I’m not entirely sure what I think about the trend of carrying guns to political events. On the one hand, I don’t object to open carry. It’s the old security versus freedom debate, and I try hard to come down on the side of freedom. I’m also pretty sure the Secret Service knows what it’s doing around Obama. I’m edgy because it is not the primary job of the Secret Service to protect, say, liberals. Or Congressmen, for that matter. Emotions are running high at the healthcare town halls, and I don’t trust everyone on either side of the issue to be stable. ...

Rose Madder? Nah, probably not. But spoilers, definitely. Mad Men is back. As the Anglophile in me decrees, everything’s better with Brits. The office politics are going to be sharper and, probably, meaner. And funnier, since we’ve now got a world of misapprehensions and bad cultural assumptions to play with. Since this is Mad Men, we even get that point thrust home with a Don Draper metatextual commentary. Not his only one this episode, either. Consider the implications of his London Fog tag line given that he’s just seen Sal with a half-dressed bellboy. “Limit your exposure.” He’s quick, that Don. Whereas Mad Men is pleasantly slow. It took three seasons for Sal to get even a taste of the sexual release most of the cast has already seen; but it worked. A slow build is good. Good for AMC, as well, for not shying away. ...

I am currently the proud owner of the Twitter accounts SarahPalinUSSR and SarahPalinEU, to offset SarahPalinUS, but I’m not quite sure what I should do with ’em. Any ideas? Although now that I look at it, she seems to have gone back to her old account (original). Darn it.

My 101 tasks blog is merged and assimilated. Burp. Some reworking of categories (mostly to turn the sub-subcategories of Gaming into tags) and I’ll feel done. I will be doing a fair bit of tagging later on but that can wait.

Imaginary Vestibule has been merged into Population One. Still to do: a couple of redirects and a bunch of category editing. Apologies if this does horrendous things to anyone’s RSS feeds. Edit: category mergers complete. Edit 2: Vestibule redirect complete. Step three is another blog merger, and then I have some CSS cleanup/modification to do, and then I think I’m done.

Step one completed.

If you aren’t watching it, you might want to catch up. The characterization has improved remarkably, and as of the end of the season the plot is equally enjoyable. We’ve taken a heavy turn into the SF. Also, Brad Anderson is producing and directing a bunch of episodes, and he is one creepy director. Spoilers follow in the form of transcribed newspaper headlines, cause we couldn’t resist freeze framing.

Lady Blackbird, Vanguard, and Lunar Notes. A few pages, perhaps pregenerated characters, rules on the character sheets. That’s interesting.

I’m not sure how I missed the Ken Hite-scribed setting coming from Atomic Overmind Press, in which the Nazis summoned Jormungandr (original), only to see it nuked by the United States (original), which led to disastrous physical and occult effects including monsters (original), not to mention Soviet giants (original) and a generally battered world (original). But I did. So there it is in case you did too.

My current secret MMO crush is Funcom’s The Secret World, which will be a modern dark fantasy conspiratorial MMO. I don’t expect much from it, which is why it’s a crush – the ideas are hot but as much as I want to like each and every Funcom MMO, there’s always been a bit of a gap between concept and execution. Hope springs eternal nonetheless. Now there is a trailer, which will probably not bear that much resemblance to game play. There is also a sort of informative interview. Starting locations will be London, New York, and Seoul. I so much want this game to be good.