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.