Obsolete Your Idols

Fair elections, verified voting, Bev Harris. Are you paying attention? This is important.

I love Mozilla's tabs. Now I can love them even more.

But the patient died. This page of game design post mortem comes to me from Doug in response to a query of mine about how I might learn about game design for computers and consoles. Here's an itch I've an urge to scratch. Nothing tangible enough to be on my TODO list, yet, but it's starting up again.

Interesting.

One word review of Stephenson's Quicksilver: Disappointing.

Two word review of Quicksilver: Sorely disappointing.

Ah, well. Maybe it'll be redeemed by the next book but my take on this first volume in the Baroque Cycle is that it's a whole lot of words used to avoid getting to the point of the story, whatever that might be. I was hoping for pirates, for a sense of resolution of any sort, for the questions to fewer than the answers by the time I got to the end of it.

Prof.Membrane pointed me at this page of quantum gravity resources. The only recent contact I've had with even reasonably current physics was reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe a year or so ago. I gather quantum loop gravity is something of a rebuttal to string theory. Bon appetit.

Gilgul is a language extension I need to get my mitts in to. From this kaffe page about other projects extending and opening Java which has this to say about it:

• Gilgul is a compatible extension of Java.
• It introduces a new view on the concept of object-identity.
• It allows for dynamic object replacement by simultaneously rerouting a set of references as an atomic operation.
• It thus provides means for unanticipated software evolution.

It's that last lovely bit that has me most excited. I turned this up for roaming around in neighborhood of C & Java porting and colinking.

I've had a Sanyo SCP-4900 for a while now. I originally chose that model from Sprint PCS specifically because of a page I found while searching the web for "Linux" and "cell phone". My dream was to have a laptop, running Linux, and using some sort of no-hotspot-needed wireless.

It took me this long to actually get it working because the data cable I needed is seemingly extremely elusive. I couldn't find the original manufacturer or even most of the knock-offs available online. In the end, I found this. It arrived today, so I went back to Nate Carlson's page, excerpted below for people who don't like to click away from the story so far. You can go to his page for the straight poop.

Nate says:

I chose Boxwave because it was actually in stock at the time I ordered, but it was possibly a net win additionally because it is retractable and can work as a charger for the phone, which helps someone like me who forgets to plug the phone in to recharge when not in use. But those factors might not matter to you if you chose to reproduce this.

Nate says:

My plan gives me Unlimited Vision for $15/month. Until I score a laptop, I don't anticipate using this enough for it to matter. So even if my Vision isn't genuinely Unlimited, I don't care enough right now to track it down.

Nate says:

This step worked like a dream. I had built my last kernel with modular support for all kinds of USBisms with the expectation I'd be adding my USB Happy Hacker Keyboard to this system and eventually wanting to test my phone's USBability.

Nate says:

I had to cd to /dev and run ./MAKEDEV usb to get /dev/ttyACM* nodes but that was a no-brainer. My Debian stable chroot shows signs of having had the right devices but not my Debian unstable desktop. No big whoop.

Nate says:

/etc/ppp/peers/sprint:

# You usually need this if there is no PAP authentication
noauth
# The chat script (be sure to edit that file, too!)
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/sprint"
# Set up routing to go through this PPP link
defaultroute
# Use remote DNS
usepeerdns
# Default modem
/dev/ttyACM0
# Connect at high speed
230400
local
novj

pppconfig added these options for me:
noipdefault
ipparam sprint

and I put in the novj and usepeerdns as suggested in Mr. Carlson's script.

Nate says:

/etc/chatscripts/sprint:
TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT           '\nERROR\r'
ABORT           '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT           '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
''              \rAT
TIMEOUT         12
OK              ATD#777
TIMEOUT         22
CONNECT         ""

Mine looks more like this because of pppconfig's output. I ignored the comments about not removing the comments because I don't intend to retune it with pppconfig. Minimalism rules.

# Shannon's chatscript
ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' ABORT VOICE ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' 
ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE' ABORT 'NO ANSWER' ABORT DELAYED
'' ATZ
TIMEOUT     12
OK-AT-OK "ATDT#777"
TIMEOUTE    22
CONNECT ''

But other than superficial differences, it seems to be about the same. I added in the TIMEOUTs, because pppconfig didn't.

Nate says:

TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT           '\nERROR\r'
ABORT           '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT           '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
''              \rAT
TIMEOUT         12
OK      "ATZ"
OK      "ATE0V1"
OK      "AT+IFC=2,2"
OK              ATD#777
TIMEOUT         22
CONNECT         ""

My ping times look like this.

binder@fool:~$ ping -v 68.28.33.136
PING 68.28.33.136 (68.28.33.136): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=0 ttl=251 time=350.5 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=1 ttl=251 time=530.0 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=2 ttl=251 time=393.9 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=3 ttl=251 time=532.7 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=4 ttl=251 time=350.6 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=5 ttl=251 time=533.2 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=6 ttl=251 time=410.1 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=7 ttl=251 time=532.3 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=8 ttl=251 time=539.8 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=9 ttl=251 time=704.5 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=10 ttl=251 time=494.5 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=11 ttl=251 time=683.2 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=12 ttl=251 time=433.0 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=13 ttl=251 time=640.6 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=14 ttl=251 time=474.7 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=15 ttl=251 time=613.5 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=16 ttl=251 time=390.3 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=17 ttl=251 time=582.1 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=18 ttl=251 time=413.0 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=19 ttl=251 time=551.9 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=20 ttl=251 time=357.3 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=21 ttl=251 time=514.2 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=22 ttl=251 time=390.3 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=23 ttl=251 time=535.0 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=24 ttl=251 time=333.9 ms
64 bytes from 68.28.33.136: icmp_seq=25 ttl=251 time=450.6 ms

So it looks pretty comparable here in Shoreline.

Or, rather, kissing. Kind of a sweet sight, seeing all those famous people kissing for our edification. Kind of a sweet site, as well.

Crypto-Gram reminded me of this page. No real commentary to add. It's just kind of neat.

I wrote a stupid bash script to automate some of the things I found myself doing time and again as part of the process of publishing blogs.

#!/bin/bash

# publish by Shannon Prickett (binder@manjusri.org)
# Promote a .tst to a .txt for Blosxom to grab.
# $Id$

declare -a TARGETS

BASEDIR=/scratch/www/blosxom
BLOSXOM=/usr/lib/cgi-bin/blosxom
PASSWORD="suuuuuure"
ARGS="-password=${PASSWORD} -quiet=1 -all=1"
SEDSCRIPT=${BASEDIR}/transforms

BASENAME=/usr/bin/basename
DIRNAME=/usr/bin/dirname
FIND=/usr/bin/find
ISPELL=/usr/bin/ispell
MV=/bin/mv
RM=/bin/rm
SED=/bin/sed

TARGETS=`${FIND} ${BASEDIR} -type f -name \*.tst`

for FULLFILE in ${TARGETS[@]}
    do
        echo "Found target: ${FULLFILE}"
        FILEPATH=`${DIRNAME} ${FULLFILE}`
        FILENAME=`${BASENAME} ${FULLFILE} .tst`
        WORKFILE="${FILEPATH}/${FILENAME}.sed"
        DESTINATION=${FILEPATH}/${FILENAME}.txt
        ${ISPELL} -h -x $FULLFILE && ${MV} ${FULLFILE} ${WORKFILE}
        ${SED} -f ${SEDSCRIPT}  ${WORKFILE} > ${DESTINATION} &&
            ${RM} ${WORKFILE}
    done

echo "Publishing to site."
${BLOSXOM} ${ARGS}
echo "All done."

You'll notice that I took perverse joy in abstracting all my executables to variables and that while I intended to check it in to CVS, I haven't yet done so and that the sed I use doesn't allow inplace editing. I had originally envisioned writing a Makefile which would let me do all this jazz but that turned out to be overkill and I was spending more time guarding against things I didn't want being done than I was writing things that I did want done, so bash saved some of my hair.

Speaking of sed, here's a subset of that transforms file I use to allow me to mark up my blog entries with lazy tags instead of typing the freaking URL every time for things I often reference. If I were very smart, I'd have some way to automatically extend this. It was, however, The Simplest Thing Which Could Possibly Work.

[transforms excerpt removed until I extend publish to entity-tize my html on request so that I can actually show what it does]

I fully expect to add more transforms and perhaps even more exciting sed operations, especially if Crag does the heavy lifting for me by doing his proposed STL-engine-in-sed.

I love Unknown Armies. It is a fine, fine RPG.

So in my usual quest to be the kind of compleatist who buys everything for it, I picked up the last 1st Edition supplement, I didn't yet have, Weep. I'll try to describe it in terms which will inspire you to go pick up something from Unknown Armies because, really, I think it's that good.

This has six scenarios. Like One Shots, you probably won't want to use all of them. You shouldn't want to use them all in the same campaign, unless you're going for that psychotic surrealist flavor that some people may enjoy. But there's a lot of fodder to pull for any kind of UA campaign from this. Here, I'll even list them and what I might suggest you could take away from it. People reading this who may play in games I run should remember that nothing is true and everything is forbidden.

• A Few of My Favorite Things -- This is John Tynes, a quick drop-in political Dadaist commentary. Good for a dream like sense of the world with some satire embedded in surrealism. Probably any character with experience with America could fit in here and the situations faced are amenable to multiple approaches [fleeing in terror will almost always work, if nothing else] in problem solving. This is quite good and abbreviated, leaving the GM lots of space to add their own meat to the skeleton.
• Swap Meet -- This is Rick Neal, a longer narrative to thread against your 'normal' campaign. Probably not something I'd start a campaign with but definitely I'd have in mind when starting a campaign. Lots of really messed up GMCs, lots of cool imagery to swipe, some fascinating concepts. It's about a place where anything can be bartered for and the kinds of people who want to go there and what they do when they get there. Great for feeding your PCs a Maguffin or letting them escape a nasty situation ... by seeking out a nastier one. Yum. Good stuff, here.
• Drink to That -- This is Greg Stolze, a sequel to one of the standard UA campaign adventures of sorts. It's event triggered, by your ongoing campaign and may not even appear to be an adventure until the culmination. This one is sneaky and subversive and just right. It's a quiet bomb going off underneath you.
• The Green Glass Grail -- This is Chad Underkoffler, a potentially self-contained side-trip or possibly part of an ongoing campaign. It's got a really fascinating structure, which allows a GM to build the adventure from a checklist of pieces of the jigsaw, including choosing the villain of the piece so you could run it differently for different groups. Some fun street level GMCs here, nothing too abracadabra [other than the grail], and quite a bit of meat to tie it to the usual groups players find themselves entangled with in UA [ The New Inquisition, the Sect of the Naked Goddess, the Sleepers, and especially Mak Attax ]. This one is rich with elements to pull out but has a holistic unholy joy to it.
• Stoon Lake -- This is Greg Stolze, again. Clever, with some great GMCs and an under-visible flavor of UA is represented here. Some great GMCs to shanghai from this story in to others if the scenario doesn't float the GM's boat. It's all about a Bigfoot attack. I like Bigfoot. I used to seek out news stories about Bigfoot. Here's the last one I read. This scenario is the sleeper hit for me; I didn't expect to like it as much as I did.
• Garden Full of Weeds -- This is James Palmer, and is either the weakest or the strongest of the lot. I still can't decide. It's a little less focused than some of the others [even the checklist of TGGG] but contains some of the most disturbing elements because it targets things which scare me and piss me off in real life. Rich with huge pieces you could rip out and drop in to your own campaign but which mutually reinforce the creepiness of this scenario. I think I'd need a very particular group of players to run this for to get the full effect of it but the payoff for that would be tremendous [much like one of the ways to handle character death in Over the Edge, which would not work for most groups -- if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about and if you haven't, I dare not spoil it].

Unlike some of the other supplements I've picked up over the years for Unknown Armies, nothing in this one has been incorporated in to the second edition. Not that I mind, I'm just saying. I say buy everything you can find for this game and run it and play it and give yourself a nice thoroughly mindfucking. You deserve it!

I also picked up the second edition rules, because I saw two NEW supplements for second edition Unknown Armies I intend to treat myself to very soon, but that'll wait until another review, after I've finished reading it.

I am extremely delighted by Bone and have loved every bit of it I've read. This most recently includes Rose, written by Jeff Smith and illustrated by Charles Vess.

My goodness. What to say? It's pretty. It's a great prelude, with hints of the future storyline. But it also stands alone. So you don't need to have read the rest of Bone to dig this. I don't want to spoil any bits of this for anyone so suffice to say that if you like stories with princesses and dragons, you'll like it. If you don't like this, there's something wrong with you. Get with the program, monkeypants!

You've doubtlessly already seen this if you're the kind of person who likes this kind of thing. I saw it a while back but forgot to spread the meme. Mmmm, sweet, sweet Perl.

So Crag has a friend and this friend bought blogshares and I somehow feel like I should know something about that but I don't think I do, mostly because the University of Iowa's Politics Exchange wasn't nearly as cool as I thought it could have been and since then, stock exchanges don't hold the allure for me they once do. But now you know; I know someone who knows someone who bought a website that some people care about.

Oh, this rant gave me a big smile and the place I fond it made me smile even more. It's like other places but without all the tedious commentary and discussion. Super sweet.

Well, this is quite pretty and might almost be worth going to the dark side for. Or I could wait a while and there will probably be something similar for the other dark side. It's unlikely to manifest soon in my favorite window manager trimmings because my favorite window manager doesn't have any trimmings.

It Just Works.

Vylar pointed me at this article about Wal-Mart. Evidently the fine folk at Business Week have noticed that being a monopoly has downsides to it as well as the delirious advantages of being able to rape customers at will. Oh, well. I suppose I should be glad that some small notice is being taken of the havoc wreaked by Wal-Mart.

I got pointed to this site, which aims to make obvious how boldly and badly the current occupant lied about his stance on HIV/AIDS research and to try to see that the person awarded the office in 2004 will do something about the ongoing world-wide epidemic. I guess they'll have actual candidate responses to their survey in January, so check back, then.

I've got a new [one year span] gnupg key.

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Keyid: b723ee81 if you want to get it from a keyserver.

Moulin Rouge could have been a pretty good movie. It wasn't. It could have been a great musical. It wasn't. As it was, it was a pretty okay musical.

How could it have been a pretty good movie? Easy. Take out all the song and dance and replace it with spoken scenes to convey the same mood and information. It then becomes a pretty interesting story about a love triangle between an ambitious actress who is unknowingly dying of consumption, an idealistic writer and a villainous powerful man, set against end of the century frenzy.

How could it have been a great musical? Harder, but still doable. Take out all the songs which are covers. Write original songs and let the cast show their obvious singing talents with songs they can make their own.

But. That's not what this movie was. This movie was a hodge-podge of pop music, flashing costuming, overdoses of dancing and camp staging and fun with CGI. Distracting at best, off-putting and annoying at worst, this movie was disappointing for me mostly because of what it could have been.

War is hell.

World war is mass insanity.

Blackadder in world war is delightful.

Sort of.

So this season of Blackadder focuses on World War I, the Great War. A time of bleak and horrifying pointless death and thus perfect backdrop for black humor.

It returns several favorites from season two, including Rik Mayall as Flasheart, this time an airborne fighting ace; Miranda Richardson, barely recognizable out of her Queenie costume; most excitingly, Tim McInnerny returns as a regular, no longer the foppish Lord Percy Percy but now the vindictive and high-strung Darling.

Now, this changes the dynamic. With season two, the only season I've seen before, Blackadder was thwarted by the impersonal malice of the monarchy and clergy as well as the bumbling of his henchmen. Here, he's actively being persecuted by the flunky of his superior. Which changes the flavor and causes me to root more for Blackadder. Not only is he twenty yards from men who hate him impersonally and have large munitions, he's under the command of someone influenced by a personal antagonist of his.

There's quite a bit of fun with Baldrick's bodily secretions, and sex and money remain the comedy elements they've always been, but the dark humor is substantially more dark for the setting and the end of the season was bleak and sobering for me. If you watch this on DVD, be sure to check out the footnotes, as well.

I know, everyone has already seen Jesus Christ Superstar. But I never had. I hadn't even heard more than one song from it. I'd heard people rant and rave about it for years without having any especial interest in it. I had quite enough of Jesus when I was a kid.

That said, the songs in this are infectious. It's a week since I saw it and I'm still singing snippets from it. I saw the 1973 version so I can't compare it to other versions. I've never seen it on stage.

If I were able to carry the part off, I really liked the songs and role of Judas Iscariot. My second choice would be the Caiaphas with Herod a close third. I'm more the Herod look and sound, I suppose. Casting in general on this was amazing, specifically that of Jesus, Judas, Mary and the Caiaphas. On several occasions, I forgot they were acting and got caught up in the narrative.

The framing of it, with the crew taking a bus out in the desert, doing the show and then leaving at the end [all save one] was a nice touch and helped invite me in beyond the fourth wall. I was caught up by the tale and enjoyed myself immensely.

No response here to this interpretation of the martyrdom of Christ; if you really want someone else's opinion, ask a Christian. But if you want some catchy songs and absorbing acting, this is pretty spiffy.

So if you've known me for any length of time, you'll have realized I like porn. Pr0n, erotica, smut, et cetera. This includes comic books of what is laughably termed an 'adult nature'. Don't get me wrong, these are quite often awesome, hilarious, titillating and stunning. But I was far more in to them long before I was legally termed an adult.

Probably my favorite artist is consistently Michael Manning and I've got most of the books of his from nbm Amerotica. The latest to fall in to my hands is In A Metal Web II. It appears to be part of a sequel to Hydrophidian, itself a sequel to The Spider Garden.

So, the question you want answered first is: is it hot? If you like black and white fetish sex of beings of ambiguous, fluid gender, yes. Yes, it is.

Less important questions:

• Does it make sense? Not really. But aside from Tranceptor, none of his works make much narrative sense.
• Can I enjoy this book without reading any of the others? Of course. You're not reading it for the story.
• Is there anything other than kinky inhuman sex in this book? Yes. There is some political intrigue, some involuntary drug use and some alien tek.
• Who is this book best for? Someone who likes sex and coloring books, though the paper stock is lousy for crayons. If the binding is similar to past Manning books from the Amerotica line, after four or five readings, pages will be coming out, suitable for marker coloring and putting up on the refrigerator of your mum's house.
• Is there anything to not like about this book? It's too short. It feels like the thinnest of his Amerotica work.

If you've read Spider Garden and Hydrophidian and [one presumes] In a Metal Web, you'll probably want this. If you're asking yourself, "Why have I never heard of this Michael Manning fellow?" you're better off picking up Tranceptor, first, or even Cathexis. The former is a co-created work of science fiction with pony girls and lethal psychic hot chicks which possesses the present flaw of being the only work of the story, and the latter is a collection of short stories which possesses the flaw that they make no sense, though they're awfully pretty to look at and usually a good litmus test for his stuff. If you find them hot, you'll enjoy much of the rest of his work.

Before I get in to the rest of this review, I want to make sure you realize that if you read this one, you shouldn't just read it. Look at the artwork on 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Look at every freaking panel, follow the stories happening only in pictures, see how the pictures and words play together. The dialogue is strong, meaningful, impacting. But the dialogue is only half the story. The expressions of characters reacting, the small events that twine around the centerpiece, it's exquisite.

Now. Gushing aside. Years ago I picked up 100 Bullets #1 and flipped through it and had such a visceral reaction that I put it on my pull list and I kept getting it in single issues for years. But I never again read it. I couldn't tell you why. I suppose it was a lower priority than my job or the people I spent time with or the ways I wasted my time. During my renewed efforts to convert my single issues to tpbs, I picked this trade up and now I am very, very sorry that I didn't actually read 100 Bullets in all that time I was buying it.

I like dark, twisted, noir stories where the happiest possible ending is surviving another day of your shitty life. That's what this title offers. There's a sinister conspiracy underneath, alluded to from the beginning of this book, but that's not the story I'm reading. I'm reading about the choices between family and honor that Dizzy Cordova faces. I'm reading about Lee's attempts to win back the life that was stolen from him. I'm reading about people trying to do right up to their waist in a sewer. It's never easy but it's often poignant.

This tradebound collects the start of the series [the first five issues and a story from Vertigo: Winter's Edge] and is a visually rewarding, emotionally compelling read. No super-powered goofs in spandex, here. Just realistic people facing tough choices and armed to the teeth with the ability to do physical and emotional damage to themselves and those around them. Go read this one. Don't wait like I did.

Sooo, if you've jumped in to Preacher late, buying up later tradebounds or not even read it yet, just had someone recommend it to you [and here it belatedly occurs to me that I owe Dan Wojcik a debt of gratitude for first telling me I had to read Preacher; thanks, Dan!] you will at some point wonder what the hell is going on here. Ordinarily I would recommend one start at the very beginning, read until the end, and then you'll know as much as you're going to know about what the hell was going on there.

Barring annotations, of course.

But if you think you want to read Preacher but don't want to commit to hunting up the first tpb, you might want to start with the fourth, Preacher: Ancient History. The book collects three stories, originally published as Specials. So they're not part of the published run of Preacher, proper. But they are part of the story. In point of fact, these are Story Before the Story works. So you don't need to have read them. You can get the meat of Preacher off the run itself. But if you really want to crack open the bones and suck the marrow, here's a good thick femur of it.

It's got Saint of Killers, the biography of that ominous presence. Reading this won't spoil any of the regular title for you and it's awfully pretty to look at in parts [and gory in places, sometimes the same places] and has some nice riffs on the fictional West colliding with the genuine West. A fun read.

It's got the Story of You-Know-Who, which is prettier to look at, but more revolting to think about, if one has reached the Kids These Days stage of life. A tale of squandered youth and bad decisions and climbing up out of the wreckage of one's own life. Charming in places but not as interesting for me as Saint of Killers. Yes, I really am recommending a story about cowboys over a story about teenagers. But that's okay, you get both for the same cover price.

Additionally, you get the gem of the piece, Good Old Boys! Now, if you read Preacher, you already know and hate Jody & T.C. in equal measure to adoring those lovable inbred muppets of gleeful immorality. They're funny and disgusting and this story is about them meeting up with a girl in trouble and her would-be protector. There's lots of brutality, lots of over the top mayhem and lots of laughs. I just love rustic perverts and this story has at least two of them.

Read this one if you don't know anything about Preacher and don't want to commit to the regular run without knowing something about it or if you've already read the regular one but ignored the Specials. It's full of death and, in the last story, sex.

Here's a good, dark comic book full of grubby successes and glorious failures. Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing.

You can find itemized summaries of the nerdy details on the web, though the page is theoretically about Swamp Thing. The continuitypages seem to be one of the few good resources for people late to the comic reading game, so I'm glad for the work presented there.

But I didn't know any of the things documented there before I read this comic book and after found them out, it doesn't really change my sense of this comic book. Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing is a nice set of stories. I think the core story line here is about the degradation of the angel Gabriel. It might not be. The core story line might be about John Constantine's failure to maintain his romantic relationship and subsequent descent in to despair. But there are other story lines which cross over these two threads with flourishes and fancies.

There are themes of family and friendship and disappointment, with bits of magic to remind you this is a fantastical narrative, not some kind of soap opera, that you're reading. Angels get laid. Swamp Thing accelerates the growth of a pot plant. There's a talking rabbit, a disappearing lesser god, an immortal bastard gets his head chopped off. That kind of thing.

In the final assessment, it's a fun book with a pretty look but if you haven't heard of Hellblazer by now, you're probably going to have more fun reading Preacher. If this were your first exposure to Hellblazer, you might think it's all about failure and despair. That wouldn't do.

Here's a site about the SCO case where they attack the GPL, the Constitution, IBM, God, the Flag, John Wayne, et alia. Fuck SCO. Fuck them right in the ear.

Go. Read. Learn. Think. Act.

This dmidecode thing looks ambiguously useful. I just can't think of anything I need it for, yet.

So let's say you're using some other operating system but you want to get to where you can use Linux. Well, the folks at IBM have a roadmap. Looks pretty decent.

DWN pointed me at this project, which wants to unify the forces or something like that. There's an interview with some people from that project here which has some food for thought if you worry about things like being able to use an OS which doesn't suck. The future of X, that sort of thing.

Setting up this blog took a small amount of effort because it's hosted on a Debian stable system. That meant building the blosxom deb in a stable chroot [debootstrap is incredibly handy for something like this] and then installing it. It has minimal dependencies and the only thorny one I fulfilled using equivs to tell apt not to worry about giving me an httpd.

Then I wrote flavour files so blosxom would generate two variants. publicfile doesn't know how to handle .xml files so that became .text=xml and I added a .text=html for xantha and other readers who prefer an inverted color scheme. [Yes, I do realize the mouse-over color in the xanthatized version is horrible and I will fix that soon, it's a legacy of my simple minded inversion.] An hourly cronjob parses the .txt files I write [I long ago got past the suffix == filetype mapping but it was the blosxom default so I use the convention] and outputs them in the tree where I told publicfile to serve from in the three flavors I want.

The biggest annoyances have been in modifying my templates and the plugins I use to append / after their paths. Publicfile is adamant about wanting it there to find the index.html underneath and blosxom's default templates and the plugins I've found all neglect to do so. Of course, some plugins are absolutely unusable because they require CGI but I can live without them. Who needs writebacks, anyway?

Look who's playing the Tractor! Not to mention my very favorite family. Oh my yes.

Those of you who have been living under a rock may not realize that your votes are at risk of never being counted at all. Here are some links. You should probably at least check out the Wired ones so you can hold informed conversations with the people who retain some notion of preserving a semblance of representational democracy. You know, cranks.

• Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force Report
• Analysis of Diebold
• Story about Bev Harris
• King County is using known broken machines
• Wired article
• Another Wired article

I gather California has recently passed a law saying that their voting machines must provide a receipt to prove that a vote has been scored as desired by the voter. By 2005. Yeah. Right.

But news is boring so read these other websites which can point you at other resources.

• Bev Harris's site
• Verified Voting and other pipe dreams
• California, savior of the nation

Prof. Membrane hooked me up with another spiffy website. This is China Mieville's Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. I'm surprised at how many of these I've actually read in my aimless meanderings.

Prof. Membrane showed me beetles and the vampire squid from HELL! Also, a very pretty octopus.

I may not be smarter but I should have some really good dreams, now!

So Will's got this friend who does things like this and this and even this. I am so astoundingly jealous. It also reminded me that it's been a while since I heard from the Adbusters people.

Drew pointed me at this announcement of the revitalization of the Thieves' World stories. A reprinting of the first two anthologies, where it [from my perception] all began. All the amazing fantasy stories which got me thinking I liked fantasy after I'd been burned out on Piers Anthony. All the treachery and gritty low level grubby ambitions of wastrels, drunks and thieves. Those of you who've played in one of my D&D campaigns will recognize these themes.

We interrupt this trashy novel to share an alert from Crag with you. Namely, that the Tests-Formerly-Known-As-Unit are now Programmer Tests. So are all the testing frameworks of the form fooUnit going to have to change their names? And here you thought the phrase "unit testing" was suggestive. Now they're going to test your whole programmer.

Because I know you loved the all-seeing eye in the pyramid from the Total Information Awareness program so much the first time around, I'm sure you'll queue up to support MATRIX, the return of everything knowable about you being collated in the search for ... anomalies. But then again, what have you got to hide? You're all perfectly normal, right? Right.

I'm sure other people have had more insightful commentary on this new/old program but, frankly, it scares the piss out of me. I have everything to hide. I'm a human being. Not a rat in a cage.

Looks like LPI will let people certify in dpkg based systems as well as rpm systems. That might be pretty cool and affordable at a hundred bucks.

There don't seem to be any existing implementations of Stratego for open source platforms. So perhaps that'd make a good fun project for me. I could even swipe someone else's implementation and not have to start from scratch but, come on, what fun is THAT?

Stormagnet says I would like Under Power and I'd sure like to, but the site is freaking timing out for me. So I saw the current comic and it made no sense to me [but not in the way that Some Guy Named Paul makes no sense to me, nor even in the way that exploding dog makes non-sense to me] but more in the way that Michael Manning's Cathexis made no sense to me. Pretty pictures. Words that were seemingly the output of some mad Markov Chain generator.

So this is a reminder to myself to go back and try to read Under Power again sometime.

On many Sundays, I run sessions of what used to be called 7th Sea and is now termed Swashbucking Adventures and has thrown out their rather funny original mechanics system in favor of the ubiquitous and flavorless d20 system. Not that I'm bitter.

OK, I'm bitter. But it's only because I sank hundreds of dollars in to the CCG and RPG line. I really fell in love with the world and the system didn't get in my way. But the point is, I run this gaming session and here's some photographic proof. Shot with Heath's camphone, once again.

Update to remove bad picture links.

Laws took a class recently on doing stand-up comedy and told me these two books are very good, the first being the textbook from her class and the second being full of useful bits. I think I probably need help being more funny.

Evidently Keef has a new project, very nearly a photographic version of the Haiku Postcard project. Or not. I really have no idea. I just know that Keef has more creative ideas in a day than I think I've had in my entire life. Bastard. With Keef's brain and my beauty, I could conquer the world. Eat your heart out, Ultra-Humanite.

I suppose I could use the photobooth in nearby Tacoma to participate but, you know, why break my ongoing streak of uninvolvement? Besides, I've got NaNoWriMo coming up and that will serve nicely as my get out of anything free card.

I like the Wing Dome. Stacks and stacks of flavored, spicy wings. One more picture from Heath, this time of a plate of defeated wings. Turns out their Super Sampler of six ten sets is just right for four enormously hungry people. Not a bad way to spend forty bucks.

Updated to cut the bad picture link which was here before.

Oh, this looks like a fun project. Maybe I should go to a technical conference some day.

The last three times people have gotten together to play non-role-playing games at the house, it's been Carcassonne or one of its derivatives, with there being another variant and several expansions we've never played. The first is a representation of the real Carcassonne, with sprawling towns, winding roads, and abbeys. Both of the Rio Grande Games games which I've played have been enjoyable, highly competitive affairs. There's some element of politicking the way we play, persuading, suggesting and browbeating other players in to placing tiles in orientations and places which will benefit our own strategies. That's probably The Right Way to play, it's just amusing how heated exchanges can become over a game which is somewhat like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where a piece can be considered rightly or wrongly placed based on how many points the placement achieves for one.

The components are quite pretty, colorful and sturdy. Little wooden figures are the player's tokens, one races along the score track, the others are positioned on the expanding board in various roles, all of which involve claiming territory. The board is built as you play, using cards which are laid as tiles and much match feature-to-feature on the sides for a legal placement. There were no confusions as to what elements tiles depicted and how they were used in the game.

The rules are relatively simple and quite short. About two times through seemed to be enough for all of us to grasp gameplay with only occasional references for scoring logistics after that. The Hunters & Gatherers set has a few forward references in the rules but they're easy enough to loop around and resolve if you skim past the confusing bits on the first pass.

Here are two pictures Heath took of the game in play.

Update to remove broken image links.

Some updates today to the Blosxom instance that I use to publish these scribblings in the form of plugins, with a few local tweaks to take in to account some of the pathing crankiness of publicfile. Otherwise, it's Access Denied, ahoy! Specifically, plugins currently running are:

• breadcrumbs
• calendar
• categorytree
• seemore, of which this post is the first test
• worldpop

Probably I'll add more as needs grow; categorytree was a replacement of categorylist, as the structure of a tree seemed easier for me to navigate in. As always, it's all about me. Me, me, me.

So there's this family, the Blackadders, and they figure prominently in the history of England and the events are captured in a television show from the BBC. I've watched the second season lately a few times, with Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and the Bishop of Bath & Wells and so on. It's a bit like Wile E. Coyote with a variety of road-running targets for our hapless protagonist to chase after.

The episodes on the second season DVD are:

• Bells - Cross-dressing, homoeroticism, easy-listening parodies, this start to the season is quite a joy and nicely sets the tone for the misadventures of Lord Edmund Blackadder.
• Head - Here we find Edmund given a new position, attendant staff, and responsibility over who lives and dies. Of course he makes a mess of things through his recurring error of delegating to his minions, and has to undergo a variety of contorting impressions to attempt to retain his head.
• Potato - Sailing, eyepatches, conquest, discoveries, cannibals and a legless Tom Baker. This one is laugh out loud funny.
• Money - This episode has a cute prostitute. Some other stuff happens, including a recurring gag about unfunny practical jokes and the inability of Edmund Blackadder to hold on to any money, but the important part is that the prostitute is really cute, right down to her toes. Some jibes at the clergy of the day which seem practically prescient considering more recent Catholic scandal and hypocrisy.
• Beer - My favorite episode of the season, it's got fake breasts, drinking, and Puritans. Wicked Child!
• Chains - Season ender. Silly accents, sheep-fucking, light-hearted torture and hostage-taking and the obligatory all-fall-down ending. The blood, you see, is compulsory.

So quite fun, and the most concentrated Blackadder I'd seen in such a short span.

Vylar brought this set of mechanics suitable for roleplaying Wuthering Heights style tragedies, should that be the kind of thing you're in to. Reminds me of something lloyd or Josh would be pleased by.

This year, instead of going to ICON, I went to Bookfest. I'd never been before and it was a real treat. I saw a couple panels, the net effect of which is what I want to read Michael Gruber's Tropic of Night, and anything by Kage Baker and I now know that Bruce Schneier is just as erudite in person as he seems in prose.

I managed to escape buying only one book, an L.E. Modesitt, Jr. novel, Archform: Beauty, which I let him sell me [and autograph] largely because it sounded like an inverse Rashomon's structure. I bought a book-holding apparatus of nifty design for stormagnet and something for Vylar but nothing for Crag, since he's not really a reader, as such.

I had a splendid time, but transportation issues prevented my going for the second day, and I'd definitely recommend it to you. Yes, you. If you're reading this, you're literate enough to groove on the bookfest. You have no excuse.

After a previous false start, I took another run at James Ellroy's American Tabloid and got through it this time.

This is a thoroughly gritty angle on the run up to the JFK assassination, one of the subjects near and dear to my heart. It follows three fictional protagonists through their machinations to make a buck, seek redress for wrongs, and pursue their rendition of the American Dream. It's populated with realistic character sketches of real people, including:

• Howard Hughes
• Jimmy Hoffa
• J. Edgar Hoover
• John F. Kennedy
• Robert Kennedy
• Santo Trafficante, Jr.
• Carlos Marcello
• Jack Ruby

along with fictional support characters, as well as notables I couldn't find quick and easy links for.

It's a story of violent crime and short-sighted goals having long term ramifications. I don't know that I'd recommend it to someone who has idealized the Kennedys or who has trouble discerning fantasy from reality, but for someone who enjoyed, oh, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this should be great fun, a romp through history with sex and snideness. First Ellroy I've ever read, but certainly not my last.

After years of hearing it referenced, I sat down with The Court Jester and saw what the fuss was all about. This quirky musical comedy from 1956 has hypnosis-as-magic, silly songs, magnetism, heroic escapades, poison and, oh yes, Danny Kaye.

It's a fun romp, with lots of clever wordplay, banter, nice emotive acting, and a storyline which is one disaster for our hero after another. It's got a baby with a birthmark, a squatter on a throne, a daring highway robber, some sword fights and at least one dance routine. Fun, light-hearted romance full of twists and turns, with quotable and memorable lines which I'd heard before and now have a context for. I recommend it.

Just finished reading Work It!, as it seemed a good time to do so. Contemplating a move to the SF Bay Area means needing to look for a job and the last time out the gate, it was pretty okay but the time before that was appalling. I've picked up a lot of good tips from it, things that I used to know and things that I never really understood very well. It's highly readable, akin to an easily digested security whitepaper, with lots of examples, quotes reflecting real life experience and tips from job seekers who succeeded, and some who failed.

It's got a chapter on the all important practices of networking, how to make contacts, nurture them, help them along, and have them help you in your quest. I picked up some great tips from this and might even consider becoming sociable because of it. Being surly is more fun, obviously, but it probably doesn't endear me to others the way solicitude might.

There's some great tips for sharpening a resume, which has me aghast at the state of my resume. [No link to it, here, it's just that awful. I'll put it back up when it sucks less.] From contact information to paperweight, this is a good chapter for me. I hope to see the work I'll put in to my resume pay off, and I'm confident it can.

Interviewing is another chapter, as is salary negotiation. The basic tip comes down to, "Know what you want, and make sure everything you say and do reinforces why you should have it." But Allison Hemming goes in to much more detail, so you should probably still buy the book or at least pick it up off the shelves and riffle through it. Maybe you'll get even more out of it than I did and will have cause to wonder how I could read so many words and not remember so many of them.

Each chapter finishes with a section of things you should have learned and can immediately turn around and apply to improve your job situation.

There are chapters on being a new college graduate [I wish!] and on facing layoffs, how to not starve while looking for a job, all that good stuff. It's a bit under three hundred pages and well-organized. I'll be loaning this one out and dog-earring it.

Years ago, I fell in love with Warren Ellis's writings in Transmetropolitan and soon scurried out to pick up all of the stuff by him I could find, including the superhero team book, StormWatch. So I've had it all in single issues for the longest time. In an effort to consolidate, I've been buying tradepaper back editions so I can rid myself of the single issues.

Which brings me to Stormwatch: Force of Nature. This is the tpb covering Ellis's first story arcs on the title, though not the first tpb to be printed. Picking it up allowed me to re-read these arcs and remember what excited me so much about it in the first place. Here's an international superhuman police agency, deciding that they've had enough of running after escaping villains hollering, "Stop or I'll ... say stop again!" So the group's leader, the Weatherman, Henry Bendix, makes a number of team changes.

He fires characters who, one presumes, Ellis hated. He changes roles for characters, gives them new tasks, new responsibilities, shuffles the love stories out of the spotlight, and gets serious about making a difference. Changing the world, as it turns out, is hard work. Hard, bloody, sardonic dialogue laced work, to be exact.

I gather this tradebound is being marketed to people who didn't notice Ellis until The Authority as it touts this being the first appearance of Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor, who continue on in that title. [Yes, yes, I know that I'm one of those people who didn't notice Ellis until Transmetropolitan, put away your nerdier than thou pitchforks.] Which is fine, it's true, this is where we first meet the Spirit of the 20th Century, the girl who is electricity, as well as the God of Cities, involuntary recipient of alien organs. But there's more here than that.

There're screeds about the imposition upon the normal majority by the paranormal minority, a Nietzsche quoting ubermensch with no face, an eyeless Japanese doomsday cult, drinking, sex, poor work attitudes, the New World Order, and high order bluffs. It's a breezy little rip through the countryside with the goggles off and well worth reading, but if you're not already an Ellis fan, it probably won't make you one. So if you're looking to join the cult, start somewhere easier, like The Authority.

Saturday night at the Mars Bar, a place I've been past hundreds of times but never gone in, I had a chance to see Replicator. Before they went on, Lower Forty-Eight did four songs. Laws and Devil insisted I go.

I got there after me infecto had started and had to dash off before Freeverse were slated to go on. As it was, I ended up missing the last bus home and walking about five miles after an exhausting day.

I'd never heard anything by any of these bands but I really enjoyed it all. Noisy, messy, raucous. Of the three I saw, Replicator seemed to have the best stage presence, largely due to Conan's antics. He wanders out in to the audience, armed with a guitar or a microphone, exalts at the altar of the amplifier, leaps and convulses in the throes of some ecstasy which transcends lyricism.

Lower Forty-Eight is a three man band, like Replicator. Their set could have been longer, what I heard of it was great. Loud, sardonic and exuberant. I felt bad that I hadn't brought enough cash to buy any schwag from them. Of course, if I'd spent money on schwag and thus voided the possibility of a cab home, I'd probably have felt even more dumb, with an armload of crap, stranded at the Transit Center.

me infecto was already in full swing when I arrived and I couldn't really see or make sense of it because I was still transitioning from my mad dash to get to the venue. But I'd probably see them again. There was a simplicity to the duo's sound that seemed potentially interesting. Sorry to give them such short shrift, here; it's not them, it was me.

I don't know anything about Freeverse but I guess the Replicator guys like their work so if you like Replicator, maybe you'll like Freeverse.

Vylar also pointed me at this set of time management pages. Nothing about being able to bottle it, however.

Vylar pointed me at this history of tapestries.

Following a link from boingboing took me to doxpara which took me to the Linux Userspace FileSystem which took me to this excerpt:

You mount a gnetfs in ~/gnet. You wait a couple of minutes so it can establish its peer connections. You start a search by creating a subdirectory of SEARCH: mkdir ~/gnet/SEARCH/metallica mp3. You wait a few seconds for the results to accumulate. The you chdir to SEARCH/metallica mp3 and try a ls: surprise the files are there! You shoot up mpg123 and enjoy... You are happy.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's here...

Oh me, oh my. If someone implemented shadow-fs in it, maybe it'd get more press. Of course, it's already in Debian, so I have no excuse for not having heard of it before.

Belatedly got around to reading Clay Shirky's piece on Groups and Software, close kin to the keynote speech he gave at O'Reilly's Conference on Emerging Technology. It's got several head-smackingly duh points, explained in ways that are only so obvious because I'm looking at someone doing a better job of making them than I ever could. When developing software for group usage, there are three things you must accept about the system and four things you must design for in the system. Go read the piece yourself to get it in context. For additional insight and inspiration, here's a copy of the LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction document referenced.

Kate said John Paul Caponigro's photography would knock my socks off.

She was completely correct.

Here's an article I ran across the other day about the idea of a canonical object in Java. It's quite dated but it might serve as a leg up on OO thinking.

I keep thinking I should attend more conventions, conferences, festivals, fairs, and so forth. Along those lines, here's a calendar of things happening in my neck of the wood and here's a different calendar of Seattle specific events of all sorts. Thanks to Qrs and Drew for finding these on my behalf.

Recently joined the mailing list of the University of Washington's Linux User's Group, which reminded me of my previous interest in the Seattle Wireless project. Which reminded me to email Travis.

I need this prelude to Bone. OK, I don't need it; but I sure do want it.

Join the craze of playing golf with telescopes. You know you wanna.

PG pointed me at this site for finding out one's FICO score. Probably useful for people looking to buy a house or rob a bank or something.

Laws says I must buy TV Carnage and then I can be like the cool kids. But not, I dare say, cool. Probably just a poseur. Still.

Vylar pointed me at this book sale, which is probably the world's biggest used book sale, and occurs annually. On a similar thread, I may finally make it to the Northwest Bookfest this year.

So Stephenson's Quicksilver is out and Morris pointed me at a Quicksilver wiki, which she says she found through metafilter, which reminded me that I didn't have a link to it or even memepool from here, yet. It's true; I'm a consumer and aggregator of aggregations. The logical culmination of aggressive passive entertain fixations.

Soon, stormagnet will finish the house copy of Quicksilver and I'll get my peepers on it. Until then, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I can't even tell you if that wiki pointed at above is cool or not. I put away the tab as soon as I realized what it was.

I'm not sure why an opera about a Gypsy among the Spanish is sung in French, but I rather liked this version of Carmen.

Of course, I say that having seen no other version.

I say that unable to recall having seen any other opera.

I would not, however, say it's my favorite opera, despite its reputation as such, world-wide, in different languages. It's the story of a Gypsy and what may be her desire to die in order to atone for the damage she's wrought upon one man's life, or perhaps she's pursuing the freedom to be herself even if it kills her, or maybe she's a femme fatale, so eager to pull strings without considering the consequences, that her end is as foreordained as it is irrelevant to her decisions.

In any case, the casting for the title role was great on this version and everyone else was pretty decent. It's a film of a proper opera and so the cameras are distant from the action and it wasn't always immediately obvious to me where my attention should be. It's subtitled, but only in places where the French becomes interesting. For phrases the translator presumes everyone knows, no subtitling. That caused some disorientation. But the music is memorable and even familiar, though the only images I associate with it are Bugs Bunny cartoons of Bugs as a matador. Hardly inexplicable.

Continuing my streak of finally seeing things everyone's already seen, I recently enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate. Going in to it, I had heard it was a movie with lots of food in it. That it did. There was also tragedy, frustration, passion, love, taboo and humor. It's got a great villain in the form of the protagonist's mother, a domineering, controlling, vindictive and utterly self-assured obstacle.

In the end, it has a happy ending, assuming you consider death and fire happy. I got the feeling that this movie was more of the magic realism stuff which I seem to be encountering in piles, lately. Things happen which could be natural, could be supernatural and it's all sort of ran together with a strong thread of subjective point of view to make sure one can't really trust any of the narration.

I wasn't so keen on the haunting by the mother but I did enjoy the transformation the sister underwent when she became more like the mother in appearance, voice, and bearing. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to marry their mother, or something like that. Not exactly a funny movie or even really a fun movie, but it was moving and passionate and parts of it will stay with me.

There's a story out about a U.S. District Judge finding that the Federal Trade Commission exceeded their authority by creating the National Do Not Call Registry. I suppose the irony in a judge ruling that the group responsible for regulating trade isn't allowed to do so almost balances the subsequent aggravation at Yet Another Delay on some change to get peace and quiet. Evidently fifty million people were so delighted with an opportunity, at last, to opt out of the use of their time and phone to try to sell them things that they leaped at the chance to escape that. Do you think this might indicate an industry desperately in need of some regulation?

I was pointed at this story by PG.

I recently had a chance to see The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of Shakespeare [Abridged]. Thirty-seven plays, over one hundred fifty sonnets, three men and a dizzying array of condensations. It really works well.

Starting off with Romeo and Juliet, including an intermission, and culminating in Hamlet, it's well worth the time to watch. Clearly, these guys know their stuff. Watching it on DVD, there are even some amusing extras, such as video footage of the first ever performance of the play. It's a breakneck paced tour through the plays of Shakespeare.

Time is saved by consolidating all of his comedies into a single convolute narrative.

The culmination involves the kind of tomfoolery with Hamlet you'll enjoy if you're a fan of Stoppard's Fifteen Minute Hamlet. All in all, a cute silly abuse and homage of The Bard, all at once. It seems they're touring with other shows, as well. Probably worth the price of admission.

In keeping with the intention of doing something with the ways I'm allocating my time, here's a review of the book I just finished, Collected Novellas, which contains three Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novellas:

• Leaf Storm -- This opens the collection and is, I believe, Marquez's first novella. It rotates between four points of view, a grandfather, a mother, a son, and some sort of disconnected floating perspective. It skips back and forth through time and it focuses tightly on details which seem unrelated while glossing over details which might answer questions I, as a reader, had. In short, it was very annoying for me to try to read it as a story. Once I gave that up and just read it for the words, it's quite pretty. It's like a poem which is communicating most through negative space, the words not said in it. That's actually my favorite form for a poem to take and this novella has that feel to it.
• No One Writes to the Colonel -- This is a sad story about sad old people who live in a sad village and are raising a rooster. The Colonel of the story reminded me a lot of my maternal grandfather in temperament. He's stubborn and dignified and persists in the face of danger to himself and his loved ones. The village the story is set in reminds me a lot of my hometown, if it were located in South America and subject to violent political upheaval. This story made more sense to me than the first one, but it was still quite a downer. There's a lot of hard luck scrabble going on here and that was an unpleasant reminder of my childhood. But the prose is quite nice and so this story is a good read for people who like words for the sake of words.
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- This was the work I checked this book out of the library for the purpose of reading on the recommendation of Vylar. All in all, this was my favorite story in this work. It's about a guy who's killed, obviously enough. The story is the efforts of the narrator to reconstruct the events surrounding the death of the protagonist, with a sort of he-said she-said and distorted through years of memory effect to the efforts. At this point, an informed critic would probably compare this story in some way to Rashomon. Unfortunately, I've never seen it or read the works it's taken from, so you'll have to fill in your own comparison here. There's a lot of good description in this novella and some quick, concise characterizations, capturing a multitude of attitudes and behaviors in short passages. It's also got a rather nice little love story inside, with a touch I really liked [the thousands of letters, carefully organized ... but all unopened] but which is a tangent from the narrative though arguably the point of the story. It's got a few gory bits but well worth the read. No one really seems to come off in a good light, here, and there's culpability aplenty to be handed out for the murder which is the cornerstone of this story.

Translators on this one were Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein. Yes, it's true. I'm woefully monolingual, though it's distinctly possible I could have tackled a Spanish version of this, with dictionary at hand. It's been a decade since anyone expected me to speak the language of another country. Any polyglot tendencies have been along the course of programming languages in the interim. There's no foreword or afterword from the translators so it's not easy for me to discern what elements are their voice and what is Marquez's original intent. There do certainly seem to be typesetting issues with at least the first novella, where a point of view switches mid-passage when other such switches have been presaged by typographical devices.

I guess this is representative of the genre of magical realism, a phrase I'd always associated with Tim Powers, quite wrongly. To me, magical realism meant a sense of the orderly fantastical, a magic with a logic beneath it, perhaps not known but certainly practicable. Do A, B, C, expect D, not from understanding the process, but simply from trial and error evidence of consequence. I gather genuine magical realism is more like telling a fantasy story and disguising it as modern prose, so that the outlandish elements don't jar with the real world setting of the work. That's okay, too. But I think I still prefer whatever Tim Powers might be writing in to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in general. I guess I like to know when someone's pulling my leg.

Vylar sent me this link on Friday, but I didn't get a chance to look it over until today.

It is, in fact, fairly freaking awesome. A simulator for artificial life, a magnitude more interesting than RoboCode and not only is it a wizard in the kitchen, it's a snappy dresser.

I rather think I'm going to have to spend some time playing with this. I especially enjoy that there's source available.
I'm sick of software which supports both kinds, Windows and MacOS.

So here's an interesting trio of sisters. As it is said, "One loved money, one loved power, and one loved China". A remarkable family, with motivated women who achieved notable destinies. Curiously little seems to have been written about their male siblings. The Furies of the Guillotine, the Greek furies, Charlie's Angels, the Dixie Chicks, everyone loves a trio of powerful and dangerous women.

Interestingly enough, the one most renowned for cleverness is said to have loved power. I suppose power does trump both money and China. Or to remap it, scissors triumph over both stone and paper. Thanks to PG for the pointer.

Continuing her quest to educate me, Laws has now pointed me at an excerpt from a forthcoming book by David Foster Wallace, who you might remember from such thick and meaty works as Infinite Jest. It's a personal failing that I can only start David Foster Wallace books while on airplanes but that doesn't mean I find him inaccessible. I'll just have to drag myself kicking and screaming in to his mad world.

Laws pointed me at an interesting article about Murphy's Law. John Paul Stapp just went from a "who?" to a "whoa." at supersonic speeds.