I’m very sad to hear that Hogshead Publishing is going out of business (original). It’s not that they’re bankrupt or any such; apparently it’s just not fun any more, and I can certainly understand that. Still a shame. Hogshead and its founder James Wallis have provided high quality gaming for the last decade. They started out as the holders of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG license. WFRPG has been an important alternative to D&D in the fantasy RPG genre in both mechanics and style. I believe the prestige class system in D&D 3E owes a lot to Warhammer’s career system, and the Warhammer world beats 7th Sea all hollow as far as alternate Europes go. ...

Sound Bites was a very good breakfast, but the memory is somewhat tainted by the tainted pizza I had for dinner. I liked their mashed potatoes, and I liked the corned beef hash very much, but I will probably not go for the poached eggs again just in case they were at fault. I have a mini-essay about the necessity to rethink the way governments interact with relevant non-governmental organizations, which I will write when I am feeling somewhat better.

n o w h e r e g i r l is a pretty tasty online comic. The protagonist is perhaps a little whiny, but the art is just lovely.

The author of the infamous “ The Eye of Argon” has been found. Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smoldering soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones. ...

Nortec Collective looks just amazingly cool. Traditional Mexican music, some of which is itself an appropriation of German polka styling, filtered through electronica sensibilities? With wrestling? Check ‘em out on your favorite music-swapping network today, cause they love that. There’s also a record label. Neat.

It really pleases me to see the WWE TV writers working on the WWE’s press releases. That’s just a hugely impressive document. It starts out pretty sane, discussing some WWF strongarm tactics, but around about the third paragraph it takes a sharp left into a very odd place. “The demand was contained in a letter sent by a Mr. Michael Rogers, an English Barrister who has resided in Switzerland for 30 years and who holds no Swiss license to practice law. Rogers is held out to be the Fund’s ‘Legal Advisor.’” ...

I picked up the Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys DVD last week, and watched it over the weekend. I’d managed to miss it in the theaters, since although Jodie Foster is a strong selling point for me, Todd McFarlane is not. However, after watching Igby Goes Down I was pretty pleased at the thought of watching Kieran Culkin again. Not a bad little movie. Not great — it probably overreaches at the end, in terms of plot — but pretty good. The core of the movie is the nature of teenage desire and ennui, and if you forgive the twist at the end you won’t have much to complain about. I think the actors did a great job of nailing the complexity of first love, teenage sexuality, and the sheer boredom that leads one to be a complete idiot. ...

The International Children’s Digital Library is a pretty cheering concept. I bet it gets more traffic from adults than children, though. Um, by which I mean adults who want to read the books themselves. Current computer screens are not the best technology for reading books to kids.

Jeremy Bowers writes on the hidden dangers (original) of Bayesian spam filters. Core of the argument: spammers can use any possible filter mechanism to fine tune their spam, and since the Bayesian filter is the best we have, once it fails we’re doomed. However, if you’re trying to sell me something, you have to either a) market it in the body of the message, or b) give me a URL to look at. Here’s the simple algorithm for filtering spam with URLs in it: if the sender is in my address book, let it through. Otherwise, mark it as possible spam. Jeremy neglects to consider the possibility of personalized filters which by their nature can’t be duplicated by spammers, since they rely on information that only I have. ...

Bring me the brains of Baader-Meinhof (original). They’ve gotta just be misplaced; what would someone do with them? But man, it prompts weird imaginings.