We went through three different seasons this week. On Tuesday it was still hot enough to be called Summer, Wednesday was Fall and on Thursday Winter started. Autumn is far and away my favorite season, so I'm understandably disappointed that it only lasted one day. I work in the foothills of the Rockies near the mouth of a canyon, and coming into work today felt like crossing an arctic tundra. We didn't get a huge amount of snow, but what we did get was drifted all over creation. I'm reaonably certain that I would have made it to work faster with a dogsled team, but perhaps I've read too much Jack London.
Looking back over the month of October, with the exception of my traditional day off (Sunday) I haven't missed a single day. It's good that this blog is purely electronic. I can only imagine the punishment in the afterlife that would have been mine if even one tree had died to publish this drivel. Using the caveat I came up with of not publishing on holidays either I guess I could have not posted today, but having a full calender was too good to ignore.
Matrix Revolutions comes out next week. It's strange, but thus far with the exception of some stuff I saw over at Ain't It Cool News. I haven't seen a single review. Even Rotten Tomatoes has nothing. The stuff I saw over at AICN looked promising, but I'd like to have a little better idea before I go see it. Nevertheless I'll probably get my boss to let me take a long lunch on Wednesday, so if you're curious I'll let you know what I think then.
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Ross
I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but deep in my heart of hearts when it comes to computers, I'm basically an Apple man. Linux is great for servers, but when you're talking about sitting down in front of something and working for 14 hours straight, it just doesn't get much better than an Apple 23" Cinema Display hooked to a Power Mac Dual 2 GHz G5. Of course, I don't have one of these awesome machines. In fact, my primary computer at home is an AMD/Windows machine. For a variety of reasons it's a lot cheaper, mostly due to the fact that since I work from home on occasion, the company I work for covers the cost of most of the Microsoft products on my machine (mostly the OS and Office), which saves me a huge amount right off the bat. And then, of course, there are the games...
Up until when I recently played Neverwinter Nights, I really hadn't played any games for about two years. And even Neverwinter Nights has recently been made available for the Mac, but the idea that if I saw a really cool game and couldn't play it disturbs me on an almost reptilian level. In fact, even as we speak, Bioware is producing a game called Jade Empire which appears to only be available on an XBox, which lead me to not-so-innocently ask my wife when we should get the kids a gaming console. To which she replied, "Not before they ask for one!" I suppose she has a point. In any case, probably more than any other single factor, it's the games that keep me from buying a Mac.
Now, if I had enough money to have a "work" computer and a game computer (like some of my friends), then I would definitely have both, but at this point I can really only justify having one computer. I got started thinking about this whole subject when a MacWarehouse catalog showed up in my mailbox today. Out of curiousity, I went to apple.com to see what my dream machine would cost. As it turns out, only around $12,400. Okay, that's a lot, though $5000 of that is getting 8 gigs of ram, another $2000 is the 23" monitor, plus tossing in the 40 gig iPod, and a dozen different add-ons wasn't cheap either. Of course, just the basic dual processor G5 is $3000, which is more than the car I'll probably be buying over the weekend.
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Ross
Okay, the bad news is I was up late talking on the phone, so I didn't exercise. The good news is that my friend is once again unemployed and should be able to pitch in and help me out with the next adventure. Further bad news would be that the technical guys down at my hosting place were doing something with the DireKobold server where it kept rebooting so I didn't get a chance to get an early start on View from the Bushes and now I have a family Halloween party to go to, so this is probably going to be short.
I will provide you with a Halloween-themed link. Retrocrush is doing the 100 Scariest Movie Scenes of All Time. It's interesting, though I only had a chance to glance at a couple. In any event that's all I have time for -- I'll keep you posted on my pathetic attempts at exercise and adventure publishing tomorrow.
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Ross
My health plan goes something like this: I'm not going to worry about what I eat, but I have to get plenty of exercise. Thus far I've mastered the first part of the plan, but I haven't had a lot of luck with the second part. Actually, I pretty much gave up on trying to do anything healthy near the beginning of this year. Looking at it, I knew that I was going to be so busy with DireKobold that I just wasn't going to have the time. So rather than stress about my expanding gut, my rising blood pressure or my 500+ cholesterol (j/k, it's not above 500, though it is pretty high) I was just going to take a few months off. Having done that I feel the need to hop back in the saddle, so to speak.
I say the saddle because my preferred method of exercising is cycling. A very close second is squash, but not only is it fairly time consuming, it's also quite expensive. Winter time is not the best time to cycle, but I do have an exercise bike, so if I could just drag my butt out of bed in the morning I could just exercise at home. Going from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard is a great opportunity for just this sort of thing. The change means that I'm already waking up an hour early and so all I have to do is find the motivation to exercise. Unfortunately, yesterday and today it just wasn't there.
Part of it is making sure that everthing is ready to go when you wake up. Exercising just by itself is hard enough to get motivated for without having to track down some gatorade or find some clothes to exercise in or even drag the exercise equipment into the right location. So I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow and report back then. Hopefully, the need to report back will inspire me to at least lie about my exercising which has to be close to actually exercising. To end with I thought I'd toss in a cool link, this is a satellite view of the California wild fires which was taken Monday.
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Ross
I had hoped to have published a new adventure on Saturday, but unfortunately, my unemployed friend who was helping me found some temporary employment last week with the union and that kind of threw a wrench into the works. My understanding is that this brief period of employment will be over as of today and he can go back "volunteering" for me. I say volunteering because that's what you call working without pay... To give you a brief preview of the next adventure, it starts by asking the question of what the clerics and followers of a god would do, if their god died?
Halloween is fast approaching and I find myself committed to quite a few parties. The first one was Saturday night. It was thrown by some friends of my wife and it was fortunately very child-friendly, otherwise I doubt we could have attended. It also had a theme for all of the costumes, which was nursery rhymes. At times (generally when most inconvient) I can be something of a perfectionist. As such, I wanted to find a nursery rhyme that all six of us (me, my wife and all four kids) could fit into. Unfortunately, nursery rhymes are either very focused on one subject, or involve things that are difficult to turn into costumes, like forks running away with spoons. In the end we decided on For Want of a Nail. I don't know if it's strictly a nursery rhyme, but it was in a collection of nursery rhymes we had and it featured six parts.
Plus, we already had a queen/princess costume which would fill in for the kingdom spot and a horse outfit. I put on all my cycling gear to take the place of the rider, for the nail we just made a circle and some spikes out of cardboard and duct tape and put them on my two-year old. By the time we got to the battle and the horse shoe, we we pretty lazy. For the former I just had my wife carry around a foam battle axe my friend had picked up at GenCon and for the latter we just had my seven-month old daughter suck on a plastic horse shoe. When we got to the party it turned out that very few people had really gone with the nursery rhyme theme. One couple was dressed up as Ozzy Osbourne and Madonna. I'd be interested in hearing that nursery rhyme.
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Ross
Today was the semi-annual used book sale at the city library. Attending it has become a major tradition for me and my friend Josh. The sale starts at seven am and it's important to show up early and get in line early. Although it's less so this year, because they've moved to a new building, which by the way is one of the coolest bits of architecture anywhere in the mountain west, and the science fiction section is no longer down a dead end, but that's another story.
In the past we've gone to breakfast first, and after waking up at 4 am for years so that we could have breakfast and still be in line by 6 am we finally wised up this year and decided to have breakfast after the sale. So I didn't have to wake up until 5:15 this morning, which is still pretty early for me. But I picked up some pretty good books. I picked up some LeQuin, some Niven and Pournelle, some Sartre and Stendhal in the original French, "The American Language" by Mencken and a nice copy of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." With the exception of the last book everything was 50 cents or a dollar.
The book sale is not about saving money, though I'm always surprised when I walk out with a big box of books and spend less on the whole stack than I did for the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting. To a certain extent, showing up at 6 am to stand in line for cheap books and finding a dozen people have beat us there and having a line with hundreds of people that stretches around the corner by the time the door opens restores my faith in humanity.
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Ross
There's a new amateur video out there which is pretty cool, called Art of the Saber. As you might guess from the title, lightsabers are involved; it's also 29 megs so a long wait could be involved as well. I think that watching the brilliantly choreographed fight scene in the movie led me to believe that knives were temporarily less dangerous. Or it could be that I was just a complete idiot, as you'll soon see. I was so impressed by the clip that I brought a co-worker over to see it. While he was watching it I had nothing to do, so I cast about for something to occupy myself with. What I found was a busted ethernet splitter and I thought it might be cool to see inside that, but the only thing I had to pry it open was this knife...
So yes, you guessed it, for some reason I thought nothing of pulling out my Gerber knife with the four-inch blade and I started prying at the ethernet splitter. While I'm doing it I'm thinking "This is really dangerous. This could slip pretty easily and it would be really bad," all while continuing to work away at it. It's always one of those things where you know the danger but figure it doesn't apply in this case. Well, predictably, the blade slipped and I ended up stabbing myself in the end of my left index finger. There was a lot of blood and it hurt quite a bit, but fortunately the cut wasn't so long that it couldn't be taken care of with a band-aid, though I'm on my third one because the first two soaked through.
It's also somewhat painful to type, so I'm going to wrap it up here. One last link for the amusement of those still thinking about the Cubs. It's an image modeled on the Despair.com posters, called Blasphemy.
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Ross
At my work we're struggling with the problem of spam. I think in reality pretty much everyone with an e-mail account struggles with spam, because there really isn't an easy solution, especially if people are going to freak out over a couple of false positives. The story starts with the purchase of a spamfilter. After testing it out for a while and getting the rules fairly refined, we turned it on. And nine days later the world ended, or that's at least what people acted like.
As I alluded to above, the single biggest problem with any kind of spam-solution is false positives. It's impossible to be certain that somewhere in the fetid pile of thousands of e-mail ads for Viagra and penis enlargement that there isn't a solitary e-mail in there somewhere which is actually from someone legitimate. Now our false positive rate was less that a quarter of a percent, and most of the false positives were from mailing lists where are easily added to a white list so that there's no further problem.
But suddenly, the idea that legitimate e-mail might be getting blocked turned into thousands of phantom messages which people were sure were being blocked. Even now, after turning of the spamfilter due to the enormous uproar, people are still convinced that they are missing dozens of e-mail. So now we are considering writing some horribly complicated software to allow people to view the subjects and decide for themselves. Which is fine, except that's essentially what people are already doing, and spending 50 man-hours implementing a program which allows people to do what they are already doing seems silly, but maybe I'm not seeing the big picture.
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Ross
My wife and I were discussing urban legends on the way home from a family gathering last night. She was commenting on the sometimes unintentional moral that many urban legends have, apart from the one that they ostensibly put forth. For example, in one through fervent prayer a girl is spared from being raped, but this is only discovered after another girl is raped in her stead. The primary moral is, of course, that prayer is good. The secondary and seemingly unintentional moral is that divine intervention doesn't stop bad things from happening -- it merely deflects them, and deflects them to someone who otherwise would have been spared. Pretty twisted, if you ask me.
I've already referenced my favorite UL website, Snopes, but I recently came across another pretty good UL website -- this one with more of a strictly religious theme. (They also mention the rape avoidance UL I mentioned previously). What's interesting is how many ULs seem to stem from a satirical article published by The Onion or a similar internet site, particularly some of the Harry Potter stuff. I mean, of course J.K. Rowling is a Satanist, but do you honestly think she's stupid enough to admit it?
Personally, I've always thought it would be fun to start an Urban Legend. I think something along the lines of the Neil Armstrong-Mr. Gorsky one -- something that's just so funny it has to be true. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that in general urban legends aren't premeditated, but rather take on a life outside of their original telling without much rhyme or reason. This may not be strictly true with glurgy-religious ULs, but those aren't the sort I would like to start, in any event. Of course, now that I've mentioned this desire I'm sure that it's virtually impossible to do it now.
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Ross
In a calamity which seems to happen all too frequently, I had the day's entry done and I was checking something else and the browser crashed and I lost it all. I get paid quite a bit of money to work with computers, and I don't think it's too arrogant of me to say that I understand computers better than the average person, and yet despite that, sometimes I find them so frustrating as to be almost unusable. I have no idea how people tolerate it.
In any case, the entry went something like: Picked up Shadows of Undrentide, not much time to play, not enough NPC's, but still good. Reviews for Matrix Revolutions are starting to appear; said to be much better than Reloaded. Probably have my friends save me a spot in line. So there you go, all the content and none of the meaningless and pathetic attempts at humor.
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Ross
Saturday was my wife's birthday -- she turned 28. How I wish that I was still only 28. I'm not sure if this made it into my blog, but near the beginning of last week my friend's H2 had some issues, and ended up needing to get its fuel pump replaced. So the dealership supplied him with a rental car; of course it had to be one befitting his station, so they gave him a Saab Turbo Convertible. Actually, he had to shell out a few extra bucks a day for the Saab, but it was worth it. In any case, I drove down with him on Saturday morning to pick it up, and mentioned that it was my wife's birthday, so he offered to let me borrow it that evening since we were going to dinner.
As it turned out, my wife's family ended up having a big get-together, and my wife's grandmother was making home-made lasagna, so she decided she wanted to eat out there. But I didn't want to waste my time with the Saab, so I drove it out there. Let me tell you, I'm not that big of a Saab fan. I would prefer a BMW or a Mercedes, but that was a sweet ride. I'm used to having a lot of power right off the line, and the Saab really didn't have much on the low end, but once you got above 20 miles an hour it had more power than I knew what to do with. I found myself up to 90 on the freeway entrance ramp before I'd even managed to actually merge onto the freeway.
To a certain extent, it worked out better to bring it to the family party. All of my wife's uncles were impressed (I even let one of them take it out for a spin). My wife's 15 and 18 year old cousins thought it was the greatest thing since Justin Timberlake broke up with Britney Spears, and my six-year old daughter thought that sitting in the back seat with her hair blowing everywhere was better than an amusement park ride, which is one thing the Saab has that the BMW and the Mercedes don't: a back seat. Of course, I'm sure that by the time I can afford one of these luxury sports cars I won't have to worry about finding space for the kids.
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Ross
It turns out that on the day before the release of the Lord of the Rings that selected theaters are going to have a one-time showing of all three movies. They're going to start with the extended edition of "The Fellowship of the Ring," then the extended edition of "The Two Towers" and then end with the very first showing of "The Return of the King." As you can imagine, this is a geek's wet dream. As such, there's some scalping going on for these tickets, and it's amazing what they're going for. For example, here's two tickets to the movie in Boston going for $355.
So each of the extended editions is three and a half hours, and I've heard that "Return of the King" may not come in much under that. So 10+ hours, plus I've heard, though I can't confirm, that there's an hour break between movies which means that if all you did was drive to the movie, get there the minute it started and leave as soon as it ended that's probably 13 hours. But if you did that, you'd have front row sets 10 feet away from the screen and 10 hours of neck strain to work out with your doctor over the next several months. So any true geek is going to want to maximize this $175/ticket experience by showing up at least three hours in advance. Suddenly, you're looking at a 16 hour day, and that's if you're content to show up at the "last minute" I image there may be people showing up 12 or more hours in advance (a friend of mine showed up 8 hours early for the first showing of "Matrix Reloaded" and still wasn't first in line). On the one hand, it seems like a colossal waste of time, on the other hand I really wish I could spend 24 hours just to see all the Lord of the Rings Movies.
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Ross
On Wednesday night I stayed up late and saw "Kill Bill." On Thursday night the Cubs lost, and in a display of emotions which surprised even me, I had a hard time sleeping. Last night, I found out that a good friend of mine is HIV+, and in a display of emotion which didn't surprise me, I once again had a hard time sleeping. As a result my cold, which was nearly routed, has made a significant counter-attack (a la The Battle of the Bulge). I have high hopes for my eventually victory, but things need to settle down a bit first. As such this will be an abbreviated VFB though I will leave you with some quotes:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
--Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942
...that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we'd jump the life to come.
--Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7
A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connectitut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a position of power should on no account be allowed to do the job.
--Douglas Adams
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--Horace
I'm going to shove these papers so far down your throat that the next time a girl rips out your heart it will be gift wrapped.
--Ross
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville-- mighty Casey has struck out.
--Ernest L. Thayer, 1888
I was more prescient than I would have liked when I mentioned ol' Casey yesterday. Unless you've gone out of your way to avoid the news today, you know that the Cubs lost. Somewhere along the line I must have read too much George Will, because at some point I went from a cynical and removed observer of the playoffs to someone with deep emotional attachment, and I am somewhat surprised to report that I didn't sleep well last night. Which was bad, because I think I'm losing ground on this cold I've been fighting since this time last week.
I cruised around the internet last night after the game, looking for other people's reactions, and by and large it sounds like I got off easy. In particular, Bill Harris made an interesting point in his Night Call Column. It's entirely possible that there is no one alive who has seen the Cubs win the World Series. Another person made the point that the loveable loser status is far more important to the people of Chicago than a single, meaningless World Series title. I doubt that's the case today, but give it a few months and maybe...
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Ross
Sports fans have these interesting superstitions. It's my understanding that the most common superstition is that by viewing the game they can affect the outcome. Not that I'm a sports fan, (people arguing that my obsession with the Tour de France belies this point should realize that cycling is not a sport it's a work of art) but back when the Utah Jazz had a some chance of winning it all (if not for the cosmic misfortune of peaking at the same time as Michael Jordan) I used to occasionaly watch games, much to the dismay of all of my friends who were hardcore fans, because whenever I did the Jazz would lose (generally playing Micheal Jordan at the height of his career in a clutch game is not a recipe for success regardless of whether I'm watching ot not). Boy that last sentence was nearly faulknerian in length.
I find that now that I'm watching the Cubs try and get to the World Series for the first time in 58 years, I have the exact opposite effect. Whenever I have the time to actually watch, the Cubs seem to do well; the minute I stop watching.... Well, as anyone familiar with last night's game can tell you, the results are catastrophic. When the 8th inning rolled around, the Cubs were up 3-0 and Prior's pitching had suffocated but not murdered the Marlins. Figuring that the Cubs ought to be able to survive a couple more innings I went to a movie (Kill Bill Vol 1, capsule review: more style than substance but I reserve final judgment until I see Vol 2). When I returned late that night and sat down to see what the score was, I thought that the 8 must be a misprint, but no, the minute I walked out the door all hell broke loose.
After I found out about the fiasco (for the Cubs at least) that was the 8th inning I was reminded (as I'm sure everyone else was) of Ernest L. Thayer's classic poem Casey at the Bat, A Ballad of the Republic. From that, I went to remembering a classic episode of "Northern Exposure" in which Chris' doctoral thesis, "Casey at the Bat - an Anti-Filiopietistic Metaphor for America's Role in Post-Cold-War-Geo-Politics" is locked up in a battle between a post-modern professor and a classical professor. Until Chris finally takes the professors out to the ballfield for a re-enactment of the poem in which he strikes out the post-modern professor, and says, "That feeling you have of despair and humilation, right now, in your gut? That's what 'Casey at the Bat' is about." Words to live by...
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Ross
Lately, the topic of PDF piracy has been a hot topic on the D20-Open Gaming Mailing List. As if electronic publishers didn't already have enough problems, we also have to worry about piracy. This may sound like hubris on my part, but I'm actually in a better position than most on this front. First off, one of the big values of my product is not available with the pdf but has to be obtained from my website. In other words, if you see one of my adventures somewhere and you really like it, then you can either "pirate" that version or you can come to my website and for a relatively small amount of money get the same adventure customized for you, plus all of the other adventures in our archive. With most PDF publishers, if you saw a copy of their PDF on Kazaa you'd be seeing everything they have to offer.
Secondly, since all of my PDF's are generated dynamically for each individual, I could use a steganographic method of fingerprinting each pdf with the identity of the person who generated it. Basically, at several points in the adventure I could give the program a choice of phrases, like "went down," "walked down," or "descended." A code would be generated for each user and the program would pick which phrases it used in an adventure based on that code. Then if I found that all my PDF's had been shared out on Kazaa I could check the encoding and see who had done it. To be honest, if every single one had a different encoding I probably wouldn't do anything, but if they were all from one individual then it might be worth my while to at least have a chat with them.
It's important to note that I haven't implemented the system described above (or maybe I have and I'm trying to throw people off the trail...), partially because of reason one and partially because I think that it would be more effort than it's worth and partially because I'm generally of the opinion that piracy's downward effect on sales is overstated and copy protection's downward effect on sales is understated. In other words, (though it's difficult to imagine how this would be the case with the steganographic system I mentioned above) you can lose a lot of sales by making it difficult for a legitimate buyer to use your product.
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Ross
After convalescing for the entire weekend, I'd say that I'm about 80% of full health. Which means I'm well enough to go and do the old 9-5 job, but not well enough to be productive once I get back home. I hope this changes, because I'd like to get enough done this week that I can justify buying a new computer game on Friday. I'm torn between buying the Neverwinter Nights expansion Shadows of Undrentide (no, I can't pronounce it either) or The Temple of Elemental Evil. The latter does carry quite a bit of nostalgia with it, since T1, The Village of Hommlet (the first adventure in the Temple of Elemental Evil series) was one of the first modules I owned and one of the few with a fully fleshed-out village (thus the name right?).
Since at the tender age of 11 I was unsatisfied with my own attempts at village building, (and judging from the reaction of the citizens of Lichtenstein my nation-building wasn't that great either) I used Hommlet for just about every campaign I ever ran. In those days, the covers of all the modules were detachable and they always had a map on the inside. The village was mapped on the inside of this cover and my copy had so many pencil marks with additional buildings, castles that the PC's had built, marks noting the depredations of evil humanoids, etc., that it was difficult to make out the original map. As such I have a deep and abiding affection for Hommlet and its citizens, which creates a double-edged sword. The computer game is suppossed to be a faithful recreation of the original module; will I be delighted to have a chance to play in the village I loved so much or will I be disappointed with their version of it, or perhaps bored with details and plot twists I already know?
Additionally, TToEE violates my primary rule of game buying, which is: wait. Wait for a couple of reviews, wait for all the bugs to be patched, wait for walkthrough's to come out on the internet (So when I'm too dumb to figure something out, some 12 year old can help me) and wait for the price to come down. So I'll probably get Shadows of Ugrentuolasplament, or however you say it. But regardless of how I go, I'll probably pick up the other one in November, though that's when Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic comes out and I may find it difficult to resist the first Star Wars CRPG.
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Ross
Well, I have spent a surprising amount of time in bed and watching kids, which ate up the vast majority of the day. But rather than being completely useless, I thought I'd drag myself out of bed and post in my blog. Many would argue that posting in my blog does not in any way mitigate my complete lack of utility. To those people I would say, "Back off, Mom, or you'll never see your grandchildren again."
But seriously folks, did you here the one about the two cows standing in the field talking about Mad Cow Disease, and the one says, "That sounds bad, good thing I'm a penguin!" My next question is whether ibuprofen is considered a psychotropic drug. Oops, scratch that, the little fairies flying around my computer screen have told me that it's not, so no worries.
In our continuing effort to help our readers spot the unnumerable errors in "View from the Bushes", I would direct you to the Common Errors in English page. There are over 500 errors listed. My goal is to eventually hit them all; I got 63 of them in just this paragraph, so I figure that's enough for tonight.
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Ross
This is a special "View from the Bushes" dictated to my wife from my death bed. Okay, it's not that bad but it's just so annoying to be sick at all. It's the standard head cold, though there are some body aches as well, which have me worried that it might be the flu. It wouldn't be quite so bad if it were just me, but my youngest son is sick as well with the one-two combo of a stomach bug and an ear infection. What this means is that my wife is busy and tired, which means she can't even take the time to transcribe "View from the Bushes," so I have to drag myself out of bed and do it.
But the people who have suffered the most are my Midnight PBP players, in between the adventure on Tuesday, a sick computer on Wednesday, and the beginnings of a cold yesterday, I still haven't posted the next turn. Of course, for better or worse (probably the latter), I've been drawn into the Baseball playoffs (but it's like I tell people: I'm interested in it from a historical perspective rather than a sports perspective) and as I write this the Cubs and the Marlins are in extra innings. The score is still tied, but the Marlins pitcher seems to be able to do no wrong, while the Cubs pitcher is barely hanging on.
Anyway, in an effort to avoid completely flaccid writing, I thought I'd include a link to yet another forgotten tragedy (BTW, I think for many the "Rape of Nanking" would also fall into this category; thanks to my loyal assistant Ed for adding a link). This one is the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fire of 1871, where possibly as many 2,500 people died. The fire traveled upwards of 90 mph with temperatures as high as 1,800 degrees; people spontaneously burst into flames. It was far worse than the Chicago fire, but as with other events I've mentioned no one remembers it.
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Ross
Well as usual, despite all the bad karma I have accumulated over my life, it turns out I didn't need a new power supply. Actually, the problem was that the power button had broken -- probably while I was trying in desperation to get it to turn on. Any time a problem doesn't cost me any money, then that's good. In any case, enough about my karmic issues. I was out buying some food last night and I heard Bill O'Reilly on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and let's just say that I was not impressed.
As I mentioned before, I try to avoid political discussions in the blog -- mostly because of the fact that I'm always right and everybody else is always wrong might make everybody else feel bad, and though I can't imagine anything better than that, my wife tells me that it's a bad idea. But I really enjoy FoxNews. In many ways I agree that it's preferable to most of the other cable news outlets. I especially enjoy FoxNews Sunday (with Tony Snow), but everytime I've seen or heard Bill O'Reilly, he comes across as the most sanctimonious, thin-skinned, rude jackass I've ever encountered.
I didn't think I could have more disdain for any "political" figure than I already had for James Carville (who, by the way, is obviously the model for LotR's Gollum), but O'Reilly may have passed him in my personal rankings. Maybe it's the fact that Terry Gross is the most calm, soft-spoken, non-confrontational five-foot nothing interviewer in history, and he treated her like she'd accused him of the Rape of Nanking. Actually the behavior that bothered me the most came at the beginning and end of the interview. To be fair, in the middle he acquits himself much better. Anyway, that's it for my rant, I now return you to your regularly scheduled whining at it's normal time.
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Ross
You know those times in your life when you do something so stupid, that looking back you can't fathom how you could have possibly thought it was a good idea to act in the way you did? A little history: my house has notoriously unreliable power. So getting a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) for my computer seems like the first thing I would do. But I waited, and I was lucky. But my luck obviously couldn't hold out forever, and I knew that -- so I arranged to buy an old UPS off of a co-worker, but it was not to be.
I had finally remembered to bring my checkbook with me, and I headed towards his cube to close the deal. But something strange was going on -- our mutual boss was in the guy's cube and the guy was shoveling all of his stuff into a box. Yes, you guessed it: at the exact moment I was going to buy the UPS the guy I was going to buy it from was fired. Taking this as some kind of sign from Heaven, I waited several more months before making another attempt, and it was only fear that made me act even then.
The power went out again, and when it came back on the computer wouldn't power up. Fortunately, the power supply just needed to be discharged, but I resolved then and there to get a UPS. So that very day I went to the store and bought one. I then took it home and sat it on my floor for the next couple of months. Finally deciding it was time to get it up and running, I plugged it in, only to find out that I didn't have a truly grounded outlet. That was enough to derail me for another couple of months, until today when the power went out again and this time I'm pretty sure the power supply really is fried. Yes, you are correct, the moral of this story is that I'm retarded.
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Ross
After a hiatus which lasted longer than I expected, DireKobold.com has released a new adventure. Draconnosaurus was written by Terry Edwards, who also provided the maps and the art. I guess that makes him a game designing triple threat, though I'm sure there are times when he wishes that he could act, sing and dance. I hear that, in addition to being more lucrative, women find it irresistible. But before I unfairly malign Terry's skill with the fairer sex any more, I should tell you about the adventure. It was originally designed for four 8th level characters, but with the Xenogenic System, it easily scales from 5th to 11th level and for a party of 1-12 characters.
At this point you saying, "Yeah that's all fine and good but what's the adventure about?" I'm glad you asked. The premise of the adventure is sort of a "Jurassic Park" for the D&D world. In the modern world, cloning a dinosaur is all about finding DNA, but in a fantasy world there are all sorts of methods which might be employed by our pseudo-paleontologist. Raise Dead and Resurrection spring immediately to mind, but what if the fossil was too old? The paleontologist in this adventure comes up with the brilliant idea of using a dragon to breed with short-lived polymorphed versions of the dinosaurs, and then having these half-dragons breed with the dinosaurs again until eventually he was left with pure dinosaur stock. Unfortunately, in the absence of any promiscuous metallic dragon in the vicinity, he ends up making a deal with a blue dragon. From this short-sighted act the rest of the adventure flows.
Oftentimes in our little fantasy worlds we will introduce some "technology," like teleportation circles, for instance, without fully considering the ramifications of that technology. Many people complained when Third Edition introduced the purchase of magic items, but if there is some definable amount of labor and material which goes into making something, then in any kind of rational economy that "something" will end up with a price. Without getting any more pedantic, it is precisely this which drew me to Draconnosaurus. We see a rational use of "technology," in the pursuit of something as ordinary as knowledge. The adventure ends up with a modern feel, but I think that's a good thing. For good or bad, much of our fantasy world would end up with a similar feeling of modernity if we really took magic to its logical conclusion.
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Ross
Well, I was driving up to Ogden yesterday and I heard a news report that a small plane had crashed. Furthermore, they reported that of the four people in the plane, the pilot, Vaughn Kinder and his wife had survived, but were in serious condition. Well, I bike and work with a guy named Vaughn Kinder and I thought he had told me about taking flying lessons, so I figured it must be him. When I got to my parents, I immediately got on the internet to see if it was, in fact, him. The first news story I found spelled the name "Von." For some reason that was enough to put my mind at ease and assure me that it was someone else, because newspapers would never misspell something, right?
Well, as it turns out, they did, and it was my co-worker who was in the crash, along with his wife, whom I had also met. But worse than all of that was the fact that one of the passengers was the husband of another co-worker. It's difficult in a situation like this to have any idea what to say. All of your cleverness and wit, all your friendliness and cheer, and all of your smiles and laughter suddenly seem hollow, misplaced and callous.
In short there is nothing to say, but it's helpful to have a reminder that all of those little news stories, like a small plane crashing in the Utah Desert, and stories that never make the national news and disappear from the local news after 24 hours, that all of these stories involve actual people, even if you've never met them, because one of these days you will have met them and one of these days it will be you.
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Ross
The good news is that I did a whole bunch of work on the next adventure today. The bad news, of course, is that it is never as much as I hope to get done. Also, I'm training someone to help me out, so the delay is not entirely my fault -- just 99% my fault. The other 1% has been due to my trying to find the right person to help me wire the adventures. After doing three adventures a month for quite a few months I realized that I was going to give myself an aneurism if I kept doing everything myself, though as I've mentioned before, the right mix of programming knowledge and D&D knowledge has been hard to find.
We played the "family campaign" last night. I'm not sure what I had ingested, but as anybody could tell you I was on one last night. At one point I'm pretty sure that I put a pistachio up my nose, and almost didn't get it out. Needless to say I had a good time, so that's always a plus. Other than a near trip to the emergency room, a lot of adventure "wiring" and a win and a narrow loss by the Cubs, not a lot has happened. So I guess I'll end here, though for all of you people out there worried about overpopulation, not having any kids at all has its own issues.
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Ross
One of the comments pointed out that I hadn't provided a link to the forums for my Play by Post campaign so here you go. You can see for yourself the confusion I caused. It's Friday, which means that the weekend is about to begin. Based on how bad last weekend was, I'd have to say that I'm not exactly overjoyed by the prospect of another one. Of course, to make sure that this weekend is just as fun as last weekend my body has decided it's coming down with a cold. My only saving grace is that the cold is still in its infancy, and if I'm lucky and get lots of sleep, then maybe it will only be a minor inconvenience. Given my luck recently, I really doubt it.
In other news, Verisign (temporarily at least) shut down it's search service. I'm guessing that probably at least three of my four regular readers have probably not heard about this so I'll explain. Versign has the control over the primary internet name servers for the .com and .net domains. Starting on September 15th, if you typed in a non-existent .com or .net address Verisign would redirect you to a site finder which had some suggestions as to what you might be looking for, a search form and worst of all (in many people's opinions) ads. Of course there was also the problem that instead of returning the "page not found" code they were returning a redirect, which was a violation of the http standard and was blamed for breaking lots of things.
A somewhat analogous situation would be if back in the days of Ma Bell, AT&T, rather than telling you when you had dialed a wrong number, instead had played for you an ad for a pizza place that did delivery, so you can imagine why people would be upset. In any event, enough boring technology news. Whether or not I come down with a cold I'm going to spend the weekend polishing off the latest adventure so expect to see something new either Monday or Tuesday and once again thanks for your patience.
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Ross
My Midnight Play by Post (PbP) campaign is finally starting to pick up steam. The players are getting into it, I'm starting to hit my stride, things are going well, everything's clicking, the praise is starting to pour in, my players love me and all is right with the world. Or at least it was: now everything is angry confused madness.
I had chased the players into a ruined inn. I thought I had described it in pretty clear detail. It had two floors. The top floor had six rooms, each of which I described. The bottom floor had two rooms: a common room and a kitchen. It seemed pretty straightforward, but once it came time for them to move around in the inn, everything came apart. Some people thought they were downstairs when they were upstairs, other people thought that there was a door in one room when the door was actually in another room. They wanted to stay awake and I didn't let them. In short, I screwed up.
What's somewhat interesting is that I had made a point of asking for feedback when I posted the last turn, and even said that as someone who was getting used to the medium that I'm sure I was making lots of mistakes. Never were truer words spoken.
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Ross
I was reading the latest Newsweek today, and their cover story was on the final season of "Friends." Leaving aside whether the end of a sitcom is worthy to be the subject of the cover of a newsmagazine, "Friends" has a special place in my heart. First, I do enjoy the show; it's been consistently funny for its entire run, the characters are great (I really like Joey and Phoebe), and it's intelligently written. But more than anything else, I like "Friends" because it brought the name "Ross" into the mainstream.
Before "Friends," it seemed like every time I gave someone my name, they would repeat it back to be as "Russ" or "Ron." The worst time was when I called up the most attractive girl at my high school and she thought my name was "Ron." I probably should have run with it. I graduated in a class of 584 -- there had to be someone named Ron who was better looking than I was. There was also the problem that as yet I had not perfected my now-legendary wit. At that point, my conversation mostly consisted of saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible time. There are many who would say that I am still in that stage.
Anyway, back to sitcoms. The other main thrust of the article was that "Friends" represented the end of the sitcom. I personally think that it happened a little earlier when "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" was cancelled. And though I would have liked to see Fox stick with it longer, they actually gave it a pretty good shot. It's actually all of you that I blame for the stillbirth of the greatest half hour on television. With that show's demise I recommend "Scrubs." If any of you out there saw what I call the "Underdog" episode, you know what I mean.
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Ross