I have a few minutes here during my lunch hour before I have to go to physical therapy again, so I thought I would try and dash off the blog before I had to leave. Slate had an interesting article on the futility of voting in the presidential election, which, rather than talking me out of voting, increased my resolve to always vote for a third party. Like the article says, the chances of one vote actually deciding the presidential election are so remote as to be incomprehensible, so rather than looking at my vote as a chance to determine who gets to be president, I look at my vote as a way to influence the ideology of whomever does end up as president.
Speaking of which, the first debate is tonight. The biggest pre-debate story is the number of rules the candidates agreed on, ranging from the temperature of the room to the height of the podiums. One of the big rules was that there could be no cut-away shots showing how the other person was reacting. Fortunately, it appears that the networks are planning on ignoring that particular rule. Overall, I'm unimpressed. Tonight's joint press-conference is a long way from the famous debates of Lincoln and Douglas.
As far as DireKobold goes, at the moment I'm working on some behind the scenes stuff, beefing up the generation system, tweaking the website, etc. So there won't be a huge amount of new content for the next couple of weeks, although I'll probably throw another Xenogenic NPC up at some point in the next few days. One thing I need to work on is the ultimatum my wife has given me to clean-up the mountain of books, paper and Dr. Pepper cans I call an office, my own version of the Aegean Stables.
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Ross
I'm feeling kind of blah today. I'm not sure why; perhaps it's the flouridation of the water. In any case, I'm not really in the mood to write very much so this will probably be a very short entry. Part of the reason may be that I spent part of my lunch hour catching up on the Cubs. After discovering that they were tied in the wild-card race with only a few games left, I decided to read some Cubs-themed blogs. There may be nothing in the universe more depressing than a Cubs fan and any blog worthy of the name is no slouch in the depressive category either. Combine the two together and you end up with a near lethal cocktail of anquish, self-pity, groundless optimism and soul-rending pathos.
I'll leave you with a link to a Wired article on the dilemma faced by my favorite news website, news.google.com.
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Ross
Another day, another blog, another chance to bash George Lucas. Actually, I'm going to try and refrain from any Lucas bashing (this does not extend to include any sort of prohibition against Jar-Jar bashing, who has to be considered some sort of hell-spawn rather than some kind of mortal creation.) Before we dive in to it (I leave the antecedent to your imagination, but I imagine that it's smelly), my friend pointed out a great link to an interactive version of Drake's equation. For those unfamiliar with Drake or his equation, it's a way of estimating how many "civilizations" the galaxy might have. It has seven terms ranging from the rate at which new stars form, to the length of time a civilization broadcasts radio waves.
In other news, one of my friends lent me his copy of Dawn of War. Last night I didn't get past the installation, but it looks pretty fun. Overall I'd have to put RTS (real-time strategy) behind turn-based strategy and RPG's but if done right they can still be quite enjoyable, and hopefully not quite as time-consuming or addictive as the other kinds of games. The game is based off the Warhammer 40k table-top miniatures game, which is a close relative of role-playing games, so that adds a couple of points right there.
I think that will about do it for today. Tune in tomorrow for more banal discourse from the fringe of society and sanity.
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Ross
My shoulder seems to be finally recovering. I had an appointment with a physical therapist, which obviously helped out a lot. One of the things they did was attach some electrodes to the affected area and run some current through the muscle. That was an interesting sensation. Over the weekend I finally got around to seeing Hero (capsule review, if you liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon you'll probably like this, and vice versa), which I quite enjoyed, particularly the first fight scene. I also finally got around to seeing Kill Bill 2 last week as well, while I was donating platelets. Overall I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first installment.
As long as we're on the subject of movies, last week I also signed a petition asking George Lucas to re-release the original theatrical cuts of Episodes IV, V and VI. The opening page has a very ironic quote from the man himself:
I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.
I've heard him quoted elsewhere as basically saying "I'm sorry you fell in love with those moves, but they weren't the movies I wanted to make; they were only 50% done." Which seems to parse down to I'm sorry that your tastes are so horrible, and misguided as to not realize how vastly superior these new cuts are.
That will have to be it for now, but if you get a chance, sign the petition, I doubt it will make any difference, but you never know.
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Ross
My shoulder felt ever so slightly better this morning, not much but every little bit counts. Noticing that I can't turn my neck very well, my co-workers have started mimicking that fact and now every time they talk to me, they make a great show of having to turn their entire body to look at something. It reminds me of when my jaw was wired shut and my friends would all poke fun of me by speaking through clenched teeth. Maybe the moral of all this is I need to find some new people to hang out with.
I picked a friend up from the airport this morning. This particular friend is studying to become a Dominican priest. He's been at it for (what seems like) 10 years and he still has another 4 years before he's actually ordained, so it's worse than trying to become a doctor. They've done some remodeling at the airport since I was last there for GenCon. It used to be that the security check point was on the first floor between ticketing and baggage claim. It still basically is, but now it's up one floor. This puts it directly in line with the skywalk to the parking garage. I'm not sure if Friday Mornings are particularly busy or not, but this morning the line stretched halfway down the skywalk. I can imagine that on a really busy day the line will end somewhere in the parking garage.
Getting back to the topic of the shoulder... That muscle relaxant is powerful stuff (but like I said, I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to that). I barely remember yesterday afternoon, to say nothing of the blog. I noticed when I looked at it today that somehow I slipped in a duplicate sentence right at the end. It's since been removed, but I certainly have no idea how it got there. Feels like I'm starting to drift a little bit, so I better end it here before I start talking about the pickled wisdom of the cabbage.
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Ross
I had hoped that a good night's rest would fix whatever was wrong with my shoulder, but instead I woke up at the unholy hour of 4:30 am and I was in as much pain as ever. Fortunately, my work has a well-staffed employee health clinic and I was able to get in first thing in the morning. The doctor prescribed some muscle relaxant and some anti-inflammatories. My resistance to most drugs, particularly sedatives and pain-killers, is extremely low. The muscle relaxant was only 10 mg of cyclobenzaprine, but I'm definitely feeling a little loopy after taking one three hours ago. The upshot is that if I happen to wander off into a discussion of Spam's affect (the mystery meat, not the unsolicited e-mail) on global commerce with specific emphasis on East Asia, you'll know why.
See, the fact is that Spam is, for some reason, incredibly popular in east Asia, particularly in Micronesia. Wait, where was I? To illustrate my lack of resistance to sedatives, let me relate the story of my endoscopy. I went into have a camera shoved down my throat so that the Doc could figure out what was causing my acid reflux. As I recall, they gave me Valium. The majority of people are awake for the procedure -- they just don't care. Almost everyone wakes up in time for the post-op lecture. I, on the other hand, was still passed out when it came time to go home, which led my wife to wheel me to the lobby and then leave me there, my tongue hanging out and drool running down my faces while she went and fetched the car. I can just imagine some medical professor walking by with his med students and pointing me out as a great example of someone in a persistent vegetative state.
Someone in the comments asked me about Tyler Hamilton. Well, as you can see from reading this article, Tyler Hamilton (arguably the second best know american cyclist, with the exception of Armstrong himself) has been accussed of blood doping. The article also points out that the test they used for this is pretty new. In fact, Hamilton was the first one to show up as a positive under this test. I'll have to corner one of the pathologists and get his take on the test.
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Ross
Something went horribly wrong while I was sleeping last night and this morning my right shoulder was incredibly tender. I don't remember anything in particular happening, though I did dream I was in the book 1984 and The State was jumping up and down on me over and over again, but that was my face, not my shoulder, so that can't be it. It seems to be feeling a little bit better as the day goes on, so I have high hopes that I won't be crippled for the rest of my life.
The play last night was quite good. They had a man playing the part of Lady Bracknell, which I thought was an interesting choice, but seemed to work out well. It was nice to actually have a night out with just me and my wife. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, which is probably mostly my fault.
I don't know if any one remembers my blog entry where I chronicled my history of presidential voting and also mentioned all of the presidential candidates on the Utah ballot, including, HRM Caesar St Augustine De Buonaparte. Well if you take a look at that entry and scroll down to the bottom it appears that good old Ceasar...Buonaparte actually came and posted a comment. I'm not sure how he found that entry (presumably by searching on his name, but my own attempts to duplicate this on google came to naught), but the tone of the comment and the phone number he left in the entry all match the info I found about him at Project Vote Smart (quite a good site, btw), so I can only assume that it is, in fact, His Royal Majesty. Kind of quirky...
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Ross
One of the big news items of the day is the release of the first three Star Wars Movies (Episodes IV, V and VI) on DVD. Lucas continues to tinker with the movies and has ended up making further changes to even the special edition versions he released a few years ago. CNN has a list of the top five changes the biggest of which is the changes Lucas made to the end of the Return of the Jedi. In addition to adding some new worlds to the celebratory panorama, including Naboo (where a reliable source reports that you can clearly hear a Gungan say "Weesa Free!" *shudder*) he also changed the actor that plays Anakin in the scene with the three Jedi ghosts. Rather than having the middle aged guy he used previously he has put in Hayden Christensen.
Yes you heard me correctly as if it's not bad enough that this no talent waste of space (speaking of both Lucas and Hayden) has to ruin the prequels, now he has to reach back and ruin the original three movies as well. Actually by all acounts Hayden is actually a very good actor when he's not forced to read lines Lucas found on the romance novel discard pile. (See what I said about Natalie Portman yesterday.) Oh well, I guess everyone agrees that they look really good, so that's something.
The new theater season has started. Tonight I have tickets to go see The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. I've always been a fan of his work so I'm pretty excited to see this production. Hopefully the local company won't butcher it too badly, though looking at the info they sent out it looks like they have quite a few broadway actors in the production, so that's promising. I'll let you know how it was. Anyway on that somewhat anti-climatic note I think I'll end.
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Ross
Many weeks after first hearing about it, I finally managed to get out and see Garden State (that's actually a link to Zach Braff's blog, which is much wittier and humorous than my own... there go my last three readers...) I enjoyed it immensely. So good in fact, that my immediate impression on leaving the movie was, I have to see that again. Which puts it in the rarefied realm of movies like Star Wars, Shawshank Redemption, Fellowship of the Ring, etc.
The movie had lots of cool things about it, but there were two which stick out at the moment. The first is how good Natalie Portman was, without that hack (nee greatest filmaker ever) George Lucas feeding her lines Barry Manilow would be afraid to use. The second is how nothing improbably bad happened. Allow me to explain: Close to the beginning of the movie there is a party where lots of drugs are present. In any other movie someone would have died, but in the movie it goes about how most of those things go. Some people do some insanely dumb stuff, and it's obvious that the whole thing contributes to their general "loser" status, but nobody dies.
On Saturday I also got my last case of miniatures (at least for the foreseeable future), which I was moderately disappointed with. I already had two rares from that expansion, the carrior crawler and the halfling outrider, both of which I was kind of unimpressed with, so rather than getting a bunch of rares I didn't have, I got three more of each, plus three more of a couple of other unimpressive rares (the orc druid, and the bladesinger) leaving me with only four (maybe five if I miscounted) rares that were actually cool. Still, there were cool commons and uncommons as well, so it wasn't too bad. One final link before I leave: Slashdot gave 15 questions from their users to the Libertarian Presidential Candidate. It's interesting stuff, enough that I might switch my vote back to him, we'll have to see.
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Ross
My dad sent me the link to a quiz which claims to be able to help you identify your political party. Unfortunately, it's pretty short, and the ranking of the different parties can change fairly drastically just based on classifying an issue as being of medium rather than high importance. It's similar to the World's Smallest Political Quiz, and possibly a little better at not displaying an obvious bias in the questions.
I got another case of miniatures in the mail yesterday. This one was a Giants of Legend case. The one I really wanted to get was the Huge Gold Dragon figure, and fortunately I did in fact get one. Of course, I'm still missing some that I would like to have, like the Behir and the Glabrezu and there are even a few uncommons that I only have one of and would like to have more, so maybe I'll end up getting another case. Of course, I'll probably have to ask for it for Christmas, since my personal spending money is running a little low.
Well, after a couple of really long entries I think I'll end here. The family campaign is tonight and I still have some preperation to do.
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Ross
An interesting follow-up to yesterday's entry: While driving into work I found myself behind a van, the back of which was covered with bumper stickers (none of them even remotely as cool as my "Cthulhu in 2004, Why settle for the lesser evil?"). One of them was a campaign sticker for Nader, and the rest mapped out in a colorful and chaotic fashion nearly the entirety of Nader's platform. From worker's rights to environmental issues and somewhere in the middle was one which said, "Legalize Hemp and Let the Trees Grow!" and I remembered that there is at least one issue that I agree with Nader on.
One of the comments brought up the idea of letting the third party candidates into the debates. I couldn't agree more. In fact, it was watching a debate among the third party candidates on CSPAN back in 1996 that really solidified the position I have today of only voting for third party candidates in the presidential elections. I hear that TV ratings for basically anything having to do with the actual political process are pretty low. Tossing a single third party candidate into each of the presidential debates would not only do wonders for the overall discourse, but I imagine it would be a real shot in the arm for the ratings as well.
In an interesting segue, Johnny Ramone, Punk Rocker and of all things a hardcore Republican, died today at age 55 of cancer. He was preceded in death by two other members of the band, "The Ramones." After hearing that he died, I ended up going to Dead or Alive Info, which is a great site if you've never been there. It's the definitive resource for finding out whether someone famous is still alive or not. For example, imagine if you're wondering if Arthur C. Clarke is still alive. Well, a quick check and you would discover that in fact he is still alive. Maybe my name will be on that site someday, who knows; Gary Gygax is on there.
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Ross
Well, contrary to my expectations (okay, actually it wasn't that surprising) straying into politics resulted in what I think was the most commented upon entry ever. Maybe I'll have to do all politics all the time from now on. Of course, the 800 pound gorilla of political discussion at the moment is the presidential election. In 1988 I was too young by four months to actually vote, but I was a member of the high school Republicans. I even ended up in a Bush campaign video (actually I think it was only my feet, but what kind of story is that?)
In 1992 I was in the Netherlands. I suppose I could have voted via an absentee ballot, and I could have written my novel by now, but I would have to actually have something resembling ambition for those two things to have happened. By 1996 I had figured out that my presidential vote, especially if cast for one of the two major party candidates didn't mean squat in Utah. (Slate did an Election Scorecard which showed Utah as having the highest support for Bush of any state in the Union.) So I decided my vote would be most effective if cast for a third party candidate.
In '96 I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate, who I was actually pretty impressed with. In 2000 Harry ran again, but this time I voted for Nader. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single issue where I had the same opinion as Nader, but I figured with enough votes he might increase the clout of all third parties. This year I am once again definitely not voting for one of the big two, and from what I hear the Libertarian candidate may be a joker short of a full deck (or perhaps have one joker to many).
I'm not voting for Nader again either. He had his chance to show that he was a viable third party candidate; this time I think he's just running on sheer hubris. Having eliminated those four, there's not many choices left, though checking out the State of Utah Presidential Site, it looks like we must have really lax requirements for getting on the ballot because there are a ton of candidates. Maybe I should vote for "HRM Caesar St Augustine De Buonaparte."
At this point I'm actually leaning every so slightly towards voting for the Constitution Party Candidate. I have a friend who is running for Congress on their ticket (though not in my district), and if I can vote for Nader then it should be obvious that I really have no standards.
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Ross
Today is my 365th entry. Which means, quite literally, that I've been doing this for a year. You would think that I would have improved over that time, but looking back I think some of my earliest entries were also some of the best. Like this excerpt only 12 days in:
Not only was it three hours long, but it involved marketing, sales and consultants. If you've dealt with any of these groups you know that this is a combination at least as dangerous as saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur (it is left as an exercise to the reader which group is the saltpeter). A normal meeting is like being kicked in the giblets. A three hour meeting with consultants, marketing and sales is like listening to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva argue about post-modern feminism in French. (Again, it's left as an exercise for the reader to determine which group is Cixous).
But alas, that was probably the high point and it's just been downhill from there. I figure as long as I'm headed that way I might as well go ahead and interject some political rhetoric into the blog in an attempt to alienate the rest of my readership. As I'm sure most of you know, Dan Rather did a report recently on some memos which proported to show that Bush was a complete slacker during his time in the National Guard. Well the show had barely aired before bloggers began punching huge holes in the authenticity of the memos Rather was using as the main evidence. It's this more than anything else that amuses me about the story, the fact that it was the bloggers who started the ball rolling. I think that's pretty cool. Neal Boortz has a pretty good breakdown of some of the problems with the memos. I particularly like his take on the "typewriter" CBS came up with as something which could have produced that memo.
Of course in a certain sense it's almost too obvious that the memos are forged. I mean what kind of idiot, when attempting to forge a type-written memo from the early 70's, would use a proportionally spaced font rather than a mono-spaced font like courier?
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Ross
Today I had a big deadline at my 9-5 job. Fortunately, it went about as smoothly as I think it's ever gone, so that was a welcome surprise. I only lasted till about around midnight on Friday; fortunately they were just about done so I didn't end up missing much. We were finishing up Atonement, one of the adventures off DireKobold. We were doing the final two encounters, which were particularly ill-suited to a group of D20 Modern characters. The first was a couple of Bone Golems, so you can imagine how effective bullets are against them, but then it got even worse when the next encounter turned out to be ghosts. Three rounds into twiddling my thumbs is about the time I decided to head home.
I finally did get a chance to play the miniature game with my kids over the weekend. I selected about 20 low point cost miniatures and had my kids put together a 30 point army. Then I put together a 30 point army and we went at it. I had to help them a lot with strategy. In the end, due to some questionable tactics on my part (like helping them with strategy), I lost, which caused them no end of glee, and quite frankly hurt my feelings. That's the last time I'll be doing that.
Hopefully it's not necessary to point out that last bit was sarcastic. In other news, it looks like the two Pioneer spacecraft are inexplicably slowing down. I guess theories abound, from suppositions about "Dark Matter" to wondering whether we understand gravity as well as we thought we did. It's kind of interesting to think of the Solar System as a bubble of normalcy while just outside its borders all sorts of things start to fall apart...
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Ross
Tonight for the first time in at least three months, probably four, I'm going to go play in my friend's campaign. At this point I'm pretty sure that he's inviting me just so that I'll bring my miniatures. That's okay, because if that's the case I can just leave my miniatures behind (not any rares, though) and leave early. This group has a tendency to play through until 6 am the next morning, and if I did that, my guess is that my cold/flu (not sure which yet) which I am almost over would blossom into full-blow pneumonia or something like that, knowing my luck.
I'm not sure if I've described this particular campaign before. At its core it's a multi-dimensional time travel campaign, which ends up, as you might expect, being the "jack of all trades-master of none." Most of the characters (as I recall, remember it's been several months) are D20 modern characters (I play a gunslinger) but most of the recent adventures have been fantasy, primarily because he has a great affinity for DireKobold (and in particular the dynamic scaling) so he ends up running a lot of my adventures. This is, of course, another thing which makes the campaign less enjoyable, having not merely read, but edited and wired up all of those adventures, my familiarity with them is exceptional, resulting in few, if any, surprises.
Despite these (minor) grievances, it's still quite enjoyable to play in this campaign, and I'm definitely looking forward to it or at least the first two hours of it before I'm forced to retire to my bedchambers in order to keep my consumption in check. It sucks to get old. Although I did feel like a kid at Christmas time as I opened up my case of miniatures last night. After the smoke cleared and the plastic was cleaned up, I'm still missing six of the rare figures from the archfiends expansion, but of the 6 I'm probably interested in only two or three of them, so maybe I'll just buy those of ebay, or maybe... just maybe... I've spent enough money on miniatures for the moment and I should just be content, nah...
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Ross
Well, it's official -- I'm sick. I'm just glad it happened after I got the adventure out rather than before. And of course I burned through all my time off getting ready for and attending GenCon, so I'm stuck at work. At the moment I'm working on a campaign to convince people that I'm so contagious that I should be sent home as soon as possible. So far it hasn't produced any noticeable effect. I think I need to start coughing more vigorously while I'm in the boss' office; if that doesn't work I'll have to escalate up to spewing forth actual phlegm while I cough. By the time I get to blowing my nose into his drink, I figure he'll either send me home or fire me, one of the two.
I should probably try to avoid getting fired since I was almost fired already once this week (and it's only a four-day week). Yesterday, during lunch the phone guy and I went out and bought a new CD player, to play hold music. We found one for only $13 and brought it back. He immediately went to go install it and in the process left his computer unlocked. Traditionally whenever that happens I like to send an e-mail out of their account. The phone guy is one of the few people in the company who has rights to send e-mail to "everyone" mailing list. So I composed the following message:
We have purchased a new CD player to play hold music for the phone system. Unfortunately it's a very cheap CD player. In order to not wear it out please minimize the time people are kept on hold, or if it's going to be awhile tell them to call back.
I was sorely tempted to send it out to everyone, but (wisely as it turns out) decided not to, and instead I just sent it to a few people in my group including the boss. He got a big kick out of it, but agreed with my decision not to send it out, he assured me that if I had I probably would have been fired. I guess some of the executives really don't have a sense of humor.
Finally, I thought I'd include a link to this news story on fly-powered robots. I've long thought that rather than working on anthropomophic robots they should focus instead on making a spider robot, or something like that. One would think that technology and even AI has advanced to the point where a scientist ought to be able to make a reasonable replica of a tarantula.
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Ross
So far the response to the Midnight adventure has been exceptional. It would be nice to be able to say at this point, even if it were a lie, "Get yours while they last!! There's only a few of these beautiful adventures in stock and when they're gone, they're GONE!!!" But it would not only be a lie, it would be a really, really transparent lie. Which I guess illustrates one of the disadvantages of electronic publishing; there's no urgency, no worry that the first shipment will sell out at the FLGS, no concern that you'll end up scouring Ebay looking for a copy, though I guess there's always a concern the company could go out of business and disappear... maybe I should play that angle up.
I was in working on my computer around nine o'clock last night when I realized that I was having a little trouble reading. The vision in my right eye was blurry, not right in the center but all around the edges. I have to confess that I was a little worried, though I figured it was just overwork, but not nearly as worried as my wife; she figured I was having a stroke and started asking me to squeeze her hands in an attempt to determine if one side of my body was permanently crippled. In any event, I figured if nothing else it was a signal that it was time for me to go to bed.
The first of the three cases of miniatures I ordered should arrive tomorrow, and now that I've got the Midnight Adventure out I'm planning on actually sitting down with my son and playing the actual miniature game. He's a little bit young for it, but I think he would really enjoy it. In other news it looks like the Genesis Capsule crashed, so it looks as if a $260 million dollar program might end up being all for naught.
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Ross
Well at long last the Midnight adventure is available. I told every one at GenCon that it would be around a week -- it turned out to be a little over two weeks. But of course my greatest crime was not having it available long before then. Not only is the adventure itself incredible, but the art and the cartography are probably orders of magnitude better than what you would find in your average PDF product. At the moment I'm waiting for the guys at RPGNow to approve the product before I really start putting out the announcement, but it's already available to all full subscribers and to those wishing to purchase it as a PDF. As I said time and time again, it was written by Wil Upchurch so as you can well imagine he really nails the atmosphere and the story that makes the Midnight setting so uniquely enjoyable. In any case check it out. I haven't decided whether to put a snippet of it up. I probably will eventually, but I can't imagine that "High-Level Midnight Adventure by Wil Upchurch" doesn't give you all the information you need.
In other news, I went biking for the first time in several weeks yesterday morning. I had scheduled a labor day ride with my father and brother-in-law probably a month ago, so even though I felt crunched for time and completely unprepared for such a demanding physical activity, I still went ahead and did it. I'm glad that I did (even if it did probably keep me from making my Labor Day deadline for Midnight), though I'm still very much feeling the aftereffects today. Actually, for most of the ride out and back I felt pretty good, the unfortunate problem with the ride is that my parents' house (which is where we started from) sits on top of this massive hill, so after biking for 33 miles you have this monstrosity waiting for you at the end. I'm not ashamed to admit that without exaggeration I was audibly whimpering by the time I hit the top of that last hill.
Well, it looks like in the time it's taken me to write this that the RPGNow link has been approved and I even have my first sale (of just the adventure), which is how I found out that the link was active, so I better wrap this up and start making some announcements on the various and sundry message boards. Until tomorrow.
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Ross
Well, I woke up at around 4:45 this morning. Generally I would be able to fall back asleep, but my youngest child, who is still breastfeeding and has a cold which prevents her from breathing through her nose was laying next to me and making sounds like a steam powered pump 25 years into a fruitless attempt to drain the swampland. I did try to get back to sleep, but I have a lot on my mind and I had woken up enough that my brain had kicked into gear and after about 15 minutes I gave it up and decided to head into work early. Which was fortunate, because about a half hour after I got in, the deluge started. Don't get me wrong, I love the rain, but I took my Eberron book into work today and I'd hate to ruin a $40 book because I forgot my jacket.
I was hoping to get a fair amount done yesterday evening, but for some reason I decided it was a good time to download and install Windows XP Service Pack 2. With my cable modem it actually didn't take that long to download. It took an equal if not greater amount of time to install, and then once it was installed there was a whole bunch of stuff you had to configure and set, so in between that and a 7:00 meeting, I didn't accomplish a whole lot. Hopefully, the weekend will be better.
Speaking of download speeds, it appears that the record for transfer speed has been broken: 6.63 gigabits/second, or a full-length DVD movie every four seconds. I wonder when that will be available in my neighborhood?
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Ross
The fall TV season is starting to kick off. The season premiere of Scrubs was on Tuesday. I almost missed it, and if my observant wife hadn't pointed it out I'm sure I would have. Season 2 of the Apprentice is also starting next week. And yes, you guessed it, if I have to resort to talking about TV the well really must be dry.
I'm not sure if it's a mild form of ADD or if it's some other horrible psychological problem, but I find that it's easier to work (though not necessarily faster) if I have the TV on. Of course, if it's actually something engaging like Nova then it slows me down too much. The ideal TV program is something that I have already seen before or something that doesn't require I pay attention every minute. In this respect, Fear Factor is nearly ideal. It's pretty sad that that's what I'm reduced to watching, but I find the wall of sound, images and other stimuli helps take the edge off.
As long as we're on the subject of TV, Ken Jennings, the winningest Jeopardy player ever, returns on the 6th. I think Utah has gotten as much press off him as just about anything else this year. The big speculation among fans is how he will end up being defeated. I read an article which said that it had already happened (the shows are pre-recorded) but maybe they were just talking about the summer re-run break. If I were the producer of Jeopardy I would start doing shows live, but that's just me.
Well, there you go -- another entry; I think this one was an all-time low in terms of appeal, but they can't all be great (which begs the question, have any been great?)
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross
I've been meaning to mention this for a while, but the other day I did pick up the Eberron setting. Yet another purchase I hadn't initially intended to make, but ended up making anyway. The biggest and most deeply buried reason was probably jealousy. See, Eberron was the setting that won the setting search contest, which I assume some of you may remember (if not that's why I included a link). You may even remember that I entered the contest, and in my own very prejudiced opinion, my setting submission was unbelievably exciting and cool, thus I expected that since my setting was rejected the setting which did end up getting picked would have to be so unbelievably incredible that the mere mention of its name would be enough to make me camp-out overnight in front of the local game store, trample skinny nerds and overweight virgins alike, just to be the first in my town to have it. But that's not what happened when the setting was finally announced.
One problem is that, as far as I can tell, no one has been able to sum up the appeal of the setting in a single sentence, which is interesting since that was the very first thing which needed to be included in the initial setting search entry. In fact, I had really hoped that they would reprint the one page Eberron entry in the book, but perhaps what they ended up with was so far removed from the initial pitch that it would have been meaningless. In any case, back to my original point: I finally broke down and bought the setting, and it turns out that it is pretty cool, though I still have yet to feel like I have a grasp on a single unifying theme, and maybe there doesn't need to be a single unifying theme, but I think it would help, particularly in the case of introducing new players to the setting. With Midnight I can say, okay imagine Tolkien's Middle Earth, only Sauron won; there's no phrase like that with Eberron.
In any case, enough about Eberron. I did end up winning one of the miniature auctions on ebay, and last night I sat down with my wife and figured out how I could buy a case of all three expansions (one down, two to go), so that's the plan. Of course, those devils at Wizards of the Coast just keep putting out expansions, so it looks like I may be indentured for quite awhile. What I need to do is find someone else with the habit so that I can trade with them and help even out my collection.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross