Posts

I kept the cynical from my door for about, oh, 24 hours. Going to a warzone and cheering up the troops is a pretty good thing to do, even if the motives are impure. So, sure, I gave him points for that. But then I stopped and asked myself why he brought the press corps along. I gotta say. If I’m the President, and I’m worried about my security, and the purpose of my visit is to rally the troops — why do I need Fox News on that plane? Why am I taking the risk of letting reporters in on the story a few days early? I could just, you know, get on the plane and go and come back without bringing along a bunch of cameramen and reporters. If I gotta have pictures, I’m sure there are a couple of Army guys whose job it is to take pictures of things. ...

Tom Kratman responded to my recent discussion of his Posleen book over on my LiveJournal. Since that post is about a month old, I figured I’d be fair and provide a pointer to the discussion. If I’ve given people a negative impression of him, which I imagine I have, he deserves to have his defense seen.

I’m futzing around with ljcrosspost (original), a new plugin that automates crossposting between MT and LiveJournal. If it wipes out all my LJ posts, I will be very sad. … OK, it’s a nice plugin but it doesn’t really make it easy to customize the post title and it doesn’t provide easy access to the permalink — so I can’t easily create links back to the blog side of things. Maybe in a couple of revs. It’s a damned cool idea, though.

Shelby is the sort of indie pop I like a lot. I will want to buy their albums at some point; this is my reminder. (At this precise moment, you can listen to a stream of their music here.)

Many, many, many, many (original), many people have expressed their displeasure with the rules of Quidditch. “Bah,” I have always said to myself. “Games don’t always make sense. Games evolve. The other players are important if the golden snitch isn’t caught.” After having learned about Eton’s The Wall Game, which has been played at Eton for over three hundred years, I no longer feel any need to defend the existence of strange and nonsensical British schoolboy games. The Wall Game even has a method of scoring points which essentially ends the game in one fell swoop: scoring a goal is worth ten points, as opposed to the more common shys (worth one point), and games are generally scoreless ties anyhow. So if you score a goal, you’re going to win. ...

Australia and the US have agreed that Australian detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be tried by US military tribunals (original). There are a number of points in the agreement, including a promise that the US will not seek the death penalty for any Australians. Also, the media will be allowed to observe the tribunal and the accused may have a cleared attorney as an advisor to his defense team. The press release makes it really clear that these are case specific assurances which do not apply to Guantanamo Bay detainees in general. Pity.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the Crank Dot Net weblog is maintained using m4, make, and perl. What kind of a crank uses UNIX macro languages and makefiles to produce a weblog? But never mind that; it’s a very useful weblog if you’re searching for crankery.

Chris Corrigan’s Maps and Territories (original) is a translucently simple blog. Each entry contains a map, along with a bit of literature that relates to the map. Evocative and, for a map lover like me, irresistable.

So a long long time ago, Ginger noticed that I occasionally wrote gaming entries (original), and I noticed her blog back, and got into her Game WISH, and so on. A little while ago, I noticed Jim Henley looking for a group RPGblog (original). I like talking about gaming. So here’s The 20’ by 20’ Room. I hope people enjoy what we all have to say.

This week’s Game WISH (original) is about player-driven shifts: What’s the biggest PC-driven shift you’ve ever experienced in a campaign? If you were a player, what made you feel like you could successfully change the GM’s world? If you were a GM, was this planned or something the PCs surprised you with? Probably unsurprisingly, my example comes from a Feng Shui campaign. (Shifts in the world are built right into the background.) Brad was the GM; the PCs were Transformed Dragons who were not part of the Ascended. Ascended — think Illuminati, but with a ruling class made up of animals who had transformed into human form. Brad made it really clear from the beginning that he wanted to run a world-changing campaign, and we took him up on the offer by going back to the 1850s juncture and working to make demons part of society. The plan was to increase the ambient level of magic so that we could take our true draconic forms once again. ...