that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the efforts of previous inspection teams. This counters the claim that previous UN inspectors were useless or worse than useless. Second, it’s evidence that the current UN inspection teams are capable of noticing something wrong and that they aren’t tipping the Iraqis off before the inspections. These guys aren’t a rubber stamp for Saddam. Third, and probably most important, it’s evidence that Saddam is up to something. Having positive evidence one way or another — which we don’t yet, but it’s a step in that direction — beats the hell out of maybes. I’m still anti-war but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the situation to be crystal clear no matter which way the US goes.
I’m still waiting for the ideal pulp game. I’m sure Robin Laws or someone will write it eventually. In the meantime, here’s a cool d20 pulp page.
Once again by way of Instapundit, we bring you James Lileks on politics. This time he’s talking about the inevitable decline and fall of Europe. I don’t really have a lot of debunking to do here; I just wanted to point out the vast irony inherent in this sentence:
“Like a religion unhinged, it is desperately intense, gripped with eschatological certainties and devoted to an unswerving belief in a caricature that bears little resemblance to the actual nature of its enemy.”
The links are, of course, mine.
Ha, there’s the first sale. I’d been thinking for a while that the real importance of Warren Buffett’s investment in Level3 was that they’d have a war chest for buying other telecoms. Genuity just announced that Level3 was buying its assets. This isn’t any kind of a surprise, but keep betting on Level3 to come out of the telecom crunch in good shape.
I spent some time roleplaying with my nephew Sparky the last time he visited and again this weekend. He’s 12; it was an interesting experience.
I gave octaNe a try, on the principle that the mechanics wouldn’t be too complicated and it’d be good for him to get his feet wet with some storytelling techniques. However, I think I was wrong — he was pretty clearly looking for more structure while we were playing, although he certainly had fun. I’d been hoping that his experience with spy flicks (we were doing a James Bondian scenario) would be enough but it wasn’t really. Also, 12 year olds are not good at saying “Hm, I could do anything I want but I will restrict myself for the sake of the story.” Next time I’ll try D20 Modern or Feng Shui.
However, this weekend, he was running all over the house with sheets of paper with dungeons drawn on ‘em. When I sat down and played with him, it turned out he’d taken this little supersimple pen and paper wargame we play in my family and turned it into a dungeon crawl, with a single “PC” and a bunch of monsters and some very very basic move and attack rules. He was very keen on the idea that people should make up their own characters (“What does your guy look like?”) and he was meticulous about handing out treasure for various victories.
Kinda cool.
The NY Times ran a great article today about economic disparities between China and India. The gist of it: China and India’s economies were on a par 20 years ago, but China is pulling way ahead. The available resources are more or less similar.
The Times implies that it’s largely due to China’s unfettered capitalism experiments, which is no doubt a big part of it; on the other hand, blaming India’s copious local regulations without examining the consequences of China’s lack of regulation is a bit shaky. They do touch on the cheap labor available in China, but they don’t ask why American companies aren’t as eager to develop the Indian markets. Maybe they’re seen as already developed, not sure.
Happy Thanksgiving, by the by.
They build giant letters on mountaintops. Innocuous activity, but fraught with potential.
This disaster is why I wouldn’t ever work at a hospital. I get sufficiently stressed worrying about my company losing money. Losing lives — no. I respect hospital sysadmins immensely.
It’s not a very technical article, but still interesting. The point about the importance of the network in disaster recovery planning is essential. slashdot claims the problem was due to a spanning tree fault, although this more technical article seems to indicate a congestion problem. Hard to say.
So, about NGOs. Non-governmental organizations, if you’re not down with the acronyms.
I think the events of the last five years have made it patently clear that NGOs of whatever sort can have a huge effect on the world we live in. Example one is 9/11. Al Qaeda is not a government in any sense of the word, but they’ve touched everyone who lives in the United States and most of the rest of the world. Example two is Microsoft. The antitrust trials of the last few years have been simply fascinating from the point of view of a territorial government trying to deal with an economic powerhouse whose interests don’t coincide with the country in which it resides. Further, when Bill Gates gives a hundred million dollars to India to combat HIV — that’s power; that has results.
There are organizations out there who can affect the nations of the world to a greater degree than many nations. An unlikely hypothetical: what if Microsoft decided to embargo Pakistan? What if Windows 2005 contained code that would shut down the computer if it had an IP in Pakistani netblocks? Wouldn’t be a universal barrier to operation, but it would make Pakistan’s life hard. It’d be noticed.
There’s no context in traditional diplomacy for the power that arises from non-territorial ground. It’s assumed that powerful economic interests will share the interests of the country from which they originate. The great trading companies of the colonial age were trusted to the point where they’d function as arms of the government; we see this with the Netherlands, with England, and so forth.
The Sherman Act (and other anti-trust legislation) meant that the value of such a relationship to the corporate sector was diminished. Modern communication technologies and travel times mean that there’s less value to physical location than there once was. It’s unclear how much value there is to cooperation, at this point. Microsoft knows this. If the Japanese government ever becomes less cooperative with the large keiretsu, they’ll know it as well. The rise of shady Russian capitalist endeavours? Yeah, that’s another example of the same dynamic.
Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups are the flip side of the same coin. You couldn’t organize a large globe-spanning terrorist organization without modern technologies.
It seems to me to be foolhardy to treat influential non-aligned powers as if they were second-class citizens. Ignoring the ability of either economic titans or criminal organizations is risky at best. This doesn’t mean that I think we should treat with Osama bin Laden any more than I think that parleying with Pol Pot would be wise. I think characterizing the hunt for Al Qaeda as a war is in fact appropriate; it’s recognition that we’re dealing with an entity who in nature if not in scale is a peer.
We need to take that recognition and extend it to other such entities.
The difficulty here is that such recognition is fundamentally subversive in nature. An important component of most political theory is that governments have a fundamental right to govern. The lines of thought which lead to such a right do not generally leave room for Microsoft to become a peer of Uganda.
It’ll be interesting to see if practical necessity erodes the foundations of the rule of law over the next few decades. Cyberpunk, ho.