Obsolete Your Idols

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.