I was hoping to come up with something controversial for today's entry. I considered talking about Ann Coulter's new book Treason and her defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but to really do the subject justice I need a little more time. Of course discussing a controversial period in our nation's history may not be the best subject for what is ostensibly a role-playing blog.
I was over at ENWorld and Morrus mentioned that the Ennies nominations are going to be announced tommorrow. I guess there might be something contorversial there but nothing has occured to me. Check back tommorrow after they're announced and maybe I'll have something nasty to say then. Hopefully I won't. One problem with role-playing controversy is that once you put pen to paper they do seem pretty silly.
Actually the Ennies have had their share of controversy, the biggest dispute was whether Wizards of the Coast should be allowed to enter their products. The space I have remaining is much to short for a complete discussion of all the subtleties of the Open Gaming License and the D20 System, but suffice it to say that not only does WotC have a much bigger budget, but they don't even play by the same rules as the rest of us. Although as many people have pointed out it sure would be sweet to beat them despite these advantages.
This is one of those days when I sit down in front of the blank computer screen and nothing jumps out at me; nothing screams "Write about me!" I have been spending more time on the ENWorld Messageboards lately. It's a pretty friendly bunch over there. A couple of the Admins where having trouble getting to GenCon and the messageboard members took up a collection and surprised them by paying for their trip.
I myself contributed mostly because I think I really flubbed my first impression at last years GenCon and I wanted a chance to give it another shot. It shouldn't surprise anyone that I ended up making a bad first impression. That sort of thing has traditionally been one of my weak points. I'm not sure what it is I think I try to hard and end up coming across as a very ernest, very annoying, somewhat creepy geek.
In any event I think I may have managed to make it to the third paragraph without saying anything at all, so I'll toss in a quick quote and voila another uninspiring entry:
Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.
H. Ross Perot
I was driving home this evening listening to October Project when I realized that I hadn't written my blog yet today. It was a pretty hectic day. I found out that to get carpet in my GenCon booth (with padding) will run me around $250. I need to confirm that, but it seems like carpet is the sort of thing that would be included, shows what I know. That was the biggest shock of the day but there was lots of other stuff going on as well, but overall having a crappy day does not an enjoyable blog make.
So back to the music. I discovered when I looked up the October Project website that the band has reformed and released a new six song album. I think I'm going to have to pick it up. Included among the other somewhat obscure bands I enjoy is Dead can Dance. Quite a unique sound, though in addition to the normal level of melancholy there is an additional layer. A Dead can Dance concert was the last time I saw one of my friends alive. He was only 30 when he died.
Another obscure band who I quite enjoy is the Police. Now I know that most of you out there are saying that the Police are not obscure, but my brother, who's 11 years younger than me didn't know who the were. I don't know what they're teaching these kids in school. Of course he knew who Sting was, but how could anyone converse intelligently about him without knowing about the police. It's like talking about Peter Gabriel without mentioning Genesis or Vince Clark without mentioning Yaz or Depeche Mode. Quite frankly it's criminal.
I added a couple of more maps to the most recent adventure. They're also done by Ed Bournelle of SkeletonKey Games. I can't say enough good things about Ed's maps, if you're not a full subscriber you haven't seen any of them and there's a reason for that. Some things are so cool there is just no way you can justify giving them away for free. You'll notice that View from the Bushes is completely free. I think that says it all right there.
I decided to take a well deserved break and went and saw "Finding Nemo". This is the first time we've gone to a movie with all four of our kids. I was all prepared to spend the bulk of the movie in the hall with the youngest, but she basically slept the entire time. She's pretty mellow for a three month old. I think she gets it from her three older siblings. If she let stuff upset her then she'd never get any sleep.
I've been told that my reviews are insipid, which surprised me I always thought of them as pedantic, humorless, vapid and inarticulate, so I won't be giving you my impression of the movie, but I can tell you that it was really nice to spend some time with the kids. My four-year old spent most of the movie in my lap because it was a little bit tense (read "scary") on occasion. Though I think it may have mostly been a ruse designed to get me to feed him candy the entire time.
Well it's that time again, we're once again releasing an adventure. This time it's by Brannon Hollingsworth and Jesse Mohn, two well-known figures in the D20 community. In fact Brannon just took a job as the Art Director at Bastion Press. My understanding is that during the hiring process he said that he wrote the book on art. It was only recently brought to my attention that he was talking about this adventure, "The Love of Art: Drawn to Gehenna".
I don't know if this adventure can be considered the definitive work on art, but is an adventure which examines the question of whether a piece of art can be so bad that it actually becomes evil. A question which has been thus far largely ignored by the D20 freelancing community in their quest to write the definitive Joycean adventure. (I understand that the Rappan Athuk series comes pretty close but in the end fails by actually being enjoyable to read.)
To get to the numbers. "Drawn to Gehenna" was originally designed for 4 8th characters, but is scalable for 1-12 characters of 6th-12th level. It is also our longest adventure, thus far, weighing in well over 30 pages. I think it is also the most fully realized location to be presented in any of our adventures and what a location it is. I'd like to give you a snapshot, but it's impossible to do it justice in a single sentence. In other words you're just going to have to subscribe.
Sometime tomorrow we'll be publishing our latest and longest adventure, The Love of Art: Drawn to Gehenna written in by my good buddies, Brannon "Ashy" Hollingsworth and Jesse "Cleavthorn" Mohn over at Enkwell Press. The adventure is in fact co-branded by Enkwell and has the distinction of being their very first product. We're very pleased to be able to give them a good start in a business which will likely destroy their sanity, health, and relationships while leaving them with nothing more than a gaping void where their heart used to be and a garage full of D20 books.
I'll save a more complete teaser of the adventure until tomorrow, for now I just wanted to start stoking the fires a little bit. On a completely seperate topic I mentioned in a previous entry that I was lusting after the new mini coopers. Well I decided to get on the web and see who much a used mini was going for. I expected it to be close to the price of a brand new one since this is only their second model year and the demand is still pretty hot. What I did not expect was for them to be thousands of dollars more than a new one.
It's almost one of the ten commandments that cars depreciate, comic books appreciate, and because of this it's more financially sound to buy the latter rather than the former. But that nevertheless despite this excellent proof of maturity. Girls will without fail choose the guy with the nice car over the guy with the nice comic book collection everytime. Which is itself a reasonable summary of my high school experience. A reasonable summary of junior high can not be included because it is way too profane.
Well, I finished the fifth Harry Potter book. It was a very nice diversion. Lately I've been getting mired in all of the stuff I have to worry about with DireKobold, to the point where I was in a pretty foul mood. And I guess the best thing I can say about the book was that it was immersive enough to make me completely forget about all that crap. So as to the central question of any review, would I recommend it? Yes. Is it flawless? No. Would it have benefited from more Jackie-Chan-like King Fu scenes? What book wouldn't? (Certainly The Awakening could have really used some.)
More good points: The Weasley Twins really come into their own in this one. Harry has matured in a believable fashion. Hagrid is still as loveably clueless about dangerous animals as ever. The Dursleys come across in a bit more well-rounded fashion than they have in the previous four books. The way she introduced beaurocracy as the major villain in the story was both very believable and very unconventional especially for a fantasy novel. The story in general flowed very well and always had something just around the corner to look forward to.
The bad points: It's difficult to discuss the bad points without spoiling the book, but since my wife will leave me if I do I'll give it my best shot. Certain elements of the plot rely on characters acting in unbelievable ways. Keeping secret things that they have no reason to or forgetting things that would never be forgotten or acting a manner which ill-befits the situation. Also it's too long and many of the things I mentioned above actually might have fixed themselves if the book were just shortened.
I think I said earlier that I didn't think I would have time to read the new Harry Potter book, but after putting in a solid day of work I decided that I needed a break and my wife had already picked it up from our local discount store (Costco a steal at only $16!) So I sat down and started reading. As of this writing I'm around page 200. For some books that might be a lot, but since this book is 870 pages Harry has just barely made it back to Hogwarts.
The problem with really famous authors is that they become increasingly difficult to edit. I have that problem with some of my authors. I'll say something like I really think that this whole tangent in the adventure about the purple dinosaur who's really nice is too cheesy. And they'll say, "BUT I LIKE BARNEY!" I got a years subscription for anyone who can name the author (primarily because I made it up as a hyperbolic example to make a humorous point....and now I've killed it).
At this rate I should be done with the book by the time I post my next blog so if anyone is interested I'll post a capsule review. I'll probably do that regardless of the interest level, daily content can be hard to come by. So far as most reviewer have mentioned it's a darker book. Harry is definitely not the boy he was before he saw a fellow student murdered before his eyes, his parents come spectres rise from the grave and the most evil wizard ever brought back from the dead. Somehow that changed him, I'm not sure why.
I'm still getting used to the new software. Like all new things in some respects it's actually more difficult. Anyway on the announcement front my good buddy Wil Upchurch is the guest on Mortality Radio tonight. So head on over once they get the show posted and listen to it. He promised to mention my "god-like grace and beauty", and prevarication on that scale doesn't come along very often unless you work in politics, or marketing, or sales, or well just about anything where you interact with other people. I actually didn't get a chance to drop by I had a wedding to go to, and there was a line.
Allow me to explain the concept of a line, you may think I'm talking about some sort of queue, but in Utah we have a peculiar institution (and no I'm not talking about polygamy though we have a little of that too) at most wedding receptions there is dancing and mingling. In Utah there is no dancing or mingling, the entire wedding party lines up on one side of the hall and then the guests move past in an orderly procession. There is a certain sterile efficiency you have to admire, but overall it's kind of unromantic for something associated with a wedding.
My friend brought a girl from South Africa and I was trying to explain the mysteries of the line to her. When its sinister purpose finally dawned on her she was shocked. She was sure that the only reason for the entire wedding party to be lined up against one wall was so that someone could take a picture of them. I have no idea where this tradition came from perhaps it was so that in the early days of the state when someone took a third or fourth wife the previous wife's wouldn't feel left out.
If you could see me you would notice that my head is lowered in shame. Not only did I not write anything yesterday, but I'm egregiously late posting something today. It's the software's fault (yes I'm aware that computers haven't achieved sentience--yet) but I nevertheless blame the software. Also I hoped to have more time to spend with it, but the cosmos conspired against me. I'm not sure which is less responsible blaming the cosmos or blaming 0's and 1's but this has to be a low point in my history of accepting personal resposibility.
Overall the last few days have been pretty stressful. We're completely redesigning at my day job plus there's a normally occuring quarterly deadline which has doubled up on the same day (June 30th). GenCon is coming faster than I would like. The convention equipment supplier wants $700 to rent an LCD projector for the duration of the Con. The whole world is going to be in town over the next week or so. I so excited about the Tour de France that I can't sleep and because of the cost over-runs at GenCon I'm going to end up being the "Booth Babe". I figure the only way to make that a comfortable experience is to start wearing the chainmail bikini early, so I've been jogging in it.
Lest anyone worry about me (Hi Mom!) I thought I'd wrap things up with a dark and disturbing quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Just the sort of dark depressing Danish philosophy that has shamefully never been recorded as a perky dance hit, over a heavy bass-line.
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I love to go hiking, or even better backpacking, but unfortunately I haven't been able to go backpacking for several years and hiking is a pretty infrequent occurance as well. There are times when you'll be backpacking and you'll hit some hill, and before you know it that 50 lb. pack is really starts to cut into your shoulders. But as you look ahead you can see the summit. It's so close. But when you get there it turns out it was a false summit. There is yet another "apparent" summit still farther on. That's what it's like to have to publish something every ten days.
You get up to the summit. You get the adventure out the door, and you think "Ahhh, time for some well deserved rest. Maybe I'll sit down and read the new Harry Potter book this weekend. Wait a second the next adventure is due a week from Wednesday, which means I'm not going to get a weekend, so much for Potter..." In other words all of the summits are false and the hike never ends, and then hallucination sets in (which my wife believes is very evident in a few recent VFB entries.
Actually overall it's going pretty well. Like I said I enjoy backpacking, even if it's only methaphorical. In other news it looks like I finally about ready to switch VFB over to some actual blogging software (Moveable Type for those that are curious). I would expect that the switch will happen sometime tonight or tommorrow. Besides providing a nicer layout it will also give you the ability to express your displeasure, I can hardly wait.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Later today we'll be releasing "Let Sleeping Dragons Lie" the newest adventure from Wil Upchurch. Without giving too much away let's just say that it's one part "Die Hard", two parts "Se7en" and four parts "Sleepless in Seattle". I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried at the end. It's set in Mystic Eye's legendary city of Bluffside, and was originally designed for four 8th level characters though of course it can be dynamically scaled for 1-12 characters of 5th-11th level.
For those of you who haven't taken the plunge and signed up for the best D20 value since pimply faced 14 year olds started scanning their books and uploading them to Kazaa, here is what has happened thus far in the Adventure Path Series: Somewhere in Kansas a girl longs for a better world, a world over the rainbow, a tornado comes... Okay, wait that's the adventure I'm publishing after this one. In the Chronicles of Anyaka there is a girl, named amazingly enough, Anyaka. And next on Jerry Springer she confronts the transvestite nazi who abandonened her to join the circus.
Okay that's a lie it's actually the heartwarming tale of a young girl passing through puberty and searching for understanding at a segregated junior high in revolutionary France just before Napoleon's ascendancy, but after the death of Robespierre. No? Okay maybe it's the Illiad with Anyaka in the role of Helen, squirrels in the role of the Greeks, and chipmunks as the Trojans? Okay it's obviously none of these things, but now aren't you really curious to see what it IS about or at least where the latest installment takes it?
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
On Monday we'll be releasing another adventure. The next installment in Wil's incredible Adventure Path. I haven't read it yet, but I assume that it's good. Hah! See that, right there I made a little joke. The joke is that it would be nearly impossible (especially if you knew what went into "wiring" an adventure) to publish an adventure on Monday that I hadn't read on Saturday, and ludicrous to boot (thus the humor). Okay at this point no one found this funny except my mother, who I understand doesn't even read VFB.
When I lived in the Netherlands I had to cook from myself, it was horrible. My hair thinned from vitamin deficiency. I grew fat from Belgian friets, cheap sates and heavy gravys, and I finally had to start shaving (I was 20) as the hormone laden Dutch meat turned my whispy blond facial hair into whispy off-blond facial hair. (Have you ever seen that episode of "Cheers" where Cliff tries to grow a beard?) Eventually I stumbled upon a meal while somewhat laborious to prepare, probably kept me alive in that war-torn country. Like all truly great meals it started with bacon.
You began by taking some finely chopped bacon and setting it in a frying pan so that it could start to simmer. At about the same time you put some potatoes which had been chopped into cubes on the stove to boil. Finely chopped onions and then mushrooms are added to the bacon. This is left to sate/simmer and then when the potatoes are done drain and dump in with everything else. Then add cheese and serve, and this is important, without any attempt drain the bacon grease at any point. In the Netherlands I used European potatoes (they're yellow not white) and Gouda cheese. This week I purchased both, I'm all ready baby you know what I'm having for breakfast tommorrow.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
As I mentioned previously in this space (normally I would put a self-deprecating comment about my lack of readership here, but damnit if people aren't reading "View from the Bushes then they should because I'm comic genius. We now return to your normally scheduled column.) I consider the flush toilet, invented sometime in the 1590's by Sir John Harington (not as is often supposed by Thomas Crapper though anyone saying Alexander Cummings would still get full credit,) one of the greatest inventions of all time.
However that is not to say that things cannot go wrong. I should warn readers right now that the following story is neither particularly gross nor overtly scatological for that I refer the reader to the latest Microsoft Security Update. There is one non-handicap toilet on the floor where I work, and it has a problem. By all appearances it is completely normal, but when flushed some design defect causes the water, instead of entering at an angle, to shoot straight down the center where it hits the curved back and arc up in a fountain of perfume (eau de toilette). Needless to say I'm a fast learner, after the 15th time I learned to use the facilities downstairs.
I tried to think of an elegant segue into this last topic, but it's more difficult than you might think to get from toilets to one of the greatest actors of all time. Gregory Peck, far and away my wife's favorite leading man, passed away quietly in his sleep at the age of 87. Just a little over a week ago AFI named his role of Atticus Finch as the greatest film hero of all time. I can think of no finer tribute.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
There's a "programmer" here at work who I went out to lunch with the other day. This particular person had been bugging me for months for an interview. Initially he said that he needed it for a class he was taking over at the community college, but even after the class was over he still wanted to talk to me. Finally after putting him off for as long as possible I told him that if he bought me lunch I'd talk to him. When we get to lunch it turns out that he wants my advice on setting up on on-line business. He evidently had not seen DireKobold, or perhaps he was looking for a cautionary tale.
Well after he announced that he wanted to sell stuff online I asked him what he wanted to sell. "Electronics: DVD players, TV/VCR's, that sort of thing." Now if you didn't know the guy you might think that he was looking to fence stolen merchandise, but this guy is as boring a four hour meeting with marketing (see my April 22nd entry). So I ask him why someone would go to his site rather then going to BestBuy or something similar. He says, "I don't know. I haven't figured that part out yet. I figured I'd have a lower overhead." "Possibly", I concede, "but a big company can go to Sony and say we're going to buy a million DVD players and generally get a pretty good price. Do you even have a way to get your stuff for less than retail?" "Costco? Sam's Club?"
The sad thing is that as bad as his business plan was his programming knowledge was even worse. When I asked him what languages he was considering he said he had heard of Perl but he wanted to know what CGI was. When I talked to him about having a database backend that could be populated straight from the webpage he was amazed. "I thought the only thing you could do with a form was have it e-mail stuff to you." But the real kicker was when he mentioned that his plan was to go to people's sites that did e-commerce, click "View Source" and just use their code. I know this whole thing comes across as really mean, but I totally sympathize with the guy. All of his programming skills are 20 years old (Cobol, VMS, etc.) and he knows the time of their obsolesce is fast approaching, what better way to stay current then to latch on to something hip and cutting edge like DireKobold?
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Because I'm a really responsible guy, quite often I'll get "View from the Bushes" done early. Either I'll have some time first thing in the morning or I'll scribble something down on a notepad while I'm out to lunch, and that was the case with yesterday's entry it was done fairly early on the 9th. But then that evening when I would normally post it I had to arrange to have my car dropped of at the mechanic's, which somehow turned into an expedition deep into northern Mexico when we had to drop someone else off. Fortunately even though I didn't think to bring my passport I had enough money to bribe the border officials into letting me back in.
Of course at this point everyone is saying, "Who cares about corrupt INS officials! We want to know what was wrong with your car!" Well as it turns out the brakes were grinding. Which is odd because I expected them to squeak and then grind, but they completely skipped the squeaking portion and when straight to the metal on metal grinding. So I talked to the mechanic about it and he said that on my model car (actually it's a minivan, how embarrassing is that). Ford doesn't put sensors on the brake pads. So instead of waiting for the squeaking now your supposed to wait for the grinding?
So now my car is as good as new except for this minor problem where if I don't turn off the overdrive then the car won't automatically engage when I try to start from a full stop. Instead you give it some gas and wait and wait and then all of the sudden there's this horrible lurch and you're moving! So I guess that would be a problem with the transmission. But I hear that they're cheap, right? It can't be as expensive as the new engine I put in last year. Did I mention what a good car this was...
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I have various mantras that get me through the day. When I look around at all the stuff I have on my plate, I often find myself hiding under a big blanket with a box of matches and all of my RPG books saying, "I can do it. I can do it." Lately in an attempt to be more optimistic I've traded my matches for a flashlight, my books for my teddybear and instead of saying "I can do it." I say, "I get to do it." You see the difference, I'm still stark raving mad, but since I'm no longer a danger to myself and other I can't be committed. Wait I think that plan may have backfired...
Another mantra I keep repeating is, "If only I had a ". Yes, I'm one of those people that believe there's one thing out there and if I had it everything would be better. Of course my tastes run towards the fantastic, I often fill in the blank with something like, "a device that could stop time" or "a billion dollars" or "a pill that eliminated the need for sleep." Lately, in an additional sign of my encroaching insanity, I'll say "If only I had a Shoehorn, the kind with teeth."
Hopefully someday my mantras will run along the lines of "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion." Although that's not nearly pithy enough, perhaps something more like, "Too much money. Too much money." Or maybe, "It's my immortality serum! Mine I tell you! Mine!"
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I've tried to keep my somewhat whacky political views out of this space for fear of alienating what little readership I had. However lacking anything else to write about tonight I thought I'd dip my toe into the pond and see what happened. I was watching this BookTV program on CSPAN2 today. It had Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly and Molly Ivins in a roundtable discussion. If forced at gunpoint to declare a political affiliation I would call myself a libertarian with conservative leanings, but when it comes right down to it I think Liberals are just more funny.
Perhaps I'll feel differently tomorrow, perhaps my less than stellar assessment of conservative humor was due to being completely unimpressed with Bill O'Reilly. I should mention that the program occurred right in the middle of dinner so I didn't catch much of the program, but it began with a call-in segment with O'Reilly. Some lady called in expressed her admiration for the show, but said that she felt Bill had been to hard on a relative of someone who had died on 9/11. Seemingly without pause Bill really laid into her. No humor at all.
Later in the program when Al Franken got up to talk about his book he was droll, delightful and maybe it was just my imagination, but modest. On the other hand O'Reilly seemed combative, clichéd and once again maybe my imagination, but sanctimonious. The big problem of course is the very dichotomous division between right and left, liberal and conservative as if there are only two possible schools of political thought. In any event I think I may have to declare this column dead on arrive, my main goal is to be humorous (like the liberals) and I think this is about as unfunny as I've been. Just keep moving nothing to see here.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well once again I'm writing this from the D&D table. This time it's the "work" campaign. Like most D&D campaigns this one is composed of a pocket protector (I think that's the correct term) of geeks. The DM confessed to me as I showed up that if it wasn't for DireKobold that he would be totally screwed. I guess that means I've sold one person on the idea, now I only need to sell 57,896,234 more and I can buy that personal sub I've always wanted. Actually I decided what I actually want is a mini. The S class has a 163 hp engine. Do you have any idea how fast you can go in 50 lb car with a 163 hp engine?
But I digress, back to the campaign. The DM appears to be running the first Adventure Path module ("One Day's Journey into Night" by Wil Upchurch). Though so far I don't recognize anything. He opened the session by having halfling kidnappers who ride worgs attack the party. Wil has put together some (One of the players just said, "What I don't need is another dying person who can't tell me where my stuff is!") interesting creatures, just wait until you see the final bad guy in his next adventure, but I don't recall any pink bathrobes (another DM embellishment?).
In other news it turns out that the emperor Caligula wasn't as bad as people always thought, telephone psychics are a scam not merely for the callers but also for the psychics, which is somewhat surprising. Also in the news Strom Thurmond is dead and it's not too late to sign up for the Third Annual Nigerian E-mail Conference.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well I finally made the last of my arrangements for GenCon (car rental reservation for those of you who are curious). DireKobold is going to have a booth this year, so if you're going to be at GenCon stop by. If someone actually mentions that, "'View from the Bushes' is the deepest thing since Thoreau wrote 'Walden'"I might give them something special. Then again I might not the chances of someone who reads VFB also being gainfully employed to the point where they can afford GenCon is best expressed as the square root of negative one.
The first year I went to GenCon I decided to go at the last minute, and I was also indigent. The combination of the two led me to stay at a campground my first year. Yes you heard me correctly my first year I stayed in a tent. With the exception of people who sleep in their cars I'm not very sympathetic to people who complain about housing problems. (Dorms with no air conditioning? Why when I was a boy is slept on the ground under a 6 foot snow drift and I had to burn my Player's Handbook to stay warm.)
The problem came the morning we were supposed to leave. Our flight left at something like 5:30 a.m., so rather than stay the last night at the campground we just decided to pull an all nighter and save ourselves the cost of an extra night at the campground (see the indigent entry above). We made it out of Milwaukee okay and we were sitting in the terminal in Cincinnati. They were calling seat numbers and they were just about to call ours when suddenly I woke up and the terminal was completely empty. There wasn't a person in sight except a lone airline employee. Somehow the plane was still at the gate, they let us on board. The moral being don't leave your mayonnaise out in the sun.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
There has never been a better time to sign up for DireKobold. Later today I'll be publishing our 10th adventure, we're giving a Bluffside bundle from Mystic Eye Games, to two lucky people who subscribe between now and GenCon, it's summer and you're out of school and have the time to run all of our cool adventures, and finally with the possibility of containment in a post cold-war Korean peninsula becoming ever more unlikely as regional instability leads to international nuclear proliferation, just how much longer do you think you can wait?
Speaking of our tenth adventure it's called "The Mirror of Stone". It was co-written by a couple of local gamers and I think they did a pretty good job. I particular I like the idea of a template that makes a monster weaker. There are gobs of templates that make creatures stronger, but how many are there that make them weaker. This allows the DM to create some very enjoyable situations where he can thrown in terrifying monsters and watch as the meta-gamers try and figure out what the heck is going on.
It's not a long adventure, but it does have some juicy bits in there. It was originally designed around four 3rd level characters but of course the Xenogenic System allows you to scale it for anywhere from 1-12 characters of 1st-7th level. And on the 16th we'll be publishing Wil Upchurch's latest installment in his Adventure Path series, and the reason for the cross promotion with Mystic Eye Games, because the next adventure is set in Bluffside. You are not going to want to miss that.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
My brother turned 21 yesterday. I didn't wish him a happy birthday, mostly because I forgot (when you have six siblings I think they should feel fortunate when you get their name right more than 50% of the time), but I also remember what an angst-ridden time 21 can be. You're well into the time when you're supposed to have decided on your raison d'etre, but instead you're just beginning to dig out from the mistakes of your misspent youth. Regret rather than anticipation seems to be the primary emotion and most of your movement is a flight from the past rather than a climb towards the future. In other words congratulating someone on turning 21 is more cruel than even I care to be.
My dad recently saw a poster that quoted Horace Mann as saying, "Public education is the greatest invention of mankind." My father, a profound libertarian, feels that public education is a great invention in the same sense as nuclear weapons. Something which we were marginally better at than the russians, but which our ultimate goal should be to dismantle. In any event in order to take my brother's mind off this wasteland between youth and maturity he asked him what he thought the greatest invention of all time was. The list the two of them came up with includes plant and animal domestication, fire and the wheel, not to mention law and mathematics it does not include the steam engine, the computer, or the flush toilet three things I would have argued for.
I decided to look around on the internet and found that pepople nominated everything from the chair to the telephone as the greatest invention of all time, but I also found this site on britannica.com with a comprehensive list of all the inventions they considered great along with the year of their invention and the inventor. It's interesting that they don't consider fire an invention at all, they do include the flush toilet and they don't, as far as I can tell include the chair. But perhaps most baffling of all, that bane of men everywhere, that cruelest of all instruments of torture, the necktie made the list.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I've lived in my current house for three years and every one of those years I've spent money on my central air-conditioning. Don't get the impression that I'm bitter, because I'm not I actually enjoy spending money over and over again to fix the same problem. I enjoy calling the technician at the beginning of summer every year and being told that their soonest open appointment is the second week of November. I enjoy leaving the windows open every night so that I don't miss a second of "Death of a Cat" a play in six parts which runs in my neighborhood every morning at four am. What I cannot stand is the heat.
I have a deal with my wife that we can never move south of our current latitude (though I suppose Antarctica would be okay). I just about had her talked into moving to Alaska until she found out about the mosquitoes. Apparently the story of the baby being carried away by a particularly large specimen was somewhat off-putting. But just look at the benefits. As of this writing when I checked the temperature in Barrow, Alaska was 32 degrees (0 for you metric snobs out there). Can you imagine the average temperature never getting above 50? Just the thought of it makes me want to shave my beard, change my name and catch the next dogsled to the Yukon.
My wife claims that what it really comes down to is watching too much "Northern Exposure". I'll admit that my view of life in Alaska is fairly idealized, but there could be a lot of really nasty surprises and all I would have to do is repeat the mantra, "I'll never be hot again..." and everything would slide off of me like snow off a polar bears back.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Ross started playing D&D in 1980 in a desperate bid to escape the squalor of the inner-city ghetto. Amazingly it worked and that same year he moved to a palatial estate high up on the hill. The years that followed are a haze of experimentation: Gurps, Hero, Rolemaster and even some nasty stuff he whipped up in his basement. Finally he started using Rifts and hit rock bottom.
Fortunately right around this time he met his wife. She cleaned him up long enough for him to complete his degree in creative writing, learn a skill that people would actually pay for (unlike an English degree) and start a novel. Of course like all hard core addicts eventually he had a relapse, and this time he really hit bottom: D20 PDF publishing. It doesn’t get any more pathetic than that.
One day while reading the "Scaling the Adventure" sidebar in Dungeon, Ross realized that the same thing could be done for the DM online. Thus began his descent into madness. Thousands of lines of code, more money than his wife cares to admit, and a year and a half later he's the proud owner of a dot-com exactly three years after the bubble burst and they all became worth just slightly more than the Italian Lira.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross