Designated Import

Help! (post by Alana)

2011-01-11T11:03:00.001-06:00

Okay...somebody needs to help the southern chick with the butter tart issue.

I made them Friday night. A huge mess, flour everywhere; I had a crust-wrestling match, the whole shebang. But they tasted...not bad.

They were better Saturday, as the filling had set properly. We had friends over, and forced butter tarts on them. Nobody died.

But on Sunday, the strangest thing happened. They started forming this solid sugar disk in the bottom of the tart. Allan joked that I'd accidentally made Scottish tablet as a byproduct, but I have to tell you, this is making me mad. All that work (and lard) to end up with rocks in the bottom of the tarts? Ummmmm...no.

Poll your Canadian friends and neighbors. If someone knows what I'm doing wrong, I'd appreciate some advice.

So, so wrong... (post by Alana)

2010-12-29T14:16:00.001-06:00

I have a confession to make.

Today, I bought something that should be illegal. Not drugs or guns, or anything so exotic, but deadly just the same. For the first time in my entire life, I bought...lard. I found it in a dark corner of the grocery store, on the bottom shelf, right next to the diced kittens.

Allan's dietitian might kill me. My doctor would surely have a stroke if he knew. We might as well load the stuff on trowels and plaster it to our innards.

The culprit in all of this? A Canadian delicacy known as the butter tart.

Allan hasn't seen butter tarts in years. I tried once to make them, but they were runny, and didn't look right, and I wasn't happy with them. (And they didn't contain lard.) So he put out feelers on RPG.net recently, and a few kind souls (or makers of Tricor) responded. And one of the posts caught my eye. When the first line reads, "For the pastry, we just use the recipe on the side of the Tenderflakes lard package," you know you've got trouble.

So I looked at other recipes. Many other recipes. Read reviews. Debated AND contemplated. Finally, I decided that there are still 30+ million Canadians up there despite Tenderflake's efforts, and to just get on with it. So I bought it, earlier this afternoon. I had my child with me, and I went ahead bought lard, setting a bad example for all time.

It's still sitting on the counter in its deceptively cheery little green and white package.

Since getting home, I've made a batch of the mother of all appetizers/artery blockers--sausage cheese balls. Sure, I feel guilt over those. They're awash in fat and cholesterol, and have no redeeming nutritional value whatsoever. But they don't contain lard. Technically. Not listed in the ingredients. I know there's pork fat and dairy fat and god knows what else in them, but the word 'lard' is nowhere to be found.

What IS it about that word? It's so tainted now that it's hard to think about cooking with it. Shortening is bad enough; I haven't had it in the house in years. Butter is awful for you, but it's pretty damn tasty. But lard? Really?

I swear I'm going to try to make those tarts tonight.

Maybe.

Uh-oh....nothing since Gen Con?

2010-10-20T11:16:00.000-05:00

Well then, it's time for me to step in and update.

Allan's been busy working (his job), working (writing), and working some more (an Excel project). If you then count the time he's spent with Logan on his math homework, I think he's running into negative hours for sleep and such.

Logan is adjusting to junior high: the aforementioned, much dreaded advanced math class; learning to play French horn; and running from one end of the school to the other in the allotted four minutes. (When did they start getting FOUR minutes to do this? We went to his open house--it's a big school, and I can't fathom him having time to get from class to class, let alone stop at his locker.) Add in school dances, football games and soccer tryouts, and he's staying pretty busy as well.

I've spent the past couple of months job-hunting, after a stint with the U.S. Census Bureau. I worked there from March to August of this year, and oh, the stories I could tell...except for the fact that they'd put me in jail. At any rate, I'm now finding out that the job market is worse than ever. I've had a few interviews, but nothing solid, and it's getting really discouraging.

Another very recent event here concerns Allan's health. He went to the doctor last week for a routine check-up, and got a call back this week with some unsettling news--he's diabetic. This isn't new territory for us, as I'm diabetic, but it's really hard to wrap your head around just how life-altering that one word is. There are most certainly other, more frightening things to hear from your doctor, but this is a nasty one. I know it's going to be difficult for him, but I hope in the end we'll make changes that are better and healthier for us all.

And let's hope that some day, somehow Cadbury will make a better-tasting sugar-free chocolate than Hershey has managed.

Alana

GenCon 2010: The last two days

2010-08-11T23:02:00.000-05:00

You might be wondering what happened to my blog posts about GenCon. Turns out, I got busy on Saturday and didn't have a chance to post anything more from the con.

Saturday morning I spent some time in the booth, then it was off to run a game of Godlike. The game was "Sinking the Lutzow", and it was my first time running it. It worked pretty well. Ironically, I thought it was going to be the stronger of the two Godlike games, as it had way more potential for roleplaying, what with lots of French contacts, Berber encounters, and Nazis. In actual play, the players were more interested in getting to the the shooting bits. It was fun, but not quite as intense as I had expected.

Afterward, I ate supper at Steak 'N Shake and then it was back to running a game. This time it was the second running of "Repo Men" for Wild Talents. I had two players show up with tickets and two with generics, even though the game was sold out. Ah, Saturday night, you temptress. One of the guys with generics wandered off to get something to eat, and was never seen again. (Dude, you could have just told us you got distracted, so we wouldn't wait for you!)

I recognized two of the players. They were a father and son. I ran a game of This Favored Land for them in 2008. It was the first time that the father had ever played a roleplaying game. They bought my book and now they were in my Repo-Men game. The game started a little slowly, but once it picked up it really picked up. There was plenty of mayhem and insanity. The three players figured out the central mystery, but it took until near the end. There was much cheering and everyone enjoyed themselves, which was the best praise a GM can receive.

I made my way back to the hotel, talking to Alana. While there, I got a call. The rest of the Arc Dream Team was at the Embassy Suites about to play Fiasco. I'll write more about Fiasco later (it's a story telling game). It was about 4 hours of intense insanity and enjoyment. We got to sleep around 3 am.

Next morning, I spent more time at the booth, and picked up a die for Alana to replace the d8 she bought last year mistakenly (it got mixed in with the d10s she bought). Then, off to my final game. This was "Sinking the Lutzow". The group was a bit smaller, 4 players instead of the previous 6. But it played very well, with two players having played Godlike before and two as newcomers. They sunk the ship, stopped the Nazis, and escaped Casablanca following a short E-boat chase. Good times.

Back in the dealer's room, I tried to buy Fiasco, only to find it had sold out largely due to a positive tweet by Wil Wheaton. Then, the show as over. We started packing up the booth, and then Kevin and I were shooed out as we only had GM, not exhibitor, badges.

I crashed briefly at the hotel, then we went off to dinner. The Alcatraz (San Fran themed restaurant) was hideously slow. The food wasn't bad and the company was wonderful.

Several of us helped finish packing the rental truck with pallets of product. We retired to our room for an hour or so of yapping, then it was off to bed.

Monday morning we were up early (5:30 Eastern) for the trip home. I dropped Ben Baugh (of Monsters and Other Childish Things and Kerberos Club fame) off at the airport and then I drove back home, listening to the rest of Use of Weapons on audiobook and singing to The Tragically Hip.

All told, a very good, fun convention. But I'm glad I'm home, so that I can get some sleep!

Here's the stuff I got at the con, which is a bit less than previous years as we were on a budget:

Setters of America: Trails to Rails board game.
a box of 15mm Black Devils Brigade figures
Death Angel, a Space Hulk card game
Psi Duel. This is a two player card game by a small company who was stuck in the worst part of the dealer's room. It was inexpensive and it's apparently a good little game.
Progenitor for Wild Talents
eCollapse for Wild Talents
Kerberos Club for Savage Worlds
a Monsters and Other Childish Things t-shirt
Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity (I had pre-ordered this)
Bigger Bads for Monsters and Other Childish Things (I had also pre-ordered this)

GenCon 2010: One of the best adventures ever

2010-08-06T23:11:00.000-05:00

I had a blast playing Wild Talents today and Godlike yesterday. But today's game of the Sessano scene from The Black Devils Brigade was the best convention game I'd ever played. The group just clicked, they had some horrible misadventures due to bad dice rolls, they did some awesome stuff, and within the last half hour of the game they lost 3 characters to enemy action (one had their head knocked off, one had their head blow away with 20mm shells, and the third was shot through the forehead). But everyone had a blast, and in the end they killed all the German ubermenschen.

I played my "Repo Men" game for Wild Talents earlier. It was a lot of fun, too. They did some awesome stuff, and managed to bankrupt a major super villain while not destroying the city of New Orleans. I run that one again tomorrow night.

Other than that, not a lot that I could get into. I had only about 30 minutes in the dealer's room today. I bought the new Settlers of America: Trails to Rails board game. I also found 15mm scale First Special Service Force miniatures, which I'd only been looking for for about a decade!

The convention centre is buzzing right now (where I'm typing this), but it's hard to get into anything. I cruised through the board game section. All the games were full up and in progress, and no one was looking for an extra player. If I had some other people around I'd maybe pull out the new Settlers game and give it a try. It's a little frustrating being around all this action but not being able to get involved.

It's after midnight now, so I think I'll head back to the room and see if I can get up a bit early. I was so exhausted from yesterday that I slept in until 8:45 today. Yikes! That's no way to go to a convention!

GenCon 2010 - One down, five to go

2010-08-05T22:25:00.000-05:00

I ran the first of my 6 games today. This was from the upcoming The Black Devils Brigade book. The players took on the Germans in the Italian town of Sessano. Though they almost lost a character due to a nasty German superman, they all survived intact. I believe the entire group (7 of them, which is 2 more than the stated capacity for the game) were all friends. It was a little different running the game for a large group who all knew each other, but it was a lot of fun.

And now I'm beat! Time to go to bed.

GenCon 2010 - That was a little weird...

2010-08-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

...and by weird, I mean watching someone else run a roleplaying game that you wrote. Kevin Pezzano ran the first part of my Black Devils Brigade book. He did a really good job, but it's kind of weird seeing someone else run "your" game. The players appeared to enjoy it, even if it did devolve into Inglorious Basterds at one point (perhaps even because of it).

I made it through the dealer's room for a first pass. I stood in line for 15 minutes at Fantasy Flight to buy Death Angels, the Space Hulk card game. That was way down from earlier today when there was a big rush to buy some of their new games.

Other than that, I picked up some dice for Dustin. There are a few things I'm curious about. I'm debating picking up the new Settlers of Catan game; it looks good, but it's a little pricey.

Anyway, I'm done eating (Steak 'n Shake has free wifi). Now it's off to grab my stuff for my evening game.

GenCon 2010 - Free stuff

2010-08-05T08:57:00.000-05:00

Made my lunch after showering this morning. This is something new I'm trying: packing a lunch each day at GenCon.

After that, I traipsed down to the convention centre. There is a massive throng waiting to get into the dealer's room already (and it doesn't open for another 20 minutes).

I'm sitting in a lounge area. They did not lie, they have free wifi! Woohoo (again). I don't have an exhibitor's badge this year, so I have to wait in line like the other peons. While I wait, let's look at this year's free swag.

Well, you can certainly tell there has been an economic downturn. Not much of any worth in the GenCon bag.

There's a free 6-sided die by Crystal Caste. They make a commemorative dice set each year. I bought one 2 years ago. Didn't get the set last year, as I didn't care much for it. This year's is okay, so I'm on the fence on it. (They do this deliberately, of course: one free die to coax you into buying the entire set.)

Mayfair have a free little draw string bag advertising Settlers of America, part of their Settlers of Catan line. I plan to get this, as we are big Settlers fans. I'm hoping the little bag is actually useful for the game.

Other freebies include a card for the Universal Fighting System CCG and a Dungeons and Dragons comic.

That's it for free stuff in the bag. The rest is an oversized Magic, The Gathering card (not sure the use in that, except that it is apparently a "plane" card, and so it might actually be of use in the game). There is a bunch of advertising that's going to get trashed forthwith. And, there's a coupon book.

The coupon book isn't bad. There are a couple of really cheap or actually free things in there, but you have to swing by a specific booth to get it. For instance, Paizo is handing out Pathfinder buttons. They are free, but you have to get them from the booth. That's a smart idea.

Some of the other coupons look useful, most aren't. A couple of standouts:

An ad for free downloads from DrivethruRPG.com
A free set of 10 train tokens from a company that sells Eurogame card sleeves. This might be for Ticket to Ride, so I'll swing by there.
20% off a Settlers of Catan "gaming surface and storage case". Looks interesting; probably expensive.
A starter set of The Spoils CCG for $5. I think they had the same deal last year, but I missed it. Might look at that.
Ah, good ol' Troll and Toad. They are an online game store that has a lot of old games. They also charge collector's prices on said games. ($110 for Glory I from GMT? I don't think so.) If you spend $20 there, they will give you a free game worth $30 from a specific list. One of the games they list is Vapor's Gambit, a hoverboard (like a flying skateboard) race game. They were selling these for $15 last year... then $10... then $5... and then at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday they started giving them away for free. I have a copy (unplayed) from last year. Now it's a "prize" worth "$30". *L*

Now it's 4 minutes until the dealer's room opens. Time to post this, grab a convention guide book, and head inside.

Ciao for now...

GenCon 2010

2010-08-04T22:00:00.000-05:00

I'm at GenCon!

Once again I'm in the Westin – hope the elevators work okay this time. Once again, they want to charge you $10 for wireless internet in the room. The Red Roof Inn in West Monroe charges $49.95 a night with free wifi. The Westin charges $150 a night (fortunately, since I'm sharing with a bunch of other Arc Dream guys I'm here for free), doesn't have rollaway beds (I brought my inflatable) and still wants to charge you for wifi in the room. I think there's free wifi downstairs. I may get to use that. There is supposed to be free wifi in the convention hall itself.

The trip was long, 12 hours long to be precise. I made good time up until the traffic jam in Illinois and the bad weather in Indiana. The police are thick on the ground in Illinois. I saw more police in Illinois than all other states combined. This is staggering as there were four police cars in Louisiana as I left, Mississippi is usually pretty bad for them, and Memphis police are notorious for pulling over vehicles for minor infractions.

I noticed that the parking has gotten incredibly pricey in Indianapolis. I went to an Indy web site before coming here to find cheap parking. There were a few lots listed, but the prices are out of date. It looks like a bunch of them recently bumped the price up to $20 a day. I'm not parked at the hotel, as they want $22 a day. Sounds cheap, but I'm going to save between $8 and $10 parking in another lot, the same lot that 2 years ago charged $12 a day. *sigh*

Otherwise, it was a good trip. I listened to Iain Banks' Use of Weapons on audiobook. I'm about 2/3 done.

Ben Baugh and James Knevitt are running a game of Monsters and Other Childish Things tonight as part of a prize for some folks who bid extra money on one of Arc Dreams' ransoms. John Marron and I are chilling in the room.

Tomorrow, I have the whole day free until 6 pm, when I run my first game (an adventure from my upcoming The Black Devils Brigade campaign book). I'll see what I can get into, do some face time at the booth, and probably cruise the dealer's room. Need to get some sleep, soon.

How Sony nerfed the PSP

2010-06-20T13:09:00.004-05:00

I really enjoy my Sony PSP (Playstation Portable), which I've had for two years now. It's a portable game device, but it also acts as a video and MP3 player, and you can connect online through wifi.

Unfortunately, it is a victim of bad timing and some poor decisions by Sony. The timing part can't be helped. Some of the decisions could be changed, but I don't see that happening, and that's a pity.

Stuff That Can't Be Changed: Hardware

Here is a picture of the PSP:

(For what it's worth, mine's silver.)

The PSP's form factor is dictated by the large screen. When I hold it a comfortable distance from my eyes, the screen is larger than a 32" HD TV would be 8 feet from the couch. (After a half hour or more of staring at the screen, I have trouble re-focusing my eyes. It sucks getting old.) To protect such a large screen you need a protective case. The best one I found was by Logitech; it's clear (though you can put a skin on it) and padded. It works very well, but it adds another 1/4" all around, and a little more weight. It has gaps for head phones and controls when sealed, making ideal for playing MP3s.

Games are loaded into a hatch in the back. The games are on an optical disc in a U shaped plastic housing, called a UMD. Sony, ever the fan of proprietary media formats (remember Betamax?), anticipated folks buying movies on UMDs and watching them on their PSPs. (You can get a cable to plug the PSP into a TV, but the image quality is not up to DVD standards.) This never really panned out, so you can pick up a bunch of movie UMDs cheap. I have several. I haven't watched many of them, but they certainly came in handy the last time I had to fly.

The optical disc format allows a good deal of storage, but it adds weight and is cumbersome compared to the Nintendo DS, which uses cartridges.

One very important feature of the PSP is its ability to take flash memory cards. Again, unfortunately, Sony's love affair with its own formats comes into play. It uses Memory Sticks (specifically, Memory Stick Pro Duo). I won't go into the technical aspects (there are web sites claiming Memory Sticks are not as good/fast as SD cards). I can read SD cards in my computer and can use microSD in my phone but can't with the Memory Stick. If you buy a Sony computer, you might be able to read the memory sticks. I think the Memory Sticks can be used in the Playstation 3.

I will note that Memory Sticks are more expensive than similarly priced SD cards. I picked up a couple of 4 GB cards when they were US $18 each. I just checked, and Office Depot has the 4 GB sticks on sale for $18 again. By comparison, they have a 4 GB SDHC card by the same company (Sandisk) for $12.99 and a 16 GB SDHC card for $40. Memory Sticks are still way cheaper than the PS2 memory cartridges, which still sell for the extortionate price of $25 for an 8 MB cartridge.

All of those decisions are understandable. I don't mind the optical drive, though it's a pain having to buy special plastic cases to keep them safe. And Sony can't be faulted for failing to anticipate the rise of downloadable content. In fact, the latest version of the PSP, the PSP Go, doesn't have the discs. It is strictly operated through downloadable content.

Sony can be faulted for the asinine power switch. It's a spring-loaded slide on the side of the device. You flick it up and release to turn on the device. That's okay. To turn it off, you have to flick it up and hold it for about 5 seconds. If you just flick it up briefly, you put the PSP into standby mode. This is so natural a thing to do that for 3 days after getting the thing I thought the battery was bad, as it kept dying on my quickly. Turns out that I kept throwing it into standby instead of shutting off. On standby, it's still using power. I have to double check it every time Logan uses it, to make sure he shut it off. You can't switch the PSP off from Standby. You have to turn it on then turn it off. Annoying.

If you flip the switch down, it puts the program into Hold mode. This stops any of the other keys from working (which is what you want when listening to music). If you aren't careful when turning off the Hold you'll flip it from Hold to Standby, which is also annoying, especially if all you wanted to do was turn on the display to see how much time is left on an audio track.

The battery life kind of sucks on the PSP. You get maybe 3 hours out of playing a game, if that. The display is the culprit. I can go about 10 hours on music alone (which isn't great, but is livable). You can buy a better battery. It's bigger, and comes with a new battery cover due to the bulge it creates. I've thought of picking one up. You can run the PSP from a USB connection to a PC or through a power converter to your car's power outlet. This is ideal for playing music on long trips.

Stuff They Did Right

There is some amazing stuff in the PSP. You can view several video formats, including .avi. You can listen to audio files. You can view images (I know for a fact it handles .png and .jpg). You can install a free file manager, but I just plug it into my computer and treat it like a flash drive. It attaches to the computer through USB.

With the recent upgrade, you can read digital comics. You have to download a reader, though, so I haven't bothered. This is the same issue with the Internet radio, which also requires a downloaded program that is stored on a memory stick.

The PSP has wifi built in. This morning I upgraded the operating system via our wireless router. You can pull down RSS feeds, play internet radio, use built-in Skype (if you get a microphone headset), and use a built in web browser. This is all through a wifi hotspot; it's not an iPhone.

Stuff That Can Be Changed: Software

Two years ago, at GenCon, I tried to use the browser at the Conrad hotel. I couldn't connect due to the log in screen the hotel was connecting through. The PSP ran out of memory. This just happened again this morning, as I tried to read my blog using the browser. It popped up with an out of memory message. I don't know why it ran out of memory, as there is half a gig available on the memory stick that's in it right now. It's safe to say you won't be using the browser for much more than gmail. I need to try it with other free wifi hotspots. I'd still rather use our netbook, as it's a pain to type out even a short e-mail with the PSP. It has a control that's not much different from a regular cell phone.

I use the PSP for music. In fact, I use it more as an MP3 player than as a game player. It plays music. It can run tracks back-to-back without a gap. You can fast forward, reverse, shuffle. You can store music in "groups" (folders).

On the downside, the PSP is missing some pretty basic abilities found in pretty much every MP3 player on the market. I can only assume that this is so that the PSP doesn't cannibalize Sony Walkman sales.

What's missing:

You can't play songs by artist. You can save songs from one artist in a folder and play them as a group.
You can't play songs by album. You can save the songs from one album in a folder and play them as a group. However, if you do that, you can't play by artist (see last point). You can do it one way or the other.
You can't shuffle across all your songs unless all the songs are in a single folder. You can shuffle within a specific group, but not across all groups. So, for instance, if you put all your songs in groups by artist, you can't shuffle among all your songs. You can put all your songs in one single group to allow random shuffling, but now you can't play by album or artist.
The PSP doesn't keep track of where you last left off if you turn off the device. It keeps track while on standby, but not if you power down. This is a major pain when playing audiobooks. I had to keep track of where I was when listening to Stephen King's Under The Dome in a little notebook.
The PSP isn't loud enough. You have to really crank it up to get decent volume.

Except for perhaps the volume issue, this could all be fixed with a software update. In fact, someone has created a better player for the PSP. Sony doesn't want you to be able to install apps on the PSP, so they locked it out through security. That didn't stop hackers, who figured out how to beat the security system. One way is using something called a "pandora battery". Hackers figured out how to crack security with an alteration of the battery (the battery is queried by the software, so apparently this was the source of a security hole). If you don't upgrade your PSP to to the latest software (and some PSPs come with it already updated enough that you can't use these hacks), you can download apps and run programs. This is how people can run pirated games, which is what Sony is trying hard to stop with their security model. Latest games require the latest upgrade, but some hackers are finding ways around those requirements. Note that hacking the PSP voids the warranty and may "brick" it (i.e. wreck it so that it can only be used as a paperweight).

The fact that the PSP can run apps, that third parties have created a better MP3 player, is the biggest failing of the PSP. Or, rather, Sony's inability to support apps is its biggest failing. Apps are what truly make the iPhone, the Touch, and the Android. Sony isn't interested.

Take PDF viewing, for instance. Reading PDFs on a PSP is a popular request. It has a big colour screen. Reading documents is tempting. Would it kill Sony to develop, with Adobe or someone else, the ability to read a .pdf file? Apparently it will.

[There is a way around the PDF problem. There's a utility that will convert PDFs to .png files. Using another utility, you can convert the .png files into .jpg files (or just leave them as .png files, but the PSP is slow to render big graphics files). Then you can read the PDF as a collection of pictures. It's clunky, but it works if you really need it to.]

The PSP is way behind the Nintendo DS in sales. The games look better on the PSP, but Nintendo has done a better job of producing a wider range of games. The DS is much easier to carry around, as it's smaller.

What could save the PSP is pushing its other abilities: MP3 and video playback, and perhaps adding a wide range of apps. I doubt very much that we will see any movement in that direction. A pity, because the PSP is a really nice device with a lot of unused potential.

Review of a new TV pilot: True Blue

2010-05-08T23:28:00.001-05:00

I had the opportunity to view the pilot for a new ABC TV show, True Blue. This might actually be the first review of the show. Warning: I give a way a lot of spoilers. If you plan to watch the show, you might want to stop reading now. But don't say I didn't try to warn you, both about the show and the spoilers (you can probably guess where I come down on the thumbs up or thumbs down scale).

I got to see the episode through eRewards, the online opinion survey site. You are sent a survey, for which you get eRewards dollars that you can spend on a list of rewards (the best is $15 from Borders book store, but you can only get that once a year; mostly it's free game or movie rentals, or a bunch of magazine subscriptions). If you qualify for the full survey you get the full reward amount. If you don't qualify — you don't fit the survey's demographics — you get a fraction of the points as a "sorry but no thank you" gift.

eRewards sent me a survey dealing with a new TV pilot, a cop show called True Blue. The rewards were $20 in reward "bucks" if you filled in the survey, $2.50 if you didn't qualify. Given that you have to watch a 44 minute pilot, it's a fair amount of time expenditure. I filled in the demographic information and they said I qualified. Then, I had to download a plug-in. I watched the pilot, and clicked the "Next" button, expecting to get to the actual survey. No dice: I got the message that said, "We already received enough responses" message. Normally this happens after the demographics part. I didn't expect it after wasting an hour of my life watching the show. So now they'll presumably pay me the small reward amount and not the $20. I wrote to complain to eRewards, but I doubt I'll get a response.

So that it's not a total waste, I thought I'd post a review in case the show makes it to air.

The premise: a group of seven close friends, who rose through the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department, drifted apart over the years, but are brought together when one of them is killed.

It could have been an interesting basis for a show, if it didn't try so hard to be "Grey's Police Academy". It's obvious from the get go that we're supposed to care more about the relationships of the friends than the actual cases they solve. This might have worked, if it hadn't been for the rotten writing and the inept casting.

The pilot begins with Kevin shot to death with that favorite of TV cliches, a single gunshot. Apparently if you are going to knock on someone's door late at night and shoot him in the chest, you only want to use one bullet. Kev dies in a pool of blood. TV pistols never miss in cases like this.

Next we meet JD, played by Marc Blucas (Riley Finn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). He's having an erotic dream about his ex-wife when we meet him. There's a knock on the door, spoiling the good part. Irony of ironies, it's his ex-wife! Of course we already know she's there to tell him about dearly departed Kevin. Oh, but there's more: the ex-wife, Katherine, is now a police captain. They broke up because JD couldn't handle her promotions, and he was incapable of sharing his feelings. They'd been divorced for two years.

She wants JD to head up the case to find Kevin's killer. JD agrees, but only if he gets his friend Walker to join in the investigation. Walker is a member of this group, but he was recently suspended due to a drinking problem. JD also wants Peter, who used to be a cop but is now an Assistant District Attorney, to prosecute the case. TV cop departments have never heard of the term "conflict of interest". Sure, the dead guy happens to die in the jurisdiction where a friend was the captain, and she calls in her ex-husband and friend of the deceased to investigate, and he calls in a friend of the deceased to help, and a friend of the deceased to prosecute. Any ambulance chaser could get any suspect off on the technicalities this would present, alone.

We meet two other characters, Malcolm and Maureen. Malcolm makes a dark joke about the deceased, showing that he's unconventional and crusty. He used to be Kevin's partner. I think Maureen is now an administrative clerk or something. I don't think she is a detective. She's there because she's one of the friends, she works at the department, and she used to sleep with Kevin. Later we find out that Malcolm "settled" for his wife, while he really loved Maureen. Maureen, on the other hand, never settled down and doesn't have a regular boyfriend or anything. It's during this reunion phase (even though they see each other daily) that Malcolm expresses his love for Maureen, just before he heads home for the woman he settled on (who would do well to kick his sorry butt to the curb).

Now, JD and Katherine have been divorced for 2 years. JD regrets their breakup, and Katherine even admits that part of her still loves him. So, of course it's at the funeral that we, and JD, learn that Katherine has been going out with Peter for several months. Neither of them had found the right time to tell JD. Instead, it comes out at the funeral in an incredibly cliched scene that has JD asking who the boyfriend is while Peter stands in the background, followed by JD slowly turning around and staring at Peter in realization.

Cliche. That's the best description for the entire episode. It's just one cliche after another. When JD and Walker interview a suspect, the suspect makes a passing remark about the deceased Kevin, and JD throws the guy up against a wall. Saw that one coming a mile away. When Peter and JD meet at the pub where the wake was held, you knew one of them was going to slug the other.

Malcolm, the crusty detective, is given a new female partner. The show breaks for a commercial after he learns his partner is, "A woman?!?" You know, that sort of thing would have worked in, oh, 1983. It's the 21st century. We're supposed to believe this guy is going to freak out about a female partner when his own captain is a friend and a woman? The new partner has to prove herself to him, when she should have said, "I earned this detective badge, jerk. Deal with it!" Malcolm makes a couple of snide, unprofessional remarks. Instead of telling him to stop being a jerk then, she waits until near the end of the episode to tell him off and call him a "douche". The use of this word is to show how "edgy" and contemporary the show is, and not saddled with writing that was worn when Hill Street Blues was airing. Anyway, upon hearing this Malcolm smirks with a new found respect for his new partner. "It normally takes them weeks to figure that out," he says. Yep, it's the old, "Ah, she realizes I'm a jerk. Now I'm beginning to like her," ploy. It was old when Star Wars used it in 1979.

The dialog was awful. The story was no better. The cops focused on two murders, Kevin's and the death of a woman found by her "dog walker". The woman ran a "sex and the city" type blog. She had a pillow underneath her head, proving the killer knew and cared for her. This kind of profiling plot was a big deal in the early 90s, so it must have seemed revolutionary to the 80s throwbacks who wrote this drivel.

Both plots are wrapped up in the episode, not with CSI's Scooby Doo ending ("I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling crime scene investigators!") but with something pretty close. And neither case was solved with much brain power, or much evidence. The dead woman's killer would have been found in 10 minutes if the woman's gay friend (inserted, I'm sure, simply because the show is set in San Francisco) had bothered to let them know one crucial piece of information. I mean, really, you don't think if someone is found dead you might say, "Did you talk to her neighbor, who was also her lesbian lover?" Oh, God, lesbian lovers! That's real edgy... again, in the early 90s. Nah, probably the 80s. When was The Crying Game, again? Don't expect any GLBT respect here (it's ABC, after all).

At least the gay killer lawyered up before she could give the Scooby Doo confession. Kevin's killer is found in just as stupid a way, and with no physical evidence other than the fact he smoked a cigar. He was obviously guilty, though, because he pulled out a gun and shot at JD. This guy killed Kevin with a single shot at night but couldn't even wing JD in a brightly lit room. Chase ensues, bad guy gets caught. This ended the last interesting tendril of a plot. They could have done something with the show if the first season was about tracking down Kevin's killer. Now, it's just about the relationships.

The relationships might be worth sticking around for if the casting wasn't so horrible. None of the actors is all that interesting. Worse, there is no chemistry among any of them. No wonder these losers drifted apart, they had nothing to keep them together in the first place. JD seems more like a creepy stalker ex-husband than a potential suitor. It would be a better show if he was supposed to be a creepy stalker, though that wouldn't explain why he stays at the precinct after Kevin's death is solved. Apparently JD's actual superior has no time for him, as you don't get even a whiff of there being a problem with the transfer. There's no clue what any of these losers saw in each other. Maureen slept with Kevin and Peter. Peter had the hots for Katherine, who was married to JD. Malcolm pined for Maureen. The only one who comes out looking the least bit like an adult is Walker, which is odd since it is painfully obvious that he's the token African-American in the series.

The only thing the show had going for it was that it was set in San Francisco, a seriously pretty city for a TV show, what with all the hills and the old street cars and stuff. Even then, the city looked listful, as the episode was filmed when the sky was overcast.

I hope that those people who managed to make it to the actual survey savage the hell out of the show. With luck, no one else will have to see this drek.

Longhorn Steakhouse overrated, underwhelms

2010-05-08T11:50:00.001-05:00

Monroe/West Monroe is in need of a good steak place. The Hobnob used to be good, but it sucks now (see my earlier review, and I've since heard others complain about it). The Lone Star — the first place I ate steak in the area — has been going downhill for years. Most folks round here go to Outback, which I've always thought overrated and overpriced.

A few months ago we noticed a Longhorn Steakhouse open near the Best Buy. Sure, it's another chain, but I've been to chain steak places that are good. Maybe this one will be worth while? It's certainly busy enough.

I got there about 5:15, Alana got us on the list about 10 minutes before that. Even still, we had about another 15 minute wait to be seated. As I said, it's really busy, which is usually a good sign (the Outback is busy, too, so there goes your proof).

We actually brought the average age of the patrons down when we entered. They were obviously seniors with a little bit of income, as the prices while not shocking ($18.99 for Alana's entree, which was the more expensive of the two) weren't exactly a bargain. We saw very few families, let alone young families.

The decor is the sort of warm-toned HGTV decorating show look you come to expect in your modern restaurants, but accompanied by pictures of cowboys and the open range. Paintings of manly men on horseback doing manly things look down on you while country music blares away in the background (and, occasionally, the foreground). It's impossible to find a steak place in the South that doesn't believe the music has to be country. I guess us alt-rock fans aren't supposed to eat steak? Or somehow listening to wailing and twanging makes you more in the mood to devour a cow? But why does it have to be audible? Anyway, that's just a pet peeve.

We ordered the Firecracker Wrapped Chicken for an appetizer. Alana asked for the Outlaw Ribeye as her entree, I went with the prime rib (we came into a little bit of money recently, so we splurged). We both had the garden salad. We skipped the soft drinks; they were Coke products (yay!) but without a price on the menu (boo!). That's usually a good indicator that we'd be paying $2.50 to $3.00 for watered down bar Diet Coke, so we passed.

The Firecrackers were supposed to be a stuffed pastry with chicken in them. I thought they tasted remarkably like Melvin's "mini tacos" (something Logan loves, from a local sports bar/restaurant), which are deep fried tacos with refried beans in the middle. I thought this on my second Firecracker. The first one had some sort of seasoning salt on the outside, so my first impression was of a Tex-Mex spring roll that was dowsed in salt. Alana didn't have the same issue, and the too much salt thing was only evident on two of mine.

These "firecrackers" were little hollow tubes with some refried beans in the middle. Not as good as Melvin's mini tacos, too salty, and too pricey. They were "spicy" but while they had a mild kick when you first ate them, the kick went away quickly.

It was a little later that Alana pointed out that they were supposed to be stuffed! And with chicken! She found a slight string of chicken in one of hers. I don't recall seeing any chicken in mine. Seriously, I thought they were supposed to be little hollow tubes of fried pastry with a little refried bean paste, because there is no way you could adequately call these things "stuffed". We're talking false advertising here. Either that, or something happened and the insides melted out before they were served to us.

Next came the salad. "Garden salad" in this case meant "lettuce and crouton salad with a little diced tomato and a piece of what might have been cucumber covered in dressing". It was edible (the lettuce was nice and fresh), though Alana pointed out that there was more diced tomato on the Firecrackers as a garnish than were in her salad. Nothing to write home about. If you want a real salad, try Olive Garden.

The steaks arrived. I had mine with a sweet potato with butter and cinnamon. The chef forgot the cinnamon, but the waiter caught it right away and brought me some without me having to ask. I honestly didn't know sweet potatoes came that small, but, really, I didn't need a bigger one.

My prime rib was okay. It was perfectly cooked, it just didn't have a huge amount of flavor. The outside was heavily peppered, but the meat wasn't marinated. Now, it's hard to get a good prime rib with flavor all the way into the meat. Usually that's what the au jus is for. Properly flavored au jus adds to the prime rib. In this case, the au jus wasn't flavored, other than mildly with salt. This was a little disappointing. The beef was a good cut, and cooked to perfection (medium rare, if you were wondering). It just didn't have much flavor.

Alana's Outlaw Ribeye (18 ounces, with the bone) was more flavorful. That is, the parts that weren't gristle were more flavorful. A good third of her steak was too gristly to eat. We figure she got about 10 ounces of actual edible steak out of it. We should have known better than to order what the waiter suggested. He recommended the Outlaw. Waiter recommendations are usually indicators of what they'll make the most money on. In this case, it was a cheap cut of steak with delusions of adequacy.

Alana's steak was cooked properly, though, and it was flavorful in the middle bit that was edible. It had that going for it.

Still hungry, we ordered the cheesecake. I have never been greeted by such a huge piece of cheesecake! It must have been a good five inches tall. Our smiles turned to scowls when we bit into it. The cheesecake was frozen. The strawberries and whipped cream were canned (the strawberries had a subtle metallic taste). We should have brought the Firecrackers to the waiter's attention. We did inform him that the dessert was frozen and that we wanted to go boxes so we could eat it at home, when it had thawed. He went to the back, returned with the boxes, and apologized. He said the chiller was set too cold. He would have replaced the cheesecake for us, but they were all that cold. He thanked us for bringing this to his attention. He did not remove the cheesecake from the bill.

As positives, the service was good, the meals came out on time, and the staff was friendly.

For the price, the meal was decidedly sub par. Granted, Alana and I know a good steak when we bite into one, and we may be a little pickier than someone just looking for a slab of properly cooked cow. When you combine the price and the inexplicable popularity of the place, it's not worth it.

The Longhorn Steakhouse is in Monroe, Louisiana, near the Best Buy and Kohl's. Save yourself the horrendous wait and eat elsewhere.

Downgraded our cable due to copy protection

2010-03-27T11:59:00.001-05:00

Alana and I just downgraded our cable TV service.

Last month, our cable box started acting up. The sound would break up on 4 channels, and the channels would pixellate. I used Comcast's online chat several times, but in the end they told me I had to replace the cable box. That's cool, electronics fail.

This morning I discovered that although I scheduled our DVD recorder to record Australian Grand Prix qualifying on Speed Channel, nothing recorded. The error message said that the program was copy protected.

The new cable box prevents us from recording channels above channel 120 or so on our DVD Recorder. Problem: I record Formula 1 on Speed because the races are at ungodly hours. Tonight's Australian Grand Prix is on at 1 am. Usually coverage starts at 6:30 am on Sundays. The Asian and Australian races are usually in the wee hours. Each season Fox runs several races (and butchers the time-shifted ones to fit in commercials), so there's only one race on Speed that is on live at a half decent time, the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Speed and BBC America are the only two channels we regularly watch on that tier (BBC America isn't copy protected, but Speed is, so not all the channels are considered worth protecting; for some reason, Speed is). There are others I'd watch from time to time, like IFC, if I remember to look down there for a show, and if it happens that there's something on at the time — this is the same issue I have with HBO.

So, my options:

Watch the races live when I can.
Pay extra money and get Comcast's DVR. (The offered it to us for $5 a month for 6 months, but then it bumps up to $16 a month).
Drop the Preferred tier entirely and download the races.
Stop watching F1 entirely, except for when Fox carries it. Given the snorefest that was Bahrain, this isn't much of a hardship.

Note that the FIA is woefully behind the times when it comes to access to F1 races. I can watch edited versions of the races a couple of days after the fact. Of course, to do that I have to go to the F1 site, which loudly proclaims the last race's winner. And you don't get to see the whole race. (In the case of Bahrain, that's not such a bad thing.) Oh, well. It was only my favourite sport.

I'm still deciding what to do, but we canceled the Preferred tier. We can watch Top Gear episodes online, which is about all we were watching BBC America for, anyway. The extra money can come in handy. Things are tight, though Alana is back to work (temporarily, for the Census Bureau). Reducing our bills by $16 a month helps.

So, by stupidly applying copy protection against someone paying legally for the channel — and who was only recording in order to time shift — they lost $16 a month and a viewer. Proof, again, that copy protection schemes mostly harm paying customers. Thanks for the "help", Comcast.

Oh, and the cable box is still messing up. So the replacement didn't even help, and I have to run it up there and get another replacement.

PlaidStallions

2010-03-13T00:58:00.003-06:00

Alana and I are extremely close in our thinking, and our likes and dislikes. There is, however, a slight generation gap, as I'm *gasp* 5 years older. It usually doesn't show up except in the songs we liked in the early 80s, mainly I suspect because "the 70s" doesn't usually come up much in conversation. I was Logan's age in the middle of that decade, while Alana was still just a little tyke. So, I offer this web site to her as a connection to my tween years.

PlaidStallons is a blog about the 70s. Primarily, the blogger posts pictures from 1970s catalogues, with an emphasis on clothing and toys. He occasionally posts links to 70s TV shows (I just came across a three-part episode of the old sci-fi garbage man show, Quark), and other items of 70s pop culture.

If you know me, you know what I'm primarily interested in. That's right, the toys (and, oddly, more often the packages) They trigger major episodes of nostalgia ("I had that!", "I remember that!", and, most frequently, "I wanted that!!!").

Here's a picture of the G.I. Joe Field Training Center. I believe my brother had this, though we shared as we were both huge Joe fans:

Plastic model kits were huge in the 70s, probably because there were no real video games until the ned of the decade, and then they were horribly expensive. At some point I had all of the models on this page. (I hadn't thought about the one in the bottom, right corner since, oh, the early 80s? It wasn't tied to an actual TV show, it was just a cool spacecraft. Oh, and the plastic was glow-in-the-dark green.)

The 1970s were a period of transition, style wise. By 1978, casual clothing wasn't that much different than it is today. The early 70s, though... oh, man, it's like everyone was clothed by a costumer from a bad sci-fi flick. I distinctly remember having not one, but two polyester leisure suits during this period (one was maroon, the later one was beige).

I mentioned the packaging earlier. This hit home when he posted a pic of a Halloween costume in a box. You don't see that now, but the cheap, superhero costumes of the 70s, made of some vaguely plastic-infused material with a thin plastic mask (I can still smell the plastic as it off-gassed) came in cardboard boxes. I completely forgot that. The box itself triggered deep memories that the costumes did not. Weird how our memory works.

There's some pretty obscure stuff on this site that I hadn't thought of for decades. I mean, like, Crazy Foam, a bath foam/soap alternative that shot out of a can painted like a superhero's face.

The blog really hits me personally because the blogger is Canadian. For instance, he mentions Uncle Bobby, the host of a kid's program that everyone in Ontario of a certain age will remember. I never cared for the show, myself, and always found him kind of creepy. That makes me feel bad, now, as Bobby Ash (the actor) was apparently a nice enough guy.

The blog has pictures taken from Consumers Distributing and Shop-Rite catalogues. CD and Shop-Rite were catalogue stores. They had display cases with jewelry, watches, and the like, and they had the occasional big item on the display floor. Everything else was in the back, on shelves. You walked up to a bank of catalogues and pulled out an order form. You filled in your name, the page number where you saw your item, and then the item number. You handed it to someone at a counter, and they went back into the warehouse section. Minutes later, your item was sent down a roller track, where someone picked it up and took it to the cash register. You got to inspect it at that point.

The Wikipedia entry on Consumers Distributing mentioned that there was a perception that things were always "out of stock". That's a fair description. It was frustrating to fill out the form, stand in line, only to find that the item was gone. They partially blame Wal-Mart in Canada for CD's demise, but I don't recall Wal-Mart being that big in Canada when CD went into bankruptcy. I worked at Kodak Canada in the 90s, and I heard some "interesting" things about how they treated their vendors. In the end, when they started to run into problems, none of their vendors were really willing to extend them much credit.

Of the two, Shop-Rite was my favourite. It didn't last as long, and it was considered a lesser chain compared to CD (even though it was owned by the Hudson Bay Company). What I liked about it was that Shop-Rite sold Avalon Hill wargames. I still have a couple, including a copy of Panzer Leader (my first wargame, 35 years old this year) that came from Shop-Rite. Now that I think about it, for a while you could buy SPI wargames at The Bay. Ah, memories...

Anyway, check out PlaidStallons for a trip down memory lane, or for a pop-culture tour of an unfairly forgotten decade.

Thanks to Shane Ivey for mentioning this site on Facebook.

The Olympics

2010-02-25T13:14:00.003-06:00

I love the Olympics. The competition; the sense of pride in your country; the stories of the individual athletes; the pageantry. I teared up when they sang "O Canada" at the opening ceremonies, and it's not my national anthem.

And of course I like Canadians. How can I not? They're nice people...and I'm married to one.

However, the past two weeks have been a little awkward. I'm so used to Allan and I thinking alike and generally being of the same mind on whatever issue that I find myself in shock as we watch the games.

We're not on the same side.

I don't remember this from the last Olympics, and he was here then, too. Perhaps I have selective amnesia, but I really think it stems from where the games are being held this year. Forget the polite reserve; from curling to bobsled to ice dancing to hockey, I think Canadians mean that "Own the Podium" thing. Really. With teeth bared and maple leafs flying--and that's just the spectators.

So it's been a little hard to get into cheering for the Americans without stepping on Canadian toes. I can't gloat over the American men's hockey victory over Canada, and he can't cheer too much as the Canadian women trounce the Americans in bobsled. As much as I love watching the games, it'll be something of a relief when they're over. This slight unease is getting to me.

I'm just glad I'm not married to a German.

Snow Day, part 2!

2010-02-12T12:48:00.001-06:00

It snowed last night. Like, really snowed. Some 2 inches of the stuff (by my crude "sticking my finger in the snow" method). The snow was heavy, wet packing snow, the type that's perfect for snowball fights.

This is the view from the apartment as I was letting the dog out this morning:

The vehicles on the end are ours. This is the first vehicle I've owned in 9 years that's been covered in snow!

It wasn't until later that I remember: I don't have a snow brush! I had to use a Swiffer wet mop as a squeegee to clear off the car, while having a snowball fight with Logan.

This is the view of a neighbouring apartment through the trees behind our apartment:

Neighbours made a little snowman this morning. Sabine checked it out:

She was still unsure of this snow stuff, as it made her paws cold (no doubt) but she had a bit more fun this morning than last night as she bounded through it and sniffed everything.

Sabine wasn't the only local who had trouble figuring out how to handle the snow. Here are a couple of local kids with the day off. I must be getting old, as all I could think about for the kid on the right was, "Put a coat on, already!"

Took this picture of a cemetery on the way to work. I had forgotten how much snow bleached the colour out of everything.

The railroad bridge over the Ouachita River (from the Monroe side):

The Endom Bridge, spanning the Ouachita River. They closed the bridge this morning as it's mostly metal and cars don't have any traction on it when it snows. You don't even have a choice of shooting past the barriers when the swivel it (I guess so that if the power goes out it won't impede barge traffic on the river).

Snow day!

2010-02-11T21:53:00.002-06:00

Logan doesn't have school tomorrow. Why? Because it's snowing out.

The observant among you will notice that the cementy parts of the ground aren't actually covered in snow. So why does Logan have a snow day? Because that's what happens in the South. Seriously, it was poring a few days ago to the point where water was pooling up to the axles of the car and the schools stayed open. Snow accumulates on the ground — even if the roads could be best described as "moist" — and it's "Close the schools! The kids aren't safe on the buses!"

I can understand if there was a threat of freezing rain, but no.

And they decided to close tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. today. This is because they let the kids out early today. Because of flurries.

Seriously. It wasn't even accumulating like it is now until about 6:30. So they let the kids out early in anticipation of... snow blindness? Your guess is as good as mine.

But I understand them deciding to close the schools tomorrow early this afternoon. I mean, you can't blame them. How else could they communicate the fact that schools were closed tomorrow? It's possible that kids might actually try to get to school because their parents didn't hear about the closure on the radio. Or TV. Or in an e-mail. Or by phone...

And the daycares are closed tomorrow, too. So one of my peeps has to work from home to watch his child. (I don't mind, but it means I'm unlikely to get to go home early; I was hoping to, as I've already logged 40 hours this week. Maybe we'll luck out and all of our clients will be snowed in, even those in Florida and Texas.)

Anyway, here are a couple more pictures of the snow (as best as I could take with our digital point and shoot).

The best part of the snow is Logan's delight. He's wanted snow for ages. And now he has it! Of course, it didn't take him long to start complaining about it, starting with the way it blows into your face.

I don't think he actually believes me about the existence of "snow brushes", though.

I don't have pictures of it, but a little bird was stuck in the front balcony of our apartment. It was completely disoriented by the snow. I think the falling snow (pretty big flakes of wet packing snow) threw it almost literally for a loop.

Our dog Sabine didn't know what to make of it, either. She was curious about the snow and sniffed it a lot, but she did not like how it made her feet cold. Or at least that's what I suspect was happening. She spent a lot of time sniffing snow and keeping off the snow covered grass. It was quite funny watching her run on it. Wish I had the video camera with me at the time.

If the snow sticks around until tomorrow, I'll take some more pics. Just to prove that yes, about once or twice a decade, it really does snow in northern Louisiana.

Of bagged milk and ketchup chips

2010-02-06T10:55:00.001-06:00

I sometimes suspect that Alana thinks I'm pulling her leg when I talk about cross-cultural stuff. For instance, when I talk about "milk in a bag" she looks at me as if to say, "No, Canada boy, you've gone too far this time." Or maybe she's just thinking "How/why would someone sell milk in bags?"

I tried to describe bagged milk, but pictures (and video) do much better than I could. So, here's a video from the Canadian desert vlogger "pincstuff" talking about bagged milk:

A few comments.

First, she doesn't mention the little "knee thump" I learned from my Dad when seating the milk in the jug. This helps drop the milk to the bottom of the jug, causing a tighter seal.

Second, cutting the corner might be "crucial" but after you've done it a few times the actual size becomes second nature. Her video makes it seem like it's a disaster waiting to happen, but it's not all that bad.

Third, we never bothered closing off the milk bags. Maybe we always went through it quickly enough, I don't know.

She also doesn't mention that bagged milk is more space friendly in the fridge (the jug with the milk stays on a top shelf and takes up much less space than a gallon plastic jug here in the U.S., and the rest of the bags can lie, or be stacked, in the bottom of the fridge). Nor does she mention that you can actually freeze milk, though you have to be sure to mix it well when defrosting it.

Bagged milk comes in the usual varieties: skim (I can't remember what they call it here, no fat I think), 1%, 2%, and — I'm not making this up — homo. (Homo stands for "homogenized milk", known as "whole milk" in the U.S.) Oh, and I seem to recall that you can get bags of chocolate milk, too.

While we're at it, this vlogger also has a video about ketchup flavoured and dill pickle flavoured potato chips. I was never a big fan of those, but the very idea that they exist seems to frighten Alana. Here's proof of their existence:

I personally was never a huge fan of the ketchup potato chip. My personal favourite is Ruffles All Dressed potato chips. I also like Lays salt and vinegar, but while I can get those in Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida, except for a weird two month period I haven't seen them here in northeastern Louisiana.

Finally, here's a video from an American band who went up to Vancouver, and while there sampled Canadian chips. You can see what they thought of ketchup chips, though the All Dressed did get a thumbs up.

So there you have it, bagged milk and All Dressed potato chips, the best Canadian inventions since the Robertson screw:

Death by candy

2010-02-05T15:05:00.002-06:00

http://www.perpetualkid.com/worlds-largest-gummy-bear.aspx

There we have it, folks. A gummy bear bigger than a football--all 12,600 calories of it. Five pounds of gummy goodness.

And I want one.

Nevermind the fact that I'm diabetic, and that it spells instant coma. I want one. The red one. Now.

The "Aints" No More...

2010-01-25T12:55:00.003-06:00

Forty-three seasons. Untold numbers of paper bags. Aerial shots of the 'dome, missing most of its roof.

Last night was a long time coming.

Last night was also the latest in a season-long series of sports-induced heart attacks...but somehow, they did it. The Saints are going to the Super Bowl.

Maybe 2010 is going to be a better year.

Year In Review -- Alana

2010-01-01T15:26:00.002-06:00

When I mentioned doing a post of this nature, I meant "we" should post...as in doing a post together (Allan writing; me making snide remarks in the background). Now it seems I'm obligated to post as well, although Allan's beaten me to the punch on most items worthy of notice.

The biggest thing to happen to any of us this year was the publication of Allan's book, This Favored Land. Logan and I were thrilled for him, and his work deserves the many comments I heard about it at GenCon (and other places). He put an incredible amount of time and care into the book, and I'd like to thank Shane Ivey and the other guys at Arc Dream for their belief in Allan's writing.

Healthwise, it hasn't been the best of years. 2009 proved to be better than 2008 for me, but only just. There has been gradual improvement, and I'm thankful for that. (If I never see the inside of another hospital, it will be too soon.) The only good thing to come of all this is the knowledge that Allan is an absolute rock. There's no way I could have made it through the past couple of years without him, and I love him more than ever for always being there.

Our trip to Indianapolis this summer was a good one; the first SF-type con Logan and I have been to, and for Logan, well...he was in the same town as Peyton Manning, and not much tops that. Getting stuck in the elevator somewhat dampened his enthusiasm for big cities, but we had a good time overall, and hope to get to another convention soon.

For me, not working this year has been strange, and somewhat of a mixed bag. I *need* to be working and contributing to the family--but it's been nice, being able to participate more at Logan's school, and being home when he gets here each day. After years of Logan complaining that I worked and couldn't be there every day to help with homework, etc., I think the boy might have changed his mind. I've seen more of his homework than he ever wanted me to, and he's tired of his mom showing up at school to help.

At any rate, I'm now babbling.

Let's all hope that 2010, however you pronounce it, turns out to be an improvement over 2009. I wish for a happy and healthy New Year for each of you.

Year in review - Allan

2009-12-31T20:58:00.001-06:00

Alana suggested that we blog a "year in review". I have a sneaking suspicion that she this is just a way for her to coerce me into "writing content", but so be it. I labeled this post with my name in the hope that Alana ends up posting, too.

It's been an interesting year. I wouldn't say it was a great year, but it certainly was an interesting one.

The highlight was the publication of my book, This Favored Land. It was such a treat seeing something I'd written all laid out, and with cool art.

The lowlight was Alana's health at the beginning of the year. It took her a while to recover from last year's surgery. Fortunately, things turned a corner by the end of June. I haven't mentioned it much on here, but I was pretty worried about her. I get a special charge when she turns to me and smiles, now that she's feeling better (but is still not 100%). I'll leave it to Alana to add more on this subject if she wishes.

My own health has been okay, not wonderful but not awful. I hate New Year's resolutions so I'm not making one, but I really need to lose some weight. I'm hoping my new allergy meds will help with, well, my allergies (ah, d'uh), as my allergies have been almost debilitating recently. In truth, the allergies aren't the debilitating part, the Zyrtec that knocks me on my ass is the debilitating part. I lost three weekends of writing to illness back in November, one from allergies and two from some sort of virus. Oh, and on Monday I broke a tooth; waiting for dental insurance to kick in before I get that seen to. (And, I might need sedatives, too, but that's another story...)

I can't believe how much Logan has grown in the last year. There was one day he came back from his father's after a week long visit and I swear he was noticeably taller! He did great in school last year. We had an... incident, scholastically, earlier this school year, but we think we've nipped it.

Logan continues to be obsessed with football. Unfortunately, he's not really cut out to be a guard, the position he played on his team this year. He has it in his mind that he'd make a great quarterback. Let's just say that Alana and I are... skeptical. On the plus side, he's now reading for enjoyment. We've been encouraging this. It's great to see him with his face stuck in a book rather than playing yet another variation on American football on his Wii or Xbox.

Work has been busy, occasionally frustrating, but generally good. I pull long hours, which tends to affect my writing, as there are only so many after work hours in a day. Odd that my most rewarding job in my career has the longest hours, lowest pay and crappiest benefits.

On the gaming front, I ran games at three different conventions. The best one, overall, was GenCon because Alana and Logan attended. I think, though, that if I can only do one convention next year (and I'm hoping for two, but we'll see) I'd go to DragonCon. It's closer, and either that much bigger than GenCon or so much more cramped that there's a frenetic energy about it.

We have a local gaming group now! That's pretty cool. We've been playtesting The Black Devils Brigade and playing board games. We haven't played Delta Green since October, but we play to get back into it in January. I need to contact everyone and set up a time to play.

So, as I said at the top of the post, not a great year but not a terrible one either. Kind of a mixed bag, really. To paraphrase (i.e. butcher) Dickens, "It was the okay-ist of times, it was the meh-ist of times."

See y'all in "Twenty Ten".

History Magazine's "Life During the Civil War"

2009-12-31T19:51:00.001-06:00

On the news stands right now is History Magazine's "Life During the Civil War" by David A. Norris. This is a perfect bound book the size of a softcover RPG supplement. I recommend it for This Favored Land players. It's also useful for games set in the Wild West period and mid-19th century Kerberos Club campaigns.

This book — it really does look more like an RPG supplement than a magazine — covers a lot of ground that I wanted to cover in This Favored Land, but which I couldn't for space reasons.

It begins with a two page dictionary of Civil War terms, most of which did not appear in TFL. Other topics are of particular interest to roleplayers: 19th century hotels; music (a blatant omission in TFL); humor and social commentary; army laundresses; army pets; fund raising; war artists; newspapers; telegraph; mail.

About half the book is information that wasn't touched on in TFL. The rest is in TFL but with more detail. The discussion on currency, for instance, breaks down army pay by rank. Railroad travel has a short explanation of "women's cars" and the food (or lack thereof) provided on rail cars. There's a wonderful single page full of common medicines and what they were used for.

The book has been on the stands for a couple of weeks. At 95 pages (with only 2 pages of ads) for $9.95, it's a bargain.

Canadian SF author beaten at U.S. border

2009-12-12T10:10:00.001-06:00

I'm asked every now and again if I intend to become an American citizen.

Alana is cool with her "Canada boy". Logan asks occasionally, but it's more out of curiosity than anything. He knows I already say things "funny" anyway.

There are downsides to becoming an American. Yes, I'd get to vote, but I live in a monoculture where my vote simply would not make a difference, and it would make me eligible for serving on a jury (I wouldn't mind, but this is more an annoyance than a benefit). I could apply for federal jobs, though there really aren't that many around here. One big downside is that if we ever left the U.S., the IRS wants a chunk of my income in another country! (Yes, your taxes in that other country are deductible, but who really wants the hassle?)

What I'm missing is a sense of belonging. I'm a foreigner in this country, and will continue to be as long as I'm not a citizen. (I probably would be even after I became a citizen, but at least I could bitch with more "authoritah").

As a legal resident, I'm protected under the law. I've been here more than 5 years, so I could now apply for social assistance if I needed it (not that I plan to). Of course, I've been contributing with my taxes. As I like to point out to people — particularly those of a "Tea Party" persuasion — I have taxation without representation.

The main advantage I'd get being a U.S. citizen is in not having to renew my green card every 10 years. Not only does this require an out of city trip and a fair bit of money (over $250 last time), I discovered in a post on RPG.net the other day that if I tried to cross the border after my green card expired, I could get kicked out of the country with no recourse for getting back in!

That revelation came in a topic about a particularly nasty incident at the U.S. border this week. Canadian science fiction author Dr. Peter Watts — who is a friend of friends I left back in Canada — was beaten, arrested, and charged with assaulting a border guard last week. Peter was going back home to Canada, after helping a friend move to Nebraska, when he was stopped by border guards. He got out of his car and asked why he was being stopped. The guards allege that he resisted arrest, while Peter denies this.

Here is the incident via Cory Doctrow at BoingBoing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html

(Full disclosure, Cory's article quotes David Nickle, a friend of mine.)

Peter's original description of the incident is here:
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932

An update is here:
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=935

And, of course, here's his web site, for ongoing news on this:
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/

If you would like to donate to Peter's legal defence fund, you can do so by sending a contribution via Paypal to donate@rifters.com.

It's incidents like these, and some wingnut things that have been happening post-millennial America, that have me seriously wondering, "do I want to be associated with this by citizenship"? On the flip side, citizenship would offer some (little) protection against this kind of insanity. I suspect they wouldn't be quite as likely to do this to a U.S. citizen, one who could maybe even wield some political power.

For now, my thoughts go out to Peter. Now if you'll excuse me, I want to make a note of the exact date my green card expires.

Snow!

2009-12-04T17:44:00.003-06:00

It's been snowing here most of the afternoon. I called Allan at work, as Logan and I and half our neighbors stood out in it like giant frozen idiots; he was not impressed.

It won't stick; it won't last...but it was really pretty for a while. And it snowed! Here! In December....

Maybe it will again on Christmas day.

Epic spam fail, or best scam e-mail ever?

2009-11-28T09:31:00.001-06:00

I received this in my spam folder recently.

It's one of the more amusing scam e-mails I've read. I guess this is what people in third world countries write instead of really bad Star Trek slashfic. (The formatting, punctuation, etc. is from the original.)

From Sgt Herman Hansley
Camp MXP-512 Third Infantry Division
UnitT.I.D.U,
Abul Uruj, Baghdad, Iraq.

I am Herman R Hansley, a native of Iraq. I am a Military Contractor with the America troop currently serving in the third infantry division Unit in Iraq.

I am currently on duty break. My partner Darren D. Braswell,36, of Riverdale, Ga., died Jan. 7th near TalAfar, Iraq, when the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter in which he was a Passenger crashed. Braswell worked For the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, before his death We secretly moved some abandoned cash in a mansion belonging to the former president, Saddam Hussein and the total cash is US$20,200,000.00 Twenty Million two hundred thousand Dollars.

As I write this letter to you, these boxes are in Security Company as I secretly moved it out of Baghdad to safe place.

Sir I seek your consent to help me move this money to your country location.

You do not have to be afraid of anything as no one else knows about this and everything is safe. I would be pleased and grateful to you if you could assist me and my late partner Darren D. Braswel in receiving this boxes for us on your behalf as I will be heading back soon to camp in Iraq to join my colleagues. Of course, I shall compensate you with an attractive percent of the total funds for your role/efforts. We have limited time now as you know that our evacuation agreement is been negotiated by the USA and IRAQI government, kindly get back to me immediately.

Moving the funds out of the security company is not going to be much of a problem as arrangements are being made towards that. All I want from you is your trust,

Please get back to me with your full name
Contact phone number

Preferable without delay and let’s negotiate terms.

Your response will determine our subsequent correspondence.

You can read more on this website for more information and explanations: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm

Yours in Service.
Herman R Hansley

The link, by the way, is to an article on the BBC News web site about a stash of $200 million found in Baghdad in 2003. Evidently this is some of the money that turned up missing.

The writer missed his calling. Instead of sending this out as spam, he should have sent it to Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer.

Black Friday update: aborted attempt at TRU

2009-11-26T23:40:00.002-06:00

Alana and I went to Toys 'R Us this evening. Their Black Friday sale starts at midnight.

If you check the timestamp on this post, you'll see that we didn't stay...

The line up was up one side of the plaza, down the other, and around the corner. There were hundreds of people in line.

We only had one thing we were looking for, for Logan, and it wasn't a toy. TRU has a good price on it, but nothing we couldn't get elsewhere.

Alana was in shock when she saw the line up. I believe her words were, "Is that the line? That's not the line!"

So, with a "Hell, no!" shouted out by both of us, in unison, we came home.

This also means we're not going to bother getting up, as a friend of Alana put it, at the "butt crack of morning", as we didn't really see anything we couldn't live without.

We'll probably go out in the morning to see if some of the stuff we could use is still available, but we're not going to do the crazy this year.

Black Friday is getting earlier and earlier...

2009-11-25T20:53:00.002-06:00

For folks not living in the United States, Black Friday is the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving. In spite of its name, it's considered a good thing. The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start to the U.S. Christmas buying season. Stores started offering deep discounts on some items as loss leaders.

It's called Black Friday because for many stores it's the day, or the start of the period, where they make enough money to break even or make a profit.

(In recent years Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday, the first day back at work when people had access to a good broadband connection and could order Christmas presents online.)

This is a uniquely American experience. Canada's Thanksgiving is a month and a half earlier (because Canadian harvests are brought in earlier) and so Canada doesn't have the same starter pistol-like start to Christmas buying. Canada makes up for it with Boxing Day sales, but that's another story.

Stores began opening their doors earlier and earlier. That's the point of this post.

When I first moved down here, I'd never actually participated in the craziness that is Black Friday. My first was in 2004. There was a bunch of good stuff to be had at Target. The night before I said something like, "So, we'll get up around 7 or so, get dressed, and go out to the store?" Alana just chuckled. "We have to be there for them opening. At 6 a.m."

I have to admit, it was fun. Tons of people in the early, early morning, after only a little bit of sleep, the air pretty chilly (at least for Louisiana). There was a charge in the air. We enjoyed it. I think Alana most enjoys the culture shock look on my face.

Now I get to the point of this post.

Monday night we were watching TV, and one store mentioned opening at 6 a.m. on Black Friday. That's, like, the traditional opening time. It's not the earliest. A bunch of stores open at 5 a.m. Then, Kohl's, the department store, ran an ad explaining that they are opening at 4 a.m. I turned to Alana with a WTF look on my face. "What's next, Black Friday on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving?"

I was joking. I shouldn't have.

K-Mart is opening on Thanksgiving Day. Black Friday on the Thursday of Thanksgiving.

And then today I received an e-mail from Borders. They are offering "early bird" access to their Black Friday sales to Borders Rewards members. Their sales start... today. Black Friday on the Wednesday.

I wonder how long it will take them until they take a page from Stupid Canadian Retailing and convert "Boxing Week" [sic] sales into "Black Friday Week". You heard it here, first!

Are we going to brave the elements, and the crazy people, Friday morning?

We're not sure. We haven't done it in a couple of years. Two years ago we were moving into the apartment. We went out shopping around 9. Last year there really wasn't anything worth getting.

This year's early ads don't really inspire much hope, either, though there are a couple of tempting items for Logan. One's at Wal-Mart, which we really don't want to go to on Black Friday. However, I understand that we might be able to get it at Walmart.com without having to rush out to that horrid place.

I didn't see much at Best Buy that grabbed me. Target had a couple of things, but nothing really "Wow!". Office Depot has a couple of things, but nothing that screams "5 a.m.".

I'll post an update later.

Comcast and repetitive music

2009-11-24T22:22:00.001-06:00

I like having music on when I write. Unfortunately, we get horrible reception in the house (but okay reception in the car) for the only radio station worth listening to in Monroe/West Monroe, KXUL, the local college station.

So, I listen to Comcast's Alternative digital music station.

What's with Comcast and the small stable of artists they play on this channel? Are they getting payola?

Right now "Kings and Queens" by 30 Seconds to Mars is playing. I like the song, don't get me wrong. But I am guaranteed to hear it at least once in a two hour session. It never fails. And they'll play another 30 Seconds to Mars song within another couple of hours.

Earlier they played She Wants Revenge. No problem with the group, but, again, I'm guaranteed to hear them once every couple of hours or so, sometimes more often than that. Because it's on the television, they have graphics for the bands they play, and these graphics tend to stick in your memory.

I guess maybe they want me to jump to another channel, one that pays them more. If I'm going to do that, I'm going to turn off the TV and plug in my PSP (as an MP3 player) or put on some CDs, none of which lets me hear new music.

Searching for an HTML editor

2009-11-23T12:25:00.000-06:00

This shouldn't be so hard...

I'm searching for a freeware HTML editor. I code almost all of my HTML by hand (for instance, my web site) so I'm looking for a text editor that can make my life a bit easier.

I mostly need it for work, where I'm writing help files in HTML Help format.

Back in the late 90s I used a program called Arachnophilia. It was a pretty good program, but it had some warts and needed some additional options. Unfortunately, the developer changed it from a Windows program to a Java cross-platform program. I say "unfortunately" because he mucked about with the interface and made it much slower. I saw, recently, that there was an update. I downloaded it, installed it, and uninstalled it within 15 minutes.

(The guy also has a screed against Microsoft on his web site. Now, I'm not exactly pro-Microsoft. I thought the U.S. Justice Department gave them a slap on the wrist when much more was necessary. But it doesn't exactly make one feel comfortable downloading software from a guy who apparently wrote his app in Java in part to get back at Redmond.)

As I'm po', I'm looking for a freeware program but I'd purchase a program if it fit my needs. Unfortunately, most of the straight text editor programs are written by small companies and are somewhat buggy, and I can't afford the full blown programs — like Dreamweaver — which are complete overkill for what I do, and way too expensive (hundreds of dollars).

Here's the wish list of features:

Colour coding of the text compatible with HTML or XML, and cascading style sheets.
Ability to easily add links and graphics. Specifically, if adding text or graphics from your own web site, the program allows you to select the file and it will insert the correct link and image tag.
A function for easily adding special characters, such as the cents sign, etc. Preferably, it would display a set of special characters that the user clicks on to add to the text.
Allow the creation of macros or snippets, etc. This allows the user to create functions for easily adding repeated text to the document.
A spell checker.
Allow search and replace across multiple documents.
HTML tag reference for ease of entering new tags.
Preview your web page from within the program itself.
Cold folding (where you can close part of the code to make it easier to read and debug your code)

For the last several years I've used a program called HTML-Kit. The build 292 version is the last freeware version. Technically, I guess, it was shareware. Anyone could run it, but the developer encouraged people to register (at a cost of US$65, or there abouts). Sometime a couple of years ago the developer stopped working on the free version (though it's still available) and announced the release of HTML-Kit Tools. This version is only available for registered users.

I registered HTML-Kit to get HTML-Kit Tools. I'm not very happy with this decision. HTML-Kit has all my wish list items except code folding and search and replace across all documents. The search and replace it does have is a little annoying. There are also some bugs in the software. If you span across paragraphs and hit the backspace key to delete text, the program deletes too much. I made it crash the other day by typing too fast. It doesn't have an auto-recover during a crash.

The bugs were annoying, but I figured these were fixed in HTML-Kit Tools. They were, but now there are different bugs. The developer actually created a new version due to a crash bug I found.

Worse, it's missing an important feature of HTML-Kit, the spell checker. The search and replace is much worse on the new version (I really dislike it), the macro/snippet function is far less intuitive than the old version (and the old function wasn't exactly intuitive), and when you preview a web page it leaves a preview copy hanging around (I have to check to see if there's a way to shut it off). The interface has been simplified to look more like the ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007 products. The interface is cleaner, but it doesn't look as professional.

So, overall, I'm not that happy with HTML-Kit Tools. In fact, I went back to the old program.

In the meantime, I tested a few other programs (roughly in order of testing):

Notepad++: This one gets lots of good reviews. It's a generic code editor, and works with multiple languages. It is well supported, with lots of add-on modules. But, it doesn't have a way to easily add links or graphics to HTML, it doesn't have a spell checker, you can't preview within the program (which I can live without, to be honest) and it doesn't have a special character preview.

PSPad: I stumbled across this. It has most of what I want, including a spell checker, but it doesn't have a link/graphic function, it doesn't have a feature for adding special characters, and it doesn't do code-folding.

Notetab Light: This is the free version of a line of products, so it's possible that a "for pay" version has the features I'm after. The free version doesn't have colour code, nor does it have a spell checker, or code folding. It does have the other items on the list, and it's very good at search and replace (I keep it around for that reason).

Aptana Studio: This is the most professional looking of all the programs I tried. I really like the interface. I really want to use this. Again, though, it has some issues. I can't make the spell checker work, if it comes with one (it has a section under preferences that suggests it does have a spell checker, but I can't make it work). So far my question to their support forum has been unanswered. It has most of the other features. It does not have an easy way of inserting graphics and links, but if you find the file you want you can copy the link into the clipboard. So, we'll say that's about 1/3 what I'm after on that feature.

As I said, I want to like this one, but I'm not getting the warm and fuzzies from their support.

CodeLobster: This is another freeware program. When I first ran it, it looked like it had everything I wanted. Digging a little deeper, it doesn't have a spell checker, it doesn't have a way to do macros, and it automatically saves your page when you go to preview it. They said today they are planning the macro feature and then, later, the spell checker. When this has a few more features it looks like it could replace HTML-Kit, but it's not there yet.

There were two other small programs I didn't keep around for long.

I'm also looking into Microsoft's Visual Web Developer Express tool, but I don't have much faith in it. It requires a whole web development environment. Then, it wanted to upgrade Visual Studio on my computer (it uses a version of Visual Studio) before it would proceed. Unfortunately, it took over an hour (!) to download the update and it's now taken more than half an hour to install it. All for something I think is going to end up being hideous overkill.

So, if you have any suggestions for HTML editors, I would appreciate hearing from you.

A head for lyrics

2009-11-07T09:10:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the absence of blog posts. I've been incredibly busy at work, writing our help file, and at home I've been writing The Black Devils Brigade for the Godlike RPG. It's been hard to fit in blogging.

Last night brought to mind something I wanted to mention. I was doing some writing with the TV on in the background. The channel was one of the VH1 channels, and they were running a concert with various alt-rock groups performing songs by The Who. I was a huge fan of The Who. I even stood in line for several hours 27 years ago to get tickets for their first farewell tour.

While watching, I started singing along to some of their songs (completely destroying the whole point of spending the time writing). Alana turned to me, smiled, and asked how I can fit in all those lyrics in my head.

This goes back to our trip home from GenCon in August. We forgot to bring music with us (other than what was on my PSP, and we don't have a way of hooking up the PSP/MP3 players to the car's stereo), so we had to rely on local radio. On the way home, we tuned in to some classic rock outside of Memphis.

Now, I'm not one to listen to classic rock stations at home. We generally listen to KXUL, the local college station, which plays commercial free alt-rock. I like classic rock. I was listening to it before it was classic (as a very small child my mother had to break a vinyl 45 rpm record of The Beatles' "She Loves You" because I was driving her mad wanting to hear it all the time). However, they aren't making any more classic rock. It's the same two decades worth of stuff they play all the time. And, this being the U.S., you hear very little of the Canadian classic rock I grew up with (April Wine or Chilliwack, anyone?). I like listening to classic rock every now and again for the great nostalgia factor, but it soon becomes tiring. I was training users in northwest Tennessee in August and they played classic rock in their offices. I didn't hear Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or The Guess Who, or even that much Rush, but they were sure to play Van Halen at least twice every single day. But I digress...

So, we listened to classic rock until we got into the depths of northern Mississippi where there's not much more than country and western, or gospel in the wee hours of the morning (until we could pick up more classic rock outside Jackson). Early on, while we were still in Arkansas, Alana made a comment that I knew a lot of song lyrics. In fact, she seemed to think I could sing along with a staggering number of songs.

The radio had just started in on a three song set of The Who.

Just as she said this, a song from the album Tommy came on.

I looked at her, smiled, and sang, "Welcome to the camp, I guess you all know why we're here. My name is Tommy, and I became aware this year."

It was obvious from the look on Alana's face that she'd never heard the song in her life, and here I was singing every word.

It just served to prove to her that, yes, I was insane.

I never really thought about it before, but it's haunted me since: I really do pick up a lot of song lyrics. In fact, when I like a song I have this deep seated need to learn the words.

I'm not as good at it as Alana thinks I am. There are still some old songs that I don't know all the lyrics to, even 30 years later, in spite of trying. I have trouble memorizing all the lyrics to songs by The Tragically Hip, but The Hip's lyrics tend to the poetic and don't repeat themselves much. They're often hard to learn, and maybe deliberately so.

But, yeah, looking at it objectively, I know the lyrics to a huge number of songs. Unfortunately, I also like to sing them even though I couldn't carry a tune if it was strapped to my back. I sing a lot when I'm alone in the car; I try not to inflict it much on the people around me, except maybe when we're on long car trips and I'm getting a bit punchy.

Now, if only I could wipe out some old Loverboy (*shudder*) lyrics and remember my security alarm number at work. I think it starts with a 5...

HyperBear redesigned

2009-10-13T21:16:00.001-05:00

It's been a busy month, between work, writing projects and gaming. It was made busier by another project: a redesign of my web site.

The redesign was in the works for over a year, but it took me a while to finish the conversion.

My web site is at www.hyperbear.com.

While I was at it, I added new Delta Green adventure write-ups. Alana and Jason played in a Delta Green one-shot campaign — the scenario "A Night on Owlshead Mountain", from Delta Green: Eyes Only — earlier this year. Alana, Jason, and our new player, Dustin, played in two adventures last month in our main M Cell campaign.

My heartfelt thanks to Alana for doing the graphic logos for my web site! I did the graphics on couple of them (I found a cool Photoshop tutorial on how to do tentacles, which I utilized for the Cthulhu Pages logo; Google "photoshop tentacles"), but Alana did most of the images and put in the lettering.

I hope you like the new look of HyperBear. I'm pretty happy with the cleaner, more modern look.

List of writing projects

2009-09-10T14:13:00.002-05:00

One thing I forgot to add to my blog post last night are the projects I'm working on for Arc Dream. Some folks have asked me what's upcoming, so here they are:

The Black Devils Brigade – Full sized campaign for Godlike, based on the historical campaigns of the First Special Service Force, a unique American-Canadian commando unit.

This has to be completed by January, 2010.

The Silver Pavilion – A Wild Talents supplement. Set during the Onin War, it treats the legends of feudal Japan as though they really happened. The creatures of Japanese mythology exist. The abilities of the samurai are as they are listed in legend. It does for samurai what This Favored Land did for the Civil War.

No time frame on this yet. I'll be working on it after The Black Devils Brigade, but it might come after the next project.

Operation Torch – Full sized campaign for Godlike, based on the historical invasion of North Africa (Morocco) by American forces in 1942. Most of the campaign has been written. I'll be writing the first two chapters, the second part of the "Sink the Lutzow" scenario, and the final chapter.

This book has been in development for quite a while. I'm not sure if it will come right on the heels of The Black Devils Brigade or after The Silver Pavilion.

This Wild Land (working title) – A sequel to This Favored Land, it brings Gifted superheroes into America's Reconstruction period and, more importantly, the Wild West. The Gifted have become The Forgotten, as their abilities — and memories of their abilities — fade away. The PCs will try to stop the forces destroying The Gift and help prevent the oncoming cataclysm.

There is no planned due date at this point. I imagine I won't start to work on this until late next year or early 2011. I'm not sure about the others, but it will probably be released via a ransom model.

My First DragonCon

2009-09-09T23:48:00.002-05:00

My convention season is over for 2009. I just got back from DragonCon. For those of you who don't know, DragonCon is the largest science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction convention in the U.S., held each year in Atlanta, Georgia over the Labor Day weekend. It gets about 40,000 attendees each year and a lot of big name (sci-fi/sf/syfy) celebrities. It's also a sizable convention for games, particularly roleplaying games.

This was the first science fiction convention for me since 1994. I used to go to the Ad Astra convention in Toronto fairly regularly. In 1994 I went to the World Science Fiction Convention, held that year in Winnipeg, Manitoba. That was an interesting convention. Not a good convention, but an interesting one. For various reasons (which could fill a post in its own) that convention drove out most of my interest in literary science fiction for almost a decade. (I still kept my interest in sci-fi movies and TV, and got into sci-fi miniatures gaming, but... well, as I said, it's a long story.) So, I really wasn't sure what to expect, especially since this was the first sci-fi convention where I would spend a considerable amount of time running games.

Last Thursday I spent the morning finishing up a Godlike (World War II super heroes; think Saving Private Ryan meets Heroes) scenario for the convention. Then I printed some character sheets for the game and generally messed about when I should have been packing. I drove from West Monroe (with a stop in Jackson, MS) to Birmingham, AL where Shane Ivey, president of Arc Dream (publisher of Godlike) lives. My trip started inauspiciously, given that I forgot some stuff and had to find a grocery store on the way. I got there safe and sound on our car's new Firestone tires (recently purchased).

We left Birmingham Friday morning, getting on the road about 7:30 CDT, and arriving in Atlanta around 11:00 EDT. We had to unload the truck, meet up with Ben Baugh (Arc Dream and White Wolf writer) at our hotel, check in at the hotel, and register at the con by 1 p.m. for my first game. We didn't make it.

Part of this is because the convention shuttle didn't show up. Our hotel (the Renaissance) was about 10 blocks away (about a 15 to 20 minute walk to the Hyatt, or 25 minute romp to the Hilton, where the games were held). It was supposed to run regularly, but I didn't see it all convention. I did see a bus someone told me was the shuttle but I'm still not convinced this mythical beast existed.

DragonCon is a bit missing in the organization side, at least compared to GenCon. Now, GenCon has the advantage of centering around a large Indianapolis convention centre and adjoining hotels. DragonCon is spread among three or four main hotels in the city's downtown. Due to the hills, one hotel's first floor is another's second floor. It wasn't until Sunday that I could navigate the labyrinth of hotel floors and skywalks such that I could find any given event. So, part of the organizational difficulties were due to physical logistics.

We arrived at the central registration area (the furthest away hotel) and — when we asked where the game masters registered — we were told to follow a yellow line taped down on the floor. That took us to the VIP registration. There were 5 people total in line and 5 people behind the booth. It took them at least 15 minutes to get to us and another 5 to realize that game masters didn't register there. We then had to go to another hotel, the Hilton where the games were held. There was a table in the basement level there where they gave out the GM badges. Now, they were efficient once we got there, but why no one couldn't have told us this to being with, and why registration was not centralized is beyond me.

I missed running my game. As Murphy would have it, this is the game I spent a good chunk of last week writing and was finishing up on Thursday morning. It's not wasted, since it will end up in the Operation Torch book, but it was disappointing.

With my game missed, we hung out in the open gaming area in the basement of the Hilton. It was a pretty good place for spur-of-the moment games, and they had a good selection of games to "rent" (at $5 per game). I had hoped to get there again, but never made it. We set up for a "games on demand" session, where we would just run a game if people came up and asked. As we would find out, the times were marked wrong. Instead of us running this at 2:30 as we had told the con, we were scheduled for 1 p.m. Nonetheless, we met some gamers and talked about the games.

After the games on demand, Ben and I walked the dealers rooms. There were two exhibit halls in the Marriott, one of which held the Arc Dream booth, and a dealer's room. Not sure what constituted the difference, but the exhibit halls were easier to find and much, much brighter. I did get a present for Alana in the dealer's room, though: a pair of clip on handmade demon horns (she asked me to look for them).

After the exhibit hall closed we ate at the food court. All but one of my meals was there. I ate at the Farmer's Market. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but the catfish they served was barking back at me for hours. Some of the others ate at a Cajun place, which was good on Friday but made them ill when they ate there again on Saturday. I wonder about the J. Brenner's cheesesteak place. It never had more than one or two people at it while other places had long lines. What, exactly, was wrong with the place? I ended up eating two meals at Moe's Southwest Grill, one at Dairy Queen, and one at Chick-fil-A.

Next up was the Stump The Geeks panel. The people running it (friends of the Iveys) read out a description of a science fiction, fantasy, or horror movie with the spec fic elements taken out. You had to guess the movie or show, and got a prize if you were right. I got one of the first ones right: "A TV series that was not canceled this season, which could also be something you sewed on jeans." I shot my hand up. "Fringe?" I won a new D&D paperback. If the first page is anything to go by, it's horribly written but luckily bad enough to be funny.

We walked to the hotel and crashed for about an hour. I changed into my Invader Zim t-shirt, and we walked back to the convention for the first of our midnight games. I ran "Target: Planet Earth", a game for Wild Talents where the players played aliens invading the Earth. I had five players, which was great.

Their mission was to investigate human technology and watch out for other alien activity. They were deposited in their base — disguised as a regular family home — in fictional Placid Falls, Florida. I had them choose between long range sensors, a shuttle pod, or a biotech lab for their base; they chose the lab. The player characters (PCs) were met by the neighbors right away and invited to a party where they acted inappropriately, as they were aliens with only a vague idea of human culture. They did learn about the disappearance of some kids, which was an important clue. The base came with a machine that created money, so they spent the next morning buying a car (a minivan, though one of the aliens wanted a Corvette because it was fast). They also stole a neighbor's newspaper and learned about bright lights in the sky and crop circles in a soy bean field. The neighbors mentioned the return of the kids, which seemed to coincide with the UFO sighting. The PCs investigated the crop circles and learned they were made by another alien ship, they discovered synthetic rubber that, among other things, was used in bubble gum, and they detected that the kids had been there. At this point, some mysterious "persons in brown" showed up and the players/aliens disguised as humans had to evade them. The PCs determined they had to sneak into the local bubble gum factory, where they found the missing kids and their family, and found that other aliens were putting brain control larvae into bubble gum. To make a long, but exciting, story short, they escaped from the factory, captured an alien flying saucer, blew up the factory, saved the family, and let the persons in brown clean up the mess. Everyone had a ball and thanked me for a fun game. It wrapped up around 4:30 (we were about 1 a.m. getting started), and I got to sleep just after 6.

I was supposed to get to a panel on games the next day, but couldn't find it (I was looking in the wrong hotel), so I ended up spending a fair bit of time at the Arc Dream booth. When I wasn't doing that, I was people watching. People watching is great at DragonCon, as at least a third of the people wore costumes, a number that bumps up to at least 50% the night of the masquerade. Steampunk costumes were all the rage, and — quite frankly — an aesthetic that appealed to me. If I had money I'd be very tempted to make a steampunk costume for next year.

There were other costumes that were... unfortunate. Some people need to learn that spandex is not their friend. And what do you call a double-decker muffin top? I particularly liked the guy with the homemade samurai armour, a really awesome Star Wars emperor, and I have to give kudos to the guy in the Monarch (from the Venture Brothers) costume, but really wish I could block the vision of the 200 pound woman dressed as the Watchman's Silk Spectre. There were more inventive costumes than derivative. Oh, sure, there were tons of people as Rohrscach from The Watchmen, and just as many Jokers, and flocks of stormtroopers, but there were plenty of unique costumes, too. The steampunk Boba Fett was great, and the girls dressed up as waitresses from True Blood were cute. I was surprised at the number of general pop culture costumes, too. There were at least a couple of people dressed as Flo from the Progressive Insurance commercials. There are too many costumes to begin to mention in detail, good and bad. If you search the web you'll find a number of pics. The costumes were so prevalent that at one point in the food court I see this grey blob moving out of the corner of my eye, and I started to think about what it might be. A rock monster? A horta from Star Trek? It turned out to be a garbage bag in a bin pushed by a janitor...

My 6 pm game was another Godlike game, this one being the first adventure from the Black Devils Brigade book I'm writing for Arc Dream. It's based on an actual unit from World War II, but with superpowered "Talents" added. I had six players, and the game went very well. The players did an excellent job killing Nazis, and they took the mountain successfully. Everyone had a blast, and two players bought stuff. You can't beat flaming Nazis (as in "on fire") for good times.

I was beat after that, so I headed back to the hotel. A couple of us took a cab: $12 to go 10 blocks (if that). I'd never heard of cabs charging extra money for extra passengers... For supper, I ate at the Varsity, an Atlanta landmark. A friend visited the Varsity some 20 years ago. I didn't recognize the place until I walked in and heard the "What'll ya have?" chant from the cashiers. It was an experience, though I thought the burgers were just okay, nothing great. I wanted to check e-mail when I got back to the hotel, only to discover that the hotel wanted $12.95 a night for internet access. They might have had free internet in the lobby, but I was too tired to bother with that. What's with these big hotels charging an arm and a leg for internet access when I can get it for free from a Best Western in northwest Tennessee?

Up around 9 on Sunday and off to the con. I got there in time to see 90 minutes of their robot wars competition. The robots were small compared to those on TV (the "ant" class were only about 6 inches long, if that). That's okay, the camera and projection screen showed all the action. They fought it out in an enclosed arena. It was lots of fun, particularly in one of the last fights in the larger "beetle" class when the one robot chewed apart another. You don't get this sort of thing at GenCon.

At 1 p.m. I ran my second Black Devils Brigade game. This used the same characters as the first game, but from a mission later in the timeline of the book. I had six players, and I again got a great response. In fact, of the six players, four of them bought something at our booth. They all thought it was a great game, with one player flipping through my rule book in anticipation of buying it. The reaction was phenomenal.

The rest of the evening was spent hanging at the booth, and wandering the con. We tried to get into the Mad Scientist's Ball (excerpts of which are on YouTube), but the line was way too long (a theme for the weekend). We consoled ourselves with checking out the costumes and just wandering around. It sounds boring, but I had a blast. I could have done without having a cherry pit hit me square on the bridge of my noes from umpteen stories up, though! (This was inside the hotel. All of the hotels are really, really tall with central atria.)

I was set to run a game of This Favored Land at midnight, but no one showed. I think this was partly because the description of the game didn't mention Wild Talents at all. This was a disappointment, particularly given that the Monsters and Other Childish Things game and the Delta Green game were overbooked. I would have offered to run my game for some of the "turn aways" if I hadn't been distracted helping Ross Payton's Delta Green game by creating a DG character on the fly without the rulebook (took me 15 minutes!). Instead, I got to play in a Monsters game. This was fun, but the player I was paired with (I was his monster, he played a child) wasn't very "active", which limited my actions. I still had fun, though, and it was the only roleplaying game I played (as opposed to run) in a year. We were back in the hotel by 5 am.

Next morning we rushed to check out. Shane shifted the truck to a closer parking lot, so I didn't have to walk to the con hotels. I ate a quick lunch then went to my last game. At GenCon, tables are numbered and assigned to games, and the table number is published in the event book. Players simply show up to their table at the right time. Not so at DragonCon. Instead, they have a dopey "mustering" process. Everyone gathers in a room. Each game is called out. Games are assigned a table at that time, and players march off to their games with the GM. This eats up 10 to 20 minutes of time for no real advantage. Okay, I guess it makes it easier to find players for games that are partially filled, but I didn't see that done successfully the whole time I was there. Each game also gets a $5 coin that you can give to a "winner" in the game, which they can spend in the dealers' rooms. I let the players vote for the winner. I've never been crazy about this idea. I don't like competitive roleplaying. In one of our Delta Green players Shane awarded one to the player who lost the most sanity, which I thought was pretty cool.

Once again, no one showed for my This Favored Land game. The last day of the con isn't a great time to hope for players for a relatively obscure game. I hung out in the muster room for about an hour, talking to the people there. There's a feeling among gamers that DragonCon could do a lot more to attract gamers. Regardless, there were more games this year than last year. This is particularly interesting as White Wolf was not present at the convention (and I had planned to buy a couple of things from them!), and the big Shadowrun group had 8 fewer games this year than last. I heard that the cheese grinder game, an annual D&D dungeon crawl, went from 242 players last year to about 150 this year. This was at least partially attributed to the game moving to 4th edition. I'm not sure if this says anything other than the fact that 4th edition has splintered the existing D&D fan base in its attempt to bring new players to the hobby.

I spent a little more time at the booth, then wandered the dealer's rooms again. There was definitely an anti-Twilight bias at the convention. Oh, sure, the books were for sale and there were t-shirts with the characters from the books and the movie. There just happened to be more t-shirts and posters against the series. My favorite t-shirt said, "... And Then Buffy Staked Edward. The End." Another said, "Real vampires don't sparkle!". I overheard some fans bemoaning the fact that Twilight was "written by a housewife who didn't even bother researching vampires". Between this and the debate between "steampunk" versus "gaslight", I was reminded that fandom wouldn't be fandom if it didn't splinter into mutually antipathetic sub groups.

And here's an open letter to folks at the Steve Jackson Games/Atlas Games/Chaosium booth. These three companies shared a booth here and at GenCon. At both conventions, they had a habit of yelling out and cheering whenever someone paid them in exact change. It's "a thing" that they're known for. Here's my suggestion: cut it out, already! I mean, jeez, guys, if you're going to scream every time you get exact change make sure you're not doing it in a potential customer's ear! I had a purchase in my hand when one of the booth monkeys cried out, "I have... exact change!" and another Pavloved a scream RIGHT IN MY EAR. I don't know how many, if any, sales your little stunt brings you, but it lost you one from me. My ear was ringing for a good five minutes. So knock it off!

I did get a free game from the Troll and Toad booth called Vapor's Gambit. It doesn't get great reviews, but we'll give it a shot. I bought a dungeon crawl card game I'd been hunting for several months. I bought a new book for Alana from one of her favorite authors and a book for myself called Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good At The Time... by John Grant. I also bought a cool Edgar Allan Poe t-shirt (there's a connection between Poe and This Favored Land). I really liked the mix of stuff for sale. Even if most of it wasn't something I'd buy, all the booths were interesting. I found a great leather trench coat to replace the long oil skin coat I had to throw away a couple of years ago, if I can pony up $400.

At 5 pm the convention was over. We packed the booth, rolled the boxes out to the nearby parking lot, and loaded the truck. It's sad seeing a convention break down, particularly since this was the last of the season for me. Still, I was missing Alana and Logan badly and looking forward to getting home.

I'm a gamer. I love GenCon, with its huge dealer's room and focus on games. Still, I think I had more fun at DragonCon. There were far more costumes, and more to do in the evening. There were tons of panels I wanted to get to, while at GenCon you have to do a little work to get into something after 8 pm. This was seen by the great turnout we had for our 6 pm and midnight games. I wish the DragonCon event book was better laid out. I hate that it's split up by genre. It assumes that most con goers are only interested in one particular area. It makes it hard to just pick a time and find out what was available to do. By contrast, the GenCon book is split primarily by date and time first, and then subdivided (with a small icon indicator) by genre. It makes for a superior event planner.

In all, I had a blast. If I get to go next year, I'll make a better effort to attend more panels in my off time. I'll also do a better job of bringing my own food, not just to cut cost but to spend less time in line. As for a costume? I'm still thinking about it...

Disappointed: Hob Nob Restaurant, West Monroe

2009-08-22T23:34:00.002-05:00

This is a quick restaurant review.

Alana and I have been to the Hob Nob in West Monroe a few times. It was one of our favorite steak places, even if it was too pricey to do very often. It was one of our favorites. I wonder if they've gone through new owners, or if they changed chefs, because tonight's dining experience was incredibly disappointing.

Alana ordered catfish and shrimp. She left more than half of it untouched. The batter on both had a weird taste. I couldn't place it, but it seemed to be acidic, almost a vinegar taste. It made the fish and shrimp unpalatable.

I ordered a rib eye. The steak was cooked properly, but it was covered in way too much pepper. The only taste on my first bite was an intense pepper taste. I could hardly taste the meat at all.

The salad was pretty sad. It was mostly lettuce with some croutons and shredded carrots, covered in dressing. I had two halves of a baby tomato, but I didn't eat them as they had dark (black?) bits on them and didn't look the least bit appetizing.

The Diet Coke was watered down, but it's bar soda, so you have to expect that. The baked potato was good.

The juke box blared a couple of times with country music, and the lighting was really, really dim where we sat. That's the Hob Nob, though, and nothing we didn't expect.

The waitress was efficient, though she didn't ask how our food was, nor did she notice Alana had only eaten half the meal (she didn't ask how it was or if we wanted a to go box).

So, not the least bit impressed. This was a place we really liked to go to, and now with this meal we're wondering if we'll ever be back; it's unlikely. Don't know what they did to it. Maybe this was just a bad night, but the place is too expensive to take that risk lightly. No, we didn't tell the manager, as there didn't seem to be one anywhere around, just a lot of young waitresses in black t-shirts and short jean shorts. Hob Nob was never "classy" but it seems to have gone way down hill since the renovation.

GenCon 2009

2009-08-22T20:15:00.002-05:00

We've been back from GenCon for the better part of a week now, so I guess it's time to put up a review of sorts.

Our trip started inauspiciously. We took the car to get the tires rotated a few days earlier. That's when we discovered that there was a problem with the tires and they were wearing funny, coupled with an alignment issue. We need new tires, and an alignment, but couldn't afford them before we left. So, off we went on a 1600 mile trip with dodgy tires and a car that liked to pull to the right. We were fine, as it turned out, but the car was more tiring to drive than I had hoped.

We lost about an hour on the trip due to damage to the car from my trip to Imagicon. On the way back in March, a piece of a truck tire from the other side of the highway hit the car. It knocked out a plastic shield over the holes where fog lamps are mounted on the Corolla. It also, apparently, popped the plastic fasteners that hold the plastic lining in front of the wheel well in place. When I got home from that trip I thought the lining was bent. It wasn't just bent, but loose. Last Tuesday, when we got into Mississippi we started to hear scraping sounds (this was our first long trip in the car since Imagicon). Just north of Jackson we pulled over to eat and I saw that a plastic skirt underneath the car had popped a fastener. I fixed that with a quick trip to Lowes for nuts, bolts, and a wrench, but the scraping still occurred. At the next stop I found out about the lining. Any time we hit a bump, the lining rubbed on the tire. We now had a hole worn away in the lining. I cut away most of the lining and the scraping sound went away. I should point out that the scraping sound also sounded quite a bit like the rasping sound of air, and since it came from one side of the car (the side that took the hit in March) I thought it was air going through the hole where the shield was lost, or it was a seal problem on that door. Turns out, not so.

We stayed for the night at the Quality Inn at Blytheville. It was okay, but nothing to write home about. The positive reviews online were too positive, but the room was clean enough and we were only in it for about 9 hours.

The next day we drove into Indianapolis in time to help set up the Arc Dream booth. We were so early, that the cheaper parking lot I used last year was still full with people working downtown. I'll have to time a later arrival next year. Shane and the Birmingham Arc Dream guys were late, so there would be no booth set up that night. Instead, Logan, Alana and I went out to dinner with Greg Stolze, Ross Payton, and a friend of Ross' at P. F. Chang's, where Logan discovered he liked sesame chicken. They went to the Diana Jones Awards in a local bar, and we crashed for the night.

The next day we got to the booth early (thank you exhibitor badges!). Our games were all running in Union Station, a great venue (an old railroad station, the motif of which has been preserved for the Crowne Plaza's conference areas) but the furthest from the convention center. I got my exercise, anyway, as all our events were there. I was to run a scenario from the Black Devils Brigade book I'm working on. No one showed. The line up for registration was around the side of the convention center, so even if people wanted in my game they would likely have missed the start time. Next year we won't bother running a game that early on day 1.

The rest of the day was spent hanging at the Arc Dream booth and prowling the dealer's room. Logan bought a wrestling mask. I bought the RPG 3:16 - Carnage Among the Stars (and later got to talk to the creator, and fellow Scotsman, John Hutton!), a game I missed last year. That was my sole purchase of the day. I saw a few things of interest, but nothing that really reached out and grabbed me.

That night we got stuck in the elevator at the Westin with 9 other people (total of 12). This is nasty because Logan was worried such a thing would happen. Several times on the way up he asked us if people could get stuck in elevators, and how did we get out, etc. He was really worried about it... so of course it happened. What's more, there were 11 of us in the elevator as the doors were closing, but there was still room and a guy named "Bob" jumped in at the last second. One of the other elevatorites said, "So help me, Bob, if you get us stuck..." You couldn't have scripted it better. We were in the elevator for about 45 minutes, with Logan freaking out the whole time. The people we were stuck with were all gamers, and they were great. One guy lent Logan his hat. Everyone tried to make him feel better. We ended up having to climb out the top of the elevator with the help of local firefighters and a really cool ladder of theirs (it came in looking like a metal bar, and then unfolded lengthwise into a ladder!). We climbed out of the access hatch and onto onto the third floor.

Westin hotel comment #1: The hotel brought water and Perrier for us. They called us the next day to see if we were okay. That was it. They didn't try to offer us anything in spite of the fact we missed eating out with the other Arc Dream guys, Logan was all traumatized (he went down the stairs for the rest of the con, and would have gone up the stairs except you can't get to the stairs from the first two floors), and we got grease on our clothes. They didn't offer us laundry facilities or offer anything but an apology. I complained about this when we got home. The woman who wrote back offered platitudes, like "An overloaded elevator is certainly no fun, and we hope your son has recovered completely." I wrote back, pointing out that there was plenty of room left on the elevator, and there were no signs indicating what the limit was on the elevator. It sounded like she was blaming the group of us for overloading the elevator, when we couldn't know if it was overloaded or not and there was plenty of room. And how does one just get over a trauma "completely"? Come to find out that they had 9 people stuck in an elevator a month earlier. They didn't offer them any laundry service or anything else, either, according to the review I read. In the e-mail I received from them, they did say they'd look into offering laundry in the future. I'm not holding my breath, given that they didn't offer anything this time (or back in July), except for the over-priced water no one took.

Westin hotel comment #2: One of the online web sites mentioned that each room came with a refrigerator. You can't use it, though. All the drinks and snacks in it are on a weight sensor, and if you so much as move them they charge you for them. The front desk people were good to mention this (though they didn't mention it to Shane and his group). This might be from the complaints they were getting, as per the comments I saw on Trip Advisor at least one person was charged quite a bit of money for food they didn't eat simply because they shifted it around. Real dumb.

We didn't do much more on the Thursday, so we went to bed early. Friday I ran two games, a Black Devils Brigade game for Godlike at 10 a.m. and This Favored Land: Horror At Spangler's Spring at 6 p.m. Both games were well attended, and the players had a good time. The Black Devils Brigade game was the first time running it, so the fact that it went so well was pretty cool. There was a great moment when one player — who was kicking butt by bouncing projectiles back at German troops — ended up face-to-face with a German in a fog bank. They got into a horrendous knife fight in a scene that was remarkably close to the bayonet scene in Saving Private Ryan. The players got a really good idea that while super powered, Godlike characters can still die fairly easily! The character didn't die, though he was bleeding a bit (another character did die, which just goes to show you that you shouldn't materialize your head within easy grabbing distance of a super-powered enemy). The rest of the scenario went very well.

So, too, did the This Favored Land scenario, which was set during the battle of Gettysburg. I can't say too much about it, as I'm running it again at DragonCon in a midnight gaming session. The players enjoyed it, which is the important part.

I didn't know when my game would end, so I couldn't commit to playing a Call of Cthulhu game run by Adam Scott Glancy. By the time I called to find out what was up, all the seats at the game were taken. I had to run our inflatable bed over to Ross, so I figured I'd drop it off and then wander into the Embassy Suites to see if I could get into any open gaming. That was the plan. Instead, I ended up hanging around until almost 3 a.m. watching the Cthulhu game. And even then, the game was only half over (so it's just as well I didn't join, as I couldn't have stayed up until 3 Sunday morning and still drive home that day). Ross will have a podcast of the game. I'm looking forward to listening to the second half, the half I missed. I'm sure you'll be able to hear me make the occasional smartass comment on the podcast in the 1st half.

Saturday I ran two games. I ran a Wild Talents game in the morning using a setting I made up for Logan. The game was Target: Planet Earth. The players are aliens invading the Earth, and thwarting the plans of other invading aliens. I can't say too much about this, either, as I'm running it at DragonCon, too, during the midnight gaming sessions. I had two players, one of whom I think I ran a game for last year. They had fun, and thought it was cool that ORE could be adopted this way. They asked if it would be a supplement for Wild Talents at some point.

At 4 p.m. I ran This Favored Land: Crescent City Crescendo. This is a New Orleans Civil War adventure, using the same characters from a scenario last year. I had four players, and they all enjoyed the game thoroughly. One of the players took the character with the ultra-charm ability. She told me later that she wasn't expecting to be all that powerful; she was pleasantly surprised to discover that she could really kick some butt. (This is another game I'm doing at DragonCon.)

That evening I crashed hard from the night before. Need to pace myself better for next year. I did manage to walk around the board game areas, though. Rio Grande, Fantasy Flight, and Mayfair all had games running. You had to pay to get in like any other event, so I couldn't just sit in on a game. I need to do that next year. There were a few that looked really good, and I could try before I buy.

Westin hotel comment #3: The hotel really tries to nickel-and-dime you. Alana ordered a pizza, and the phone call was $1.50. There's the aforementioned fridge. Parking is $25 a day with no in-out privileges, and $28 a day for valet (similar to the Conrad a couple of blocks over, a much more expensive but swankier hotel). They also want $10 a night for internet service, which is ludicrous when you're only checking e-mail. You can get free internet down in the lobby, which adds to the insult. "Yeah, you can use our internet for free, as long as you don't want privacy and do it in the lobby. If you want to check e-mail in your room, it's going to cost you." Seriously, they charged $159 a night for the room (when in off peak times they've sold the room for $73), you'd think they could build in the internet usage into their pay structure. I went downstairs and got it for free. They didn't get a cent more out of me, they just inconvenienced me. If I had to do it again, I'd be tempted to go down there in a bathrobe.

Sunday I was supposed to run a game of This Favored Land. Only one player showed up. Luckily he played in a couple of my other games and saw this as an opportunity to visit the dealer's room for the first time. It allowed me to get lunch, visit the booth again, meet a couple of people who really loved This Favored Land, shop one last time through the dealer's room, and then leave by 2 p.m. That got us home by about 2:30 a.m., saving us money on another hotel room in Blytheville.

Westin hotel comment #4: Shane, Arc Dream prez, booked our rooms. The hotel charged his valet parking to our room. We told the people at the desk about this as we were checking out, and they removed the charge. They put it back on later, and since we paid by debit card it came out of our bank account. It took a flurry of e-mails between Alana, Shane, and the hotel to get it sorted out. The accountant was pretty snooty about it, too, insisting that their documentation proved it all. Except that the charge for valet parking was for four nights, and Shane stayed five. So if it was his parking, and not just some stupid error, they didn't charge him properly. It wasn't so much the fact that they goofed that bothered me. It was the attitude that seemed to say we should be thankful that we stayed with them, and that we're obviously trying to pull something over on them. Sure, our room was in Shane's name (and mine). We told them this at the desk on Sunday morning. They couldn't have sorted this out before we left? Their customer service e-mails leave a lot to be desired. We won't be staying there next year if we can help it.

Overall, hotel not withstanding, I had a good convention. I got to run lots of games, and got some ego stroking from my book. Arc Dream had problems with their printer and so we didn't have a lot of books at the con. We did sell out the copies of This Favored Land that were there, we sold out Ben Baugh's Kerberos Club, and sold most of the copies of Greg Stolze's and Ken Hite's Grim War. Sales were down from last year, but from what I heard they were down for everyone. Blame the economy.

I picked up less loot this year, again a function of the economy with Alana out of work. I bought 3:16, as mentioned. I bought the campaign book for Memoir '44, as it was only slightly more expensive than getting it online before shipping costs. I was looking for a dungeon crawling game for Logan, but the only one I really saw was Fantasy Flight's Descent, which is huge in mass and in price (and $20 cheaper online). Instead, I saw a demo of Dwarven Dig, a cool game of dwarves digging through earth to get to a hidden treasure trove. Logan will like it, because it has a lot of possibilities for beating on Dad. The components are nice, and it was nominated for an Origins award. Other than that, the only other thing I bought was Mythos poker chips from Dagon Industries, one of our boothmates. I picked up two sets, which can be used as poker chips or as sanity tokens for Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. I have some other ideas for them, too. For helping with the editing, Alana and I received a copy of The Kerberos Club and Grim War. I didn't even buy any dice this year (though both Alana and Logan did).

I didn't get a lot of time to look at other stuff and try demos and such. One of the things on my to get list was the new transhuman sci-fi game Eclipse Phase. Two of the players in my Spangler's Spring scenario had a bad experience in a demo and warned me off it. They thought the game was very crunchy. I liked crunchy games in the past (I've played both Living Steel and Harnmaster), but I'm shying away from that in my current groups. There are times when Chaosium's BRP comes across as a little too time consuming (I'm looking at you, automatic weapons fire rules!). This is probably a non-starter for our group. I might pick it up in the future to mine for ideas.

Another book on my to-get list was Realms of Cthulhu, the Cthulhu Mythos game for Savage Worlds. The book is very pretty and hard cover, but it's a bit short at 150-odd pages for $40. The main reason I didn't get it was that it's yet another 1920s Cthulhu game, when I can already run Cthulhu in a couple of different game systems. I want to try Savage Worlds, but our group has a lot of other games already. Alana isn't crazy about the 1920s setting for Cthulhu. If this had 21st century stats (and I'm not saying it doesn't, only from my perusal it didn't look like it did), I'd get it to give it a try. I could also run a game on Skype using it for a 1920s game. So, this is going on my Christmas list, but I didn't get it at GenCon.

Logan had a lot of fun at his first game convention. He bought a fair bit of stuff, but still came back with $50 of his own money. Next year we'll work on getting him into some games. He also said he wants to play my game, meaning he wants to play in a This Favored Land adventure. I'll have to do something about that! Alana enjoyed herself, but I'll let her comment herself.

Tomorrow, I'm off to northwest Tennessee to train some clients, then I'm back for a three day work week, then it's off to DragonCon by way of Birmingham.

It's almost that time....

2009-08-07T11:16:00.002-05:00

Gencon. Everything possible seems to be happening to keep us from Indianapolis, or me, at any rate. Is it a sign? Or maybe it's a sign I should get the hell out of Louisiana....

In June, I went into the hospital a couple of times, and yesterday my doctor sent me to the ER again, this time for a heart scare. (I tried to explain that I don't have one, but they never listen.) When we finally got home, I promptly fell down the steps. More accurately, Sabine yanked me down, but that leads into a whole other story about the dog and I and the steps, so we won't go there.

Anyway, now i have more pills, and a nasty scrape on my shin that's shaped vaguely like Chile. Allan has threatened to have me a suit made of bubble wrap lined with pain meds, and I'm starting to think that's a dandy idea.

Off to think of more things to pack....

I need a hobby...

2009-07-06T16:03:00.003-05:00

Again...obviously...this is not Allan posting.

Allan has hobbies up the wazoo. Since I haven't been working, most of my time has been spent in the hospital, recovering, or limping around the apartment wishing I felt like doing something. With the exceptions of the times that Allan and Logan are here, I feel like a lump, and I'm bored with a giant capital B. I've read until my eye sockets are bleeding, and I can no longer think about anything about which I want to read. This will sound odd coming from a resident of a miniature Library of Congress, but there's nothing here to read. War in whatever period of history is simply not my thing. And I like gaming, but browsing the minutiae turns my brain to mush (not that it has far to go these days).

So. Today I vacuumed and made a pot of soup...and now I'm exhausted. Sad, because as I told Allan, it's not as though I went out and harvested ingredients. I opened a box, a bag, and a few cans, then I went and laid on the couch like I'd conquered a small peak.

Any ideas? Correction--ideas for something to do that don't involve housework. I love to cook, but the rest of it...eh. And yes, I can hear the dustbunnies snickering at me from beneath the desk, but they can just bite me.

The BEST Michael Jackson eulogy yet!

2009-07-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

This is the best encapsulation of (the late) Michael Jackson's life that I've yet seen in print:

Weird guy. Odd duck. Seemed to like chimps, if I recall. Wasn't he friends with Eddie Murphy or something?

This is from an article on Something Awful. The article is about the tribute to Michael Jackson in the August edition of Roofers' World magazine.

Do I really have to mention that this is a satire?

The article is a must read. You can find it here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/michael-jackson-tribute.php

Word of warning, my eyes are still watering after reading it...

FireFox 3.5 and new add-ons

2009-07-04T19:27:00.002-05:00

I'm writing this blog post using an add-on for Firefox called ScribeFire. I loaded it to write not only to Designated Import, but to the Arc Dream LiveJournal. While Blogger's online editor isn't too bad, LiveJournal's sucks. I was using Semagic to write to LiveJournal, but I couldn't figure out how to use it for both blogs. ScribeFire solves that problem.

I downloaded Firefox 3.5. It's a cool update of Firefox. It's still not as fast as Google Chrome, but it has way cool add-ons and it's much faster than Internet Explorer (and I really dislike IE8).

I thought I'd list the add-ons I'm using in Firefox, as they're the reason I haven't moved to Chrome.

Adblock Plus: Blocks ads to your browser. I don't use it that much, but RPG.net has these incredibly annoying in-line links that are automatically added to forum posts. Adblock blocks them.
Better Gmail 2: I do all my home e-mailing through Gmail. This add-on adds some features to Gmail, including a coloured bar that shows the e-mail you're hovering over.
Canadian English Dictionary: Because I still haven't gotten away from spelling things correctly!
Cooliris: Cool image preview software. Alana really likes this, though I'm still unsure about it. It's flashy, but I haven't really used it for much and a couple of times it annoyed me by starting when I didn't want it to.
Download Status Bar: When downloading files, the status of the download shows on your status bar. When finished, it shows the file, which you can then double-click to launch.
DownThemAll!: Lets you download all the files on one web page. It's of limited usage, admittedly, but if you ever have a web site where you need to download a lot of files, this helps out a lot.
Duplicate Tab: Duplicate any tab, including history!, to a new tab. Technically this still shows up as "not available for Firefox 3.5" but if you go to the comments section, there's a link to a pre-release version for Firefox 3.5 that works quite well.
Greasemonkey: Runs scripts to do a wide range of things in Firefox. I haven't explored this yet, but it's needed for Better Gmail 2.
IE Tab: There are some sites (okay, Microsoft's and a few badly written ones) that require IE to work. IE Tab launches these sites in IE within Firefox. You get all the benefits of Firefox while rendering the site in IE (and it looks to the site like it's running IE). I don't have to run IE at all with this add-on.
It's All Text!: Instead of editing a text box in the browser, this add-on launches your favourite text editor for editing in it. When you close or save the document in the text editor, it updates the text box.
Long URL Please: Converts shrunken links, like those produced by TinyURL and other sites, into the full-sized link, so you can see just exactly where the link will take you.
PDF Download: One of the most useful add-ons I have, when you click on a link to a PDF file instead of automatically opening the PDF inside the browser, you have a number of options, including saving the PDF to your computer.
Read It Later: New add-on for me, and I haven't really tried it much. It lets you bookmark sites on a separate set of "pages to read when you have time" list, and downloads it for offline reading.
ScribeFire: mentioned above, for posting entries to blogs.
Shareaholic: Easily share links using several applications, including blogging the page, sending it through Twitter, or sending an e-mail (even through Gmail)

If you have any cool Firefox add-ons of your own, feel free to list them in a comment.

Another example of synchronicity

2009-06-28T23:39:00.001-05:00

A couple of posts ago I mentioned synchronicity, the weird little coincidences that pop out at you. Here's another one.

Today, on RPG.net I read a review of Wraeththu, a thoroughly awful roleplaying game by all accounts. The author of the review used this phrase: "He looks like a gamer version of a Keene painting."

At the same time as I was reading that, I opened a TV review article on Salon. I'm just now reading it. The phrase that pops out at me? "The studly, flawless good guy saves an adorable foreign child with eyes straight out of a Keane painting..."

The darnedest thing. And I don't think I'd ever seen a Keane painting, not until I Googled it just now. The eyes on some of the pictures look remarkably like the aliens I'd been looking at on a clipart web site earlier today.

Weird, indeed.

Arc Dream GenCon events posted to Live Journal

2009-06-28T15:15:00.001-05:00

I noticed last night that the Arc Dream events were now in the GenCon calendar. I posted a complete list of these events — all 24 of them, including the 6 that I'm running — to the Arc Dream Live Journal.

You can view our GenCon 2009 events here: http://arcdream.livejournal.com/

You can also download the event calendar from the GenCon web site at: http://www.gencon.com/2009/indy/default.aspx

If you want to pre-register for any of these events, you have to sign into the GenCon web site. Also, while I tried hard to make sure I copied the event ID codes correctly, if you're signing up for any of these codes I suggest you double check the code number.

Synchronicity

2009-06-27T15:02:00.002-05:00

I'm fascinated by weird little rancom coincidences. For instance, the other night there I watched a rerun of The Family Guy, which was immediately followed by a rerun of The Office, both of which featured the song "Camptown Races".

This is just one of several that hit me this week. Which brings up another one today. Earlier this week I read a chapter in the upcoming Delta Green book and sent in my comments. Without giving much away, one part of the text mentioned the slave revolt on the island of Saint Dominique in 1789. Today, I happened to catch up on some reading on the Civil War Memory web site, and it, too, mentions that slave revolt (in yesterday's posting). I read about the revolt years ago, and here it pops up twice in a couple of days.

I recommend the Civil War Memory blog, found at http://cwmemory.com/. It's written by a teacher and Civil War historian, whose mission is to educate about the wary while cutting through many of the myths surrounding it. I've had a link to the site on my blog for a while, but the link was to the old site (I've now updated it).

Update on Alana

2009-06-10T23:25:00.002-05:00

Alana was in the hospital, from Thursday to Monday. She started throwing up for no good reason on Thursday and couldn't stop. Her white blood cell count was up, indicating gastroenteritis, apparently.

She got to come home on Monday, but has been queasy ever since. She felt good earlier today but took a turn back to feeling queasy. Hopefully she'll be feeling better tomorrow.

Oddly enough, her back and leg pain — which has been her big problem recently — hasn't been an issue. It's like parts of her rotate through making her miserable.

Anyway, some folks have been asking about her, so I thought I'd post something on the blog.

This Favored Land at IPR, and other stuff that's happened

2009-05-25T15:42:00.001-05:00

I've still been uber busy, yada yada yada, but this being the long weekend I have some time for blogging.

Arc Dream sent copies of This Favored Land to Indie Press Revolution, the chief place for purchasing it online. They're now sold out! Some 28 copies made their way to Leisure Games in Britain, for sale in the U.K. and Europe. Pre-orders are being/have been sent out. You can buy the PDF version of the book at IPR, but for now they are waiting for a new shipment of the actual hard copy.

I ran games at ImagiCon in Birmingham, AL two months ago. I will be running six adventures at GenCon in Indianapolis in August, and a similar number at DragonCon in Atlanta in September. Half the games are for This Favored Land. Two are playtest games for The Black Devils Brigade: Daring To Die, a supplement I'm almost finished writing for Godlike (superheroes in World War II). The last game is for a game idea I have for Wild Talents. Two of the This Favored Land adventures and one of the Black Devils Brigade adventures have already been tested and run well at previous events.

Here are the events I'm running. I'll post an entry when the full slate of Arc Dream games are listed.

This Favored Land - Crescent City Crescendo: In Yankee occupied New Orleans, the players must stop a bomb plot that threatens to shatter the fragile peace. Superhero roleplaying during the War Between the States.

This Favored Land - Deserters: Early spring, 1863. A unique band of superpowered soldiers -- half Yankee, half Rebel -- desert from their units to hunt a dangerous common enemy in Tennessee's Smokey Mountains. Not long ago they were enemies, but now they must unite in pursuit of justice and vengeance. Superhero roleplaying during the War Between the States.

This Favored Land - Horror at Spangler's Spring: The Battle of Gettysburg is into its second day, and something terrible is happening to the wounded men near Spangler's Spring. It's up to the PCs to investigate, and stop, the horror. Superhero roleplaying during the War Between the States.

The Black Devils Brigade - Daring To Die: December, 1943: Elements of two divisions failed to wrest Hill 960 from the Germans. In their first real combat mission, the job of taking Monte la Difensa now falls to the joint American-Canadian First Special Service Force. Can this elite unit -- spearheaded by the men of the Talent Section -- do the impossible and succeed where so many others have failed?

The Black Devils Brigade - Repeat Performance: January, 1944: The American-Canadian First Special Service Force are relieved from their successful attack on Monte Majo, only to learn that their relief force has lost the mountain. The Force must, again, take the last hill blocking the Allies from Liri Valley and a drive on Rome.

Wild Talents - Target: Planet Earth! - As an alien invader, you must observe the hairless apes and analyze their weaknesses. But it's not easy avoiding nosey neighbors, snooping reporters, and the ominious Persons in Brown. And what's with the weird lights coming from the abandoned bubblegum factory at the edge of town? Target: Planet Earth! A Wild Talents game of alien invasion and futile resistance.

For the record, here's the stuff I'm working on:

Finishing up The Black Devils Brigade - Daring To Die. I want to get this done in the next couple of weeks so that it will be ready for playtesting soon, and so I can begin work on...

Operation Torch. This is a large campaign for Godlike. Most of it has been completed by other writers, but I've been asked to add a couple of adventures and tie the whole package together. I'm hoping to have this finished by the end of October.

The Silver Pavilion. An historical/fantasy game set in medieval Japan at the time of the Onin War. I've already started researching this.

Playtesting Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity. Alana and Jason are now caught up in testing the new Delta Green book with me (I haven't written anything for it, just testing it). I'm also looking at other groups to help with the playtesting.

Work on Target: Planet Earth, a humorous alien invasion supplement for Wild Talents. I'm running a game of this at GenCon. So far it's just a loose collection of notes, but it should be a fun game to rope Logan into.

Prepare a Vampire: The Requiem game for Alana. This will be a one-on-one game, once I get the time to work on it!

That's a lot of stuff to do. We'll see, as the year progresses, how far I get with each of these projects.

2009-04-24T16:03:00.003-05:00

~waves~

Yeah. So this is not Allan; it's Alana. He's been so busy for so many months that I've finally stormed in to update his blog. (Call it a very minor coup.)

First and foremost, his book has finally been published! Yay!!! After waiting many, many, many months, then proofreading until we were cross-eyed...This Favored Land was officially born. (Printed. Whatever. We're just excited it's here.) He went to ImagiCon in Birmingham, AL to begin promoting it, and will be at GenCon in Indianapolis this summer as well. There are a couple of other conventions he might manage to get to if things work out (Origins, DragonCon).

Otherwise, he's been working too hard; both at (real) work and writing the next book(s), and also at taking care of his klutz of a wife (that would be yours truly). To be honest, I think I'm more work than the rest of it combined.

Did I mention This Favored Land yet?

I'm kind of excited for him. ;-)

A primer on the financial crisis

2008-10-06T23:40:00.001-05:00

I saw last night that 60 Minutes tried to explain the great finance crisis that's hitting the world (but, and let's put the blame where it belongs, it started in the U.S.). They didn't do a great job of it. They used sound bites to explain what caused the problem and why it was bad without explaining what really happened and how. Not that this is surprising for television reporting.

I did some digging and found the following information, culled from several sources. Special thanks to a user named Tavella on RPG.net for posting an explanation, from which this post is culled.

* * *

Banks like giving out mortgages. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. They are a safe vehicle for providing credit. Traditionally the failure rate is around 5%, peaking at around 15%. When mortgages do fail, they are attached to collateral: actual property, for which there is always very good demand. The value of property generally trends upwards. There are occasional bubbles and bursts that affect home owners and investors in the short term, but that shouldn’t be enough to sink a bank.

So, what happened?

With the rise of China as a source of the world's cheap crap, and the increase in oil revenues, and several other things, the 1990s saw the rise of a lot of investment money. The investors wanted a safe investment vehicle. Mortgages were a safe investment vehicle! So, the banks started selling mortgages. After all, people usually paid their mortgages (and if they hit hard times, they'd usually pay their mortgage before any other debt), and if they didn't the bad debt was tied to collateral.

The way banks sold mortgages was through something called a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). This is one of those things you've heard about called a "derivative".

CDOs work based on the default rate of mortgages. The banks took a whole bunch of mortgages and lumped them all together. The banks knew how much money they would make from those mortgages, both as monthly payments and as interest. However, between and 5% and 15% would fail, based on historical data. 5% were likely to fail, and there was some risk that up to 15% would fail. So, the banks took this lump of mortgages and split it into what they called tranches. They took 85% of the mortgages and put them into the A tranche. Of the remaining 10% they put that in the B tranche. The leftovers were put in the C Tranche.

These tranches were then sold to investors (usually large institutions). The A tranches got the highest AAA ratings. The B tranches got BBB rating. No one touched the C tranches, so the banks kept that for themselves and paid themselves nice interest rates. The risk was spread across the tranches. The difference, as an investment, between the tranches was based on how they were paid out. When a mortgage is paid out, investors get a return based on the tranche they bought. The C tranches got the highest percentage return, then the B, then the A. However, if some of the mortgages defaulted, what money was recovered went to the A tranche first, then the B tranche, then the C. The A tranche, therefore, was considered safer, though it generated a lower rate of interest.

These CDOs were so popular that investors started asking for more and more of them. Unfortunately for the banks, only so many people could afford to buy homes. Too bad, as these things were generating a lot of income for the banks.

They were also generating a lot of income for the investors, because housing prices kept increasing during this period (with the occasional bubble, but mostly moving upward) which increased the dollar value of mortgages, and the payout to investors. This put even greater pressure on the banks to generate more of these securities.

This is where things start to go wrong.

You can’t just “create” more mortgages. You only get more mortgages if you find ways to lend more people money to buy property. The banks started to get "creative" in the types of mortgages they produced, in an effort to get more people to take out mortgages.

The most infamous of these creative mortgages is the sub-prime mortgage. You got a mortgage at a really low interest rate for a set amount of time. At the end of that time, the rate would go up, sometimes drastically. You could then take out a loan on the equity that you'd built up or sell the house for a profit before the mortgage came up for renewal. Or, you sucked it up and paid the higher interest rate.

Now, I want to mention something about Canadian mortgages. In Canada, most mortgages are variable rate. I was quite surprised to see that American banks would offer fixed rate mortgages that never changed for the lifetime of the mortgage. In Canada, you typically take out a variable rate mortgage. Every 3 to 5 years your rate changes. This is common, but it’s not a “sub prime” mortgage. The initial amount of the mortgage is at a competitive rate. The rate doesn’t go sky high after the initial term in order to make the bank more money. The bank is happily making money right from the get go, while the homeowner has a really good idea of what they got themselves into. (Not always. A lot of people got hit with high interest rates in the late 70s. I remember my parents being happy about renewing their mortgage at 14% for a couple of years back when some people were hitting 18% and higher.)

The sub-prime mortgage wasn't the only type of creative (perhaps “shady” is more accurate) mortgage. There were some where your payment wasn't even enough to cover the interest, or banks wouldn’t look too closely at someone’s credit history. The point was to sign more mortgages to fuel the demand for CDOs. It didn't hurt that both the Democrats and the Republicans saw it as a good thing for more people to buy homes.

The wheels didn’t fall off the cart with CDOs and shady mortgages, but they certainly became very wobbly with the introduction of Credit Default Swap, or CDS. 60 Minutes concentrated on CDSs last night.

A Credit Default Swap is a derivative in the form of insurance. You have an investment and you think it might not completely pay out. You’re going to lose money. Another company comes along and says, “Yep, you’re right, I think it’s going to fail. Tell you what, if it doesn’t pay out I’ll pay you the difference. In the meantime, you give me monthly payments.” The first company buys a CDS. They make payments to the other company, the seller. If the security falls through, the buyer either hands over the collateral to the seller for the value of the security, or the seller pays the buyer the difference. In the meantime, the buyer makes payments to the seller.

(Simplified example:) Let’s say you have a mortgage security for $1 million. You think you’re only going to get $900,000 out of it. You pay the seller, oh, $20,000 a year for five years in monthly payments. If the security falls through within 5 years, the seller of the CDS takes the foreclosed property off your hands and pays you the $1 million. Or, you keep the property and the seller pays you the difference between the property and the value you can get for it. If the mortgage security doesn't fall through, the seller of the CDS makes money in the form of monthly payments.

The big banks and investment houses had their own CDSs, so sometimes they would just trade one CDS for another, betting that the investment they were giving the CDS against wouldn’t collapse. CDSs were sold as investment opportunities. Banks and corporations sold them to manage risk. If the risk was lower than anticipated, the seller of the CDS made money on the “premiums”. If the risk was higher than anticipated, the seller had to cover the loss, but presumably the banks and investment houses did some math to estimate how much money they were really risking. This is the big risk with these items: the seller of the CDS is now on the hook for bad debts. They’re going to owe money if the CDS falls through.

Now that the banks had a way of mitigating against loss, they started making securities based on even riskier mortgages. And they started playing around with how they created CDOs. This is where the wheels start to fall off.

Lets look at those CDOs. The A tranches sold well, because the risk was pretty low. The B tranches, with the riskier mortgages, not so much. Investment analysts needed a way to sell more of the B tranches. They decided that not all of those B tranches were really going to fail. They figured, oh, 20% of the B tranches would be bad, but the rest were good.

So, they bundled a bunch of B tranches together and created a new security out of them, called a second stage derivative. They took 80 percent of this bundle and called it an A tranche. The credit rating agencies nodded their heads and declared they were nice and safe as A tranches. Now investment companies were buying a whole lot of B tranches thinking that they were as secure as A tranches.

Wouldn’t you know it, the banking houses built CDSs out of these second stage derivatives, pretty much like they did with the first stage. Now, you and I can see that these second stage derivatives are riskier than first stage. And, we can see that there are already CDSs out there for the first stage derivatives, and now they’ve created them on the second stage, too.

But it gets better (or worse, if you will). Remember that with a CDS, the seller gets a premium each month. Well, that’s income, so the banks turned around and created a CDO out of that, too, which in turn was used to anchor a CDS. Then the investors got really inventive and came up with even weirder — and riskier — derivatives.

Now you had more and more securities built around existing securities. If a security did well, as it would while housing prices increased, you had a magnified effect of greater profits.

The housing boom and easy-to-get mortgages brought a lot of people into the market who shouldn’t have been there. It also brought about things like “flipping” (where someone bought a house cheap, spent money to fix it up, and then sold it at a profit; it seems like the TV channel TLC is based around this whole flipping thing). This fueled an increase in housing prices, making the bubble bigger. People took out loans on the equity on their house and used it for consumer spending. Other people bought property out of panic. More and more mortgage were produced, with more and more securities based on them, and with the securities themselves leveraged so the banks could invest even more heavily.

This worked well while housing prices increased.

Then the bubble burst.

A glut of new homes hit the market, slowing the rate of increase in home prices as homes took longer to sell. Subprime mortgages came due, and suddenly people were shocked at the increased interest rate. Homes weren’t worth quite as much as the owners thought. Refinancing became an issue. Some people got into a negative equity situation (the mortgage was for more than the house was worth), and had to make up the difference when it was time to renew the mortgage. Instead, people walked away from the home.

Banks foreclosed, but they couldn’t easily get rid of the properties they had acquired; the bubble was busily bursting.

All those CDSs were supposed to ease this sort of risk. Except the securities were too highly leveraged. There were too many securities based on the same crappy mortgages. The investment banks couldn’t afford to pay out the A tranches, let alone the B and C. They didn’t have enough money, and couldn’t liquidate enough securities to get it, because those securities had dropped so much in value.

That’s when the banks and investment houses started to collapse. I over simplified a lot of this, but that's essentially what happened. I'm not sure anyone really understands everything that happened in great detail. If they did, they were a mental oddity: intelligent enough to figure out these derivatives but not intelligent enough to figure out this house of cards would crash, and crash hard.

Peculiar political ad

2008-10-06T22:34:00.002-05:00

There's a peculiar political ad floating around on Louisiana TV. I just noticed it this weekend, partly because of Alana's surgery, and partly because I mostly avoid the local channels.

The ad is an attack ad by Republican Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy against incumbent Democratic U.S. senator Mary Landrieu (Kennedy is running against Landrieu). The ad accuses Landrieu of voting 81% of the time the same way as Barack Obama.

What's odd about this ad is that, somehow, the Republicans think this revelation is going to come as a surprise. Really? Two Democrats voted the same way? Say it ain't so, Joe... I mean, John!

Well, actually, yeah, it was a surprise. I mean, she only voted the same as Obama 81% of the time? What about the other almost 20%? Which one of them is less liberal, Obama or Landrieu. I'm actually semi serious about this; I'm really curious about the bills where they didn't vote the same.

Anyway, I really can't imagine why the Republicans are wasting money on this ad. Surely they could have come up with a better ad than that, one that doesn't verify what most voters already knew, that Landrieu was in the same party as *gasp* Obama.

Funny Simpsons line

2008-09-28T22:42:00.002-05:00

There was a very funny line on The Simpsons tonight:

You hang onto resentment like a Confederate widow.

The man who prevented a nuclear war

2008-09-28T21:41:00.000-05:00

I remembered reading about this a few years ago.

While conservatives have formed a posthumous lovefest around Ronald Reagan, forgotten are the dangerous first couple of years in his presidency when his "evil empire" rhetoric played well at home but did little to ease international tensions. Then the Soviets shot down Korean Airlines flight 007 on September 1, 1983, which was flying from JFK airport to Seoul, South Korea. At first the Soviets said the plane was spying, but later admitted to a "mistake" that cost the lives of 269 civilians. (No one is sure why the aircraft wandered into Soviet airspace, or why it didn't respond to Soviet radio calls, if they ever received those calls.)

On September 26, 1983, the world came this close to a nuclear war. Soviet early warning systems detected a missile heading for Moscow from the United States. Soviet protocol was to launch a massive nuclear counterstrike, but Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov wasn't convinced. He thought a single missile made no sense. He delayed the counterattack, even after another, and another, and another missile were recorded in bound.

You can read the full story here, but the upshot is that Petrov's assumption of a computer error was correct. He saved the world from nuclear war, at the cost of his pension and a nervous breakdown.

I wish I had posted this on the 25th anniversary of the incident, but better late than never. Petrov is little known, but he's someone everyone should know, and thank.

Another Tina Fey as Sarah Palin skit

2008-09-28T15:34:00.002-05:00

A week or two ago Tina Fey played Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. It was quite funny;

Here's Tina Fey as Palin on last night's show. It's funnier than the first one.

Stewart and Colbert in Entertainment Weekly

2008-09-28T14:48:00.006-05:00

I am so going to have to buy the next issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Here's a picture of the cover (with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart). It's obviously a parody of the controversial New Yorker cover from earlier this year:

The interview with Stewart and Colbert is available online.

First picture of a planet around a sun-like star?

2008-09-16T19:58:00.000-05:00

A team of University of Toronto astronomers took what might be the first picture of an extra-solar planet — a planet around a sun other than our own — orbiting a star very similar to our own.

Astronomers have photographed other extra-solar planets, but they were all orbiting brown dwarfs, which are very small, very cold stars. Because they don't radiate much light, it's easier to spot (with optical telescopes) the planets that might orbit them.

In this case, the object was photographed orbiting the star with the catchy name 1RSX J160929.1-210524. This is a very young star. So young, in fact, that the planet has not yet cooled. This means it is radiating its own energy, making it possible to see. The star is a little smaller than our sun, and the planet is about the size of Jupiter, but much hotter (about 1500ºC, compared to Jupiter's temperature of -110ºC).

The star is 500 light years away. Scientists believe it will be another two years before we know for certain that it's moving along with the star, hence the reason why it's still open to conjecture as to whether or not the smaller object is a planet and whether or not it belongs to that star.

An additional interesting point is that the planet is 330 AU out from the star. An AU is an astronomical unit, equal to the distance from the Earth to the sun. Neptune is about 30 AU from our sun, so this planet is 10 times the distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun, which isn't a situation that fits the current solar system models.

This is going to be an interesting object to pay attention to. Meanwhile, the picture is available at the Gemini Observatory web site. Just follow this link: http://www.gemini.edu/sunstarplanet.

Large Hadron Collider webcam

2008-09-12T23:14:00.002-05:00

You might have heard about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new, huge subatomic particle collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. The collider is being used to find, if possible, dark matter, the unseen particles that — theory predicts — make up the bulk of the mass in the universe.

There have been all sorts of (uninformed) reports that the collider could create a black hole big enough to destroy the world. That's foolish, it can't happen.

However, here's a live webcam site for the collider. Chances are you'll see an experiment in progress. Enjoy!

After that, here's a science rap about the collider, performed by a CERN employee. It topped over 2.8 million YouTube hits as of today.

This Favored Land coming closer to reality!

2008-09-11T21:12:00.000-05:00

Last week I got to see a very small sneak peak of my roleplaying supplement, This Favored Land: A Wild Talents Sourcebook for the War Between the States.

Shane at Arc Dream sent me a link to a preview of the layout files. I got to see all the finished art work, and the templates used for the layout. It looks very, very good! It's done in a 19th century style. The sidebars look like scrap paper, and the art looks like they were photos held into an album with those little sticky corner holders you used to be able to buy.

Arc Dream is working hard to finish the layout so that the book will be ready to go to print this month. Once it's been laid out, I'm sure I'll be asked to help proof it. I can't wait!

Call of Cthulhu: Dig To Victory!

2008-09-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

I mentioned a few days ago that I played a game of Call of Cthulhu while I attended GenCon last month (gosh, it seems so long ago by saying "last month"...).

Role Playing Public Radio now has the entire session — all 320+ minutes of it — available as a podcast.

If you don't want to listen to it all online, you can also download it, though it does take several minutes.

Was Jindal a missed opportunity?

2008-09-01T15:23:00.004-05:00

The wind has whipped up around here — gusting to 28 mph — and the rain is falling as the outer bands of Gustav slide over West Monroe, Louisiana. Fortunately, it looks like Gustav hasn't been anywhere near as devastating as Katrina, and maybe not as bad as Rita either.

Regardless of the power of Gustav, the evacuation of New Orleans and the southern part of the state went very smoothly. This is due to the lessons learned in Katrina. Apparently FEMA spent a year in New Orleans drawing up an evacuation plan.

One politician in particular is getting a "boost" due to Gustav: Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. His competence during Gustav — albeit with far better federal support and 50:50 hindsight — is striking in comparison to then governor Kathleen Blanco three years ago. With the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, some people are starting to speculate on a particular what if: what if McCain had chosen Jindal to be his running mate? With the media focus on Louisiana, Jindal's leadership would be a powerful tool against the Democrats. Instead, McCain chose the inexperienced Palin for vice presidential nominee. Some media, and no doubt some Republicans, are wondering if McCain would have been better off choosing Jindal.

What the media seems to be forgetting — if they even remembered it in the first place — is the reason Jindal fell off the short list for VP in the first place.

Bobby Jindal fell off the list due to the embarrassment he suffered earlier this summer. The state congress in Louisiana voted itself a 125% pay increase, making Louisiana’s politicians some of the highest paid in the nation. Worse than that, their pay was to be tied to the consumer price index, a luxury not afforded to the vast majority of the state’s residents.

The people of Louisiana were livid, yet Bobby Jindal refused to veto the bill. Oh, he spoke out against the raise and urged the state congress not to pass it, but he refused to pit himself against Louisiana’s senators and representatives. Instead, he chose not to sign the bill into law, legal sleight-of-hand given that if the governor doesn’t sign a bill it goes into law within a month anyway. Only after a grassroots campaign to recall several Louisiana politicians — including Jindal — gathered momentum did Jindal realize he had misread the public, at which point he vetoed the bill.

Louisianians were openly speculating that Jindal would be a one-term governor, so angry were they over the raise debacle. Other skeletons in Jindal's closet, which came out during the last two gubernatorial elections, popped up once again (such as his participation in a fellow student's exorcism when he was in college). His chance of being picked as McCain’s running mate was essentially sunk by his actions back in June, and the negative publicity he received.

McCain didn't select Jindal for good reasons, reasons that have been largely forgotten as Jindal appears as a strong leader on television. It remains to be seen if his handling of Gustav will be enough to reform him in the eyes of Louisianians, though.

Watching Gustav

2008-08-31T23:22:00.002-05:00

It was just a little over 3 years ago when I first started this blog. It was in the wake of Katrina, with Hurricane Rita heading to the coast. I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog with the hurricane on the way. I could point my family to the blog instead of getting the same, repeated questions of concern.

So, here I am on post number 383 talking about a hurricane about to hit the Louisiana coast. As of right now, Gustav is heading toward the coast just west of New Orleans. Normally winds are stronger on the northeast quadrant of a Gulf hurricane. According to the news, it's looking like Houma, LA is going to be in the northeast quadrant. In the case of Katrina — which hit east of New Orleans — the storm's wind drove the water in Lake Pontchartrain down to the city where they breached the levees. Gustav will be driving Gulf water up the Mississippi, but it might be safer for the city than what happened with Katrina. Gustav is faster, too, so the surge won't last for as long.

Katrina didn't hit us in Monroe. It looks like Gustav will hit us, though. The first rains from Gustav are sliding over Jackson, MS right now. We're, personally, in good shape. When we lived in Monroe, we were in a flood area. They have drainage channels, but we never really trusted them. Now we're in West Monroe. We're on a hill with a couple of valleys around us. I figure this area would need something like a 30 foot flood surge before water would come in our second floor apartment. The building is new, too, so I don't think we'll have a problem with the wind even if it's still hurricane force when it gets to us. There are trees behind us, none of which are tall enough to land on our apartment; the fear of being hit by a tree was very real in our old place.

I'll probably post when the hurricane winds get to us, assuming that we still have power. Losing power, in the fragile infrastructure that is Entergy's northeast Louisiana territory, is our greatest worry.

Threat to cotton

2008-08-27T23:23:00.000-05:00

One of the first really cool things I saw down here in Louisiana was a cotton field. There's something special about a field covered in white fluff balls on short, dark brown stalks. I've seen people pull off to the side of the road and grab a cotton boll right from a plant. In these days of synthetic fabrics, it's simply cool to see natural fibers growing in a field.

How long this will continue is open to conjecture, because there's a scourge afflicting the South's cotton plants. And the scourge is almost entirely man-made.

The scourge goes by the name Palmer amaranth, also known as pigweed. Pigweed grows fast (an inch a day, even in drought conditions), blocking sunlight and sucking up water intended for cotton plants. Pigweed is resistant to Roundup, the primary herbicide — created by agri-tech company Monsanto — used by cotton farmers.

Monsanto developed genetically modified cotton that was resistant to Roundup. This tied a single strain of cotton seeds to a single herbicide. Farmers could spray Roundup over their crops secure in the knowledge that it would kill everything except their cotton plants.

Some scientists warned against such a mono-culture: a single plant strain coupled to a single herbicide. Roundup killed every plant that rivaled pigweed. Pigweed evolved a strain that was resistant to Roundup. Farmers planted Roundup resistant cotton and sprayed Roundup. The result was that only two plants survived on the farms, Roundup resistant cotton and Roundup resistant pigweed. Pigweed is the stronger plant, so it started taking over. Now it threatens the South's entire cotton industry.

Here's an interesting article on Palmer amaranth.

One of the last Civil War widows dies

2008-08-25T11:59:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago I read a story about a woman who died claiming to be the last Civil War widow. It turns out that she was not the last.

On August 17, one of the last Civil War widows died at the age of 93. Maddie White Hopkins (her name at the time of her death) married William M. Cantrell, a Confederate veteran, in Baxter County, Arkansas in 1934. She was 19, he was 86.

Her story is actually quite touching, describing the desperate situation in that part of the country during the Depression. She cleaned and did laundry for the elderly Civil War veteran. He offered to leave her his house and land if she married him and took care of him in his final years, which she agreed to do. He died 3 years later, in 1937.

Hopkins was reluctant to come forth, afraid of what people would say about her marriage. According to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, there are other Civil War widows who are still alive, and who shun publicity for similar reasons.

When you realize that there are still people around today who were married to a man who fought in the Civil War, you realize that 150 years isn't that long ago.

You can read the full story at the Charlottesville, VA Daily Progress web site.

Presidential timing

2008-08-25T11:36:00.000-05:00

This post isn't intended to get into the debate about who would make a better president, Barack Obama or John McCain. Instead, I wanted to point out something that most reporters haven't mentioned. (In fact, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere yet.)

If Barack Obama becomes U.S. president he will be the first African-American president, which everyone knows. He would be the first African-American president on the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the start of the American Civil War. The anniversary takes place April, 2011. (Most historians set the beginning of the war as April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired on Union-held Fort Sumter. The U.S. Supreme Court fixed the legal start of the Civil War as April 19, 1861, the day Lincoln ordered the blockade of all Southern ports.)

Obama would also be president on the 150th anniversary of the enacting of the Emancipation Proclamation, which would occur at the end of his first term on January 1, 2013.

If he loses the election, then then 150 years would have passed since these events occurred with an unending string of middle-aged (or older) white men holding the nation's top office.

If an African-American were to win the 2012 election, they would be in office on the 150th anniversary of the passing of the 13th (outlawing slavery) and 14th (granting suffrage to black males) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

By contrast, the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage was passed in 1919, 89 years ago. If Obama wins, hopefully it won't be another 60-odd years before a woman becomes president.

GenCon Report

2008-08-22T13:19:00.001-05:00

Life's been mucho busy, which is why I haven't posted anything to my blog. I was considering even just taking it down, but Alana suggested I post my GenCon report to it.

I was at GenCon last week, from August 14 through 17. This was the first GenCon I'd attended since 2000, back when I was in Toronto and it was in Milwaukee. The purpose of the trip was to run events of This Favored Land, my Civil War roleplaying game supplement to Arc Dream's Wild Talents. My book is due out sometime next month.

I intended to have all my scenario stuff printed out on Monday, the 11th so that I'd have the 12th to pack and relax in order to get up early the next day. That didn't happen, and I was printing maps up until 10:15 pm. As such, I didn't leave West Monroe until 7:30 a.m. I made pretty good time, though, getting to Indy in just over 12 hours, including a lunch and a dinner stop. The irony of GenCon travel is that when it was in Milwaukee it took 12 hours to drive there from Toronto. It moved to Indy after I moved to Louisiana. Milwaukee is a two day trip from here, but while Indy is now down to 9 hours from Toronto it is 12 hours from West Monroe. I'm destined to always travel 12 hours to GenCon.

(For the record, the drive seemed to go by faster here. I think it's because the number of Interstate changes is a little more spread out, making for better breaks in the drive.)

This is the fastest GenCon I've ever attended. I think it has to do with running RPGs during the middle of the day (1 pm to 5 pm). When I ran miniatures events I spread them out so that I ran some of the events at night. I only had to handhold the players for about an hour, after which they were running things on their own. In an RPG I'm busy the full 4 hours. I enjoyed it, but it also makes the day seem to go by very fast.

I got to meet the folks at Arc Dream for the first time in person. Three of them (Shane Ivey the president, John Marron an editor, and Kevin Pezzano a writer) live in Birmingham, AL. We're planning to get together at some point, as it's only about a 5 or 6 hour shot across I-20 to get there from West Monroe. Shane even suggested bi-monthly game sessions. Not sure I could afford the gas for that.

Thursday night I visited with some friends (Mike Miserendino and Dean Gundberg) from my days running Ground Zero Games miniatures events. None of us could believe it was 8 years since I last saw them. I tried to catch them again Saturday night, but their games were done by then. This surprised me a little, mainly because a decade ago we had games running until about midnight a couple of times, or at least up until 10. As it was, I didn't get to play any miniatures games.

I did get to play a Call of Cthulhu game with Scott Glancy, one of the co-creators of Delta Green, along with Greg Stolze (inventor of the ORE system and fairly well known in RPG circles). We played members of the British 179th Tunelling Company during World War I. Much fun was had, and my character managed to avoid being eaten and remained sane! The scenario ("Dig for Victory!") is going to appear in a Pagan game book at some point. The game session is going to show up on Ross Payton's podcast web site.

My scenarios played very well. I didn't have anyone show up for my Thursday game, but when Ross couldn't make it to run a Monsters and Other Childish Things game (also by Arc Dream) I folded most of his players into my own scenario. On Friday, I ran the scenario for a father and son group that so enjoyed the game they pre-ordered my book. Saturday I had to make space for extra people in my adventure (Woohoo!). On Sunday I only had one player, but Shane Ivey jumped in and I ran it for the two of them. This was the first time I had run games for complete strangers, and it was a blast.

Shane and I discussed my next project, which is going to be a Godlike book about the First Special Service Force. Most of the Godlike campaigns are short, 34 to 60 pages, but Shane wants a full 128 page game book, which means about 80,000 to 100,000 words. Oh, and he still wants the two extra chapters for This Favored Land that I've been working on and he wants the two GenCon scenarios as expanded PDFs. I'm going to be a busy boy...

That was my GenCon in a nutshell. A couple of observations:

There were more kids (10 year olds and younger) there than I remember. They seemed generally well behaved.

The miniatures events were spread all over the place, which is too bad given that they are very much a visual hobby. The historicals were about a block and a half away, from what I heard, and I only saw two historical games the whole time I was there.

Not a lot of night time games. I've heard a number of people complaining that after 6 pm it was hard to find a game to get into, except for the occasional pickup game. Looks like a good opportunity if you want people to play in your game: run it from 6 to 10 or, better yet, 7 to 11.

There were a lot of good looking science fiction and science fantasy miniatures games. There were four or five contenders to Games Workshop type games, though the game mechanics looked looked better. The old Mutant Chronicles game is back, this time by Fantasy Flight.

Whoever came up with the leather and heavy cotton men's utility kilts -- complete with pockets! -- should be shot out of hand.

The Forge had a good selection of truly interesting RPGs. I picked up _Dread_ which uses a Jenga tower to simulate the dread felt in horror games. 3:16, a tongue-in-cheek "beat up the alients" RPG sold very well, but I thought it was a bit pricey at $25 considering what you got. A game based on the Warsaw ghetto won a big indie award (I was at the ceremony in a bar on Wednesday night).

There was no Elder Party rally this year for the presidential elections, partly to do with some controversy from 2000 or 2004, but I never got the full scoop about it. So, I guess Cthulhu is running for president by acclimation.

Finally, you can have a great time at GenCon without spending much on events. There are a lot of free games you can try, particularly if your friends bring some of their own games along.

I bought some neat stuff (of course). Here's a list:

Wild Talents Essential Edition (didn't actuall buy this; it was my comp playtest copy). The full rules for Wild Talents 2nd Edition, but with the background universe and a couple of (very good) essays removed. The full $40 hardback will be available this fall, but this edition, with just the rules, is a steal at $10 and if you played any of our games at GenCon you received a $5 off coupon for any purchase. Best deal of the convention!

A Dirty World, Greg Stolze's film noir roleplaying game using Arc Dream's One Roll Engine system.

Dread, a horror roleplaying game that uses a Jenga tower to add, uh, dread and tension to the game.

Memoir '44: "Operation Overlord" and the "Hedgrow Hell Battle Map". I'm a big fan of Memoir '44, which is rules light but still offers some nice tactical decisions. The "overlord" games are extra big games that require two sets of the rules, and sometimes two sets of the expansion packs! The "Operation Overlord" set provides cardstock counters instead of plastic figures, but for all the armies covered by the game. It also includes special "Overlord" cards. The battle map is double sided with all the terrain pre-printed, and comes with new rules and new truck models.

Monsterpocalypse. I sort of blundered into this. I was looking at some models in the Privateer Press booth before the dealer's room opened, only to discover that a line had formed ahead of me and eventually encompassed me. I asked what the line was for, and someone mentioned it was to buy Privateer Press stuff, particularly Monsterpocalypse. This is a collectible miniatures game about giant monsters destroying cities. Logan loves a similar game we have for the Playstation, and after hearing about the game from fans in the line, I ended up buying a set. Unfortunately the starter packs were sold out and we could really use another one to play, but we'll be able to manage with what we have so far. After buying the sets I picked up the rare GenCon exclusive figure for $2, and then I played a demo that netted me the GenCon demo exclusive figure.

Mr. Jack is a two player family game of hunting Jack the Ripper. It gets very good reviews and I've wanted this for a while.

Wings of War is a card game about World War I aerial combat. I'd heard mixed things about it, but the Arc Dream guys all played and enjoyed it, and talking to a woman at the Fantasy Flight booth sold me on it. It looks very easy and a lot of fun to play. I'm going to try and rope Logan into playing this weekend.

Black Goat of the Woods: an expansion for the Arkham Horror board game. I might have to haul this out later this weekend. Takes a while to set up and it isn't a short game, but it can be played solitaire.

Ten Creepy Freaks booster packs for Logan. This is a game he got into a couple of years ago that was soon discontinued. They were selling the boosters for $1 each.

Starship Troopers Miniatures Game and Starship Troopers Floorplans. I've had precious little time to paint miniatures this year, and so buying more miniatures for a setting I didn't already have was right out. I do have some trooper miniatures I can use with this game, I just need to buy some bugs. I may or may not do that, but the game was on clearance for $2, as were the floorplans (which I can use for roleplaying games).

More dice than you can shake a stick at.

2008-04-13T12:37:00.002-05:00

I found this fun little site with those dumb little polls that everyone seems to enjoy filling out. Okay, I enjoy them, at least.

I have almost a 50:50 chance of surviving a zombie attack:

46%

Given the above, it's probably not helpful that I'd make a good human shield:

64%

Or that that it's a 50:50 chance I'd eat my friends once the food ran out:

46%

However, I have a pretty good chance of beating up a kindergarten class (presumably if they aren't zombies):

22

I now have proof that I'm worth more to Alana dead than alive:

$4575.00

The degree to which I'm a geek shouldn't surprise anyone (except to say, "What, that low?"):

80% Geek

My spelling's not bad, either:

I Scored a 93%!

You can find the whole selection of quizzes and widgets here:

http://www.justsayhi.com/bb

Hello! Is there anybody in there?

2008-04-12T13:25:00.001-05:00

Thud. Thud. Thud. Is this thing on?

As you can tell, I haven't died or been abducted by aliens or anything.

So, why haven't I blogged? Mostly from being extremely busy with writing and other stuff.

Right after I posted my last message (more than three months ago; yikes!), I received feedback on This Favored Land, the Wild Talents roleplaying supplement for the War Between the States. The good news was that they really, really liked the manuscript! A recent comment was "it will rock your face off", so I'm really psyched! It's been compared, rather positively, to Arc Dream's Godlike roleplaying game.

The bad news/good news was the feedback from the playtesters. It was all pretty positive, but it was in almost all cases a request for more information, both from Shane Ivey at Arc Dream and the playtesters. As a result, the manuscript exploded in size. From June through September I wrote 83,000 words. In the month of January I added almost 40,000 words to the manuscript! This is actually quite deceptive, because there was a major problem with the scenario in the original manuscript, so I had to almost completely rewrite it. Call it 45,000 words in a month and a bit. (The "bit" came when a playtest document showed up the day before I was going to send in the finished draft, resulting in another week or so of edits.)

So that was what I did every night in January, or so it seems. At about the same time, Logan started playing soccer and I was drafted as a coach. Well, alternate coach actually. I didn't have the time to do all the coaching activities. Their season ended last month. They didn't win a game, but they tied in three games. The age group ran from 7 to 9, and most of our players were only 7 years old. We also had a fair number of kids that only showed up for the games, not the practices. With a tiny bit of luck, we could have won two of the games we tied. It was fun, though, and I think the kids learned some stuff for the next season. I don't know if I'll be coaching again. Part of me wants to, though Logan probably won't play in the fall as it will run at the same time as football.

The biggest issue for us this year has been Alana's health. She's not been feeling well since December, or earlier, but since the start of the year she's just been feeling really bad. It has to do with her diabetes, and various drug interactions. We now at least know what is causing the problems. Unfortunately, she's now on a cocktail of prescriptions; she's up over 18 prescription meds a day now.

The weather has turned nice (we're in that one month zone in Louisiana when it's gorgeous), so we're getting out and walking more, which helps all of us. We just walked up to a nearby park, prowled around and walked back, something we need to do a lot more of. Logan and I have been playing more games of late. He's really taken by an old, simple Avalon Hill game called Naval War that, in spite of its name, is a slightly abstract card game. One of the reasons he likes it is because he can beat me at it rather handily (it's mostly just luck, though there is a slight strategic element). We played Memoir '44 this week, and he beat me! This is a "light" wargame in a system I really enjoy. It's a very easy system to learn, but it's not a simplistic game. I first played it with him a couple of years ago, when he needed help from Alana in choosing cards. This is the first time that we played with him making all the decisions. He still beat me! (Yes, I went a little easy on him. If I hadn't, I think he would have still won! I blame my dice rolls...)

Gaming wise, we're still playing roleplaying games once a month, though I think we've only played twice this year, and three times since September. Jimmy hasn't been able to make it down with Jason, so our roleplaying group is down to three. I'm running Walker In The Wastes for them. When that's over, in a year or so, I'll look at resurrecting Delta Green or playing a similar game, like Conspiracy X. I'm thinking of taking the Conspiracy X game (using Eden's Unisystem) and converting it to One Roll Engine (ORE, which is used in This Favored Land). Eden has been incredibly slow at releasing stuff for 2nd Edition Conspiracy X. First edition used a completely different rule set, so you have to do some converting of their sourcebooks into the Conspiracy X 2.0 rules. If I'm going to do that, I might as well convert to ORE. If I run Delta Green again, it will be with the NEMESIS rules, which are ORE based.

I've also been playing a weekly Skype game of Call of Cthulhu. I'm running the players through Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. This past week we used the freeware RPGTools MapTool program for the first time. It allows you to share maps with players online. It worked very well. One of the players, Tom, has purchased a similar game. I think we're going to give that a try to see if the extra features are worth changing from the free MapTool program.

This all brings me full circle to This Favored Land. I haven't heard anything yet, but I've volunteered to run a couple of games at GenCon. As a result, I've been working on a couple of scenarios. I also need to work on two extra chapters for the book which will be released as PDFs simultaneously with the book's release, which is tentatively scheduled for June. This week I received a request from Shane at Arc Dream to help with the new super power rules for Wild Talents. Originally the 2nd edition of the game was going to just be a reprint with some additional information. Instead, they've decided to fix some aspects of the rules based on feedback they've received since the game's initial release at the end of 2006.

At the same time, I have a couple of additional game ideas in mind. I could extend This Favored Land into the Wild West. Or, I could write an ORE version for feudal Japan. Percolating away is the idea for a fantasy/alternate history game I mentioned three months ago. The only problem with this game is I'll need to do a fair bit of research, and I'm not sure we have the space for any more books!

Yes, I'm going to be busy in the next few months, but I'm going to try and blog more. Or, if I can't because of all the other writing I'm doing, I have to seriously consider whether or not it's worth keeping the blog going. I'm not sure anyone is even reading it any more.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Is this thing on?

Louisiana state government supports LSU

2008-01-04T21:33:00.000-06:00

Alana mentioned today that she can go to work in jeans and a Louisiana State University t-shirt on Monday. Alana works for the State of Louisiana. LSU plays Ohio State in the NCAA national championship football game on Monday.

I guess they figured they might just as well let people wear LSU t-shirts because they're going to do it anyway! (The main campus of LSU is in the state capitol of Baton Rouge.)

Mike Huckabee and the National Igloo

2008-01-03T21:51:00.000-06:00

Mike Huckabee won the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa this evening. It is, therefore, only fitting that I present to the people of the United States a younger, chubbier Mike Huckabee at his intellectual best.

The following is a clip from a one hour special — based on a semi-regular segment called "Talking To Americans" — from the Canadian fake news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. (The show was sort of a Canadian version of The Daily Show, though it predated the American show). This is from 2000, when the then governor of Arkansas congratulated Canada on preserving its National Igloo:

Roleplaying game idea: Reaver

2008-01-01T22:11:00.000-06:00

While I haven't been posting to my blog, I haven't been just lying around like a slug. I've been working on a New Orleans scenario for This Favored Land. I've also been working on an entirely different roleplaying game, using the same ORE (One Roll Engine) game system.

This game, so far named Reaver, is set in an alternative 13th century with fantasy elements. I have a good handle on the setting, but I'm stalling on how to tie the setting to character motivation.

The departure point is the 3rd century CE. Christianity and Mithraism compete in Rome, with Mithraism eventually attaining the edge. Mithraism was a religion popular among Roman soldiers, brought to Rome from the Middle East. Through the first three centuries of the Common Era, Mithraism and Christianity co-existed. There's some debate as to whether the two religions actually competed head-to-head, or if they just basically competed for real estate within Rome. There are several elements common to both religions. In this game, it's Mithraism rather than Christianity that comes out as the state religion of Rome by the end of the 4th century, though Christianity still exists.

Fast forward to the 13th Century. England's king (King John in our timeline; someone else in my modified time line, which I'm still working on) is having problems with France. In our time line John came up with the idea of converting to Islam. At the time, he wasn't taken seriously and England remained Christian. In my timeline the king does turn to Islam, which has spread pretty much as it did in our universe. He sees the Moors in Spain as a valuable ally against Mithraic France.

Not everyone in England is happy about the conversion to Islam, of course. The nobles in Northumbria, in particular, have taken a dislike to this forced conversion, and are considering rebellion.

And this brings us to the actual focus of the game. Scots — who are still pagan Celts in the absence of Christian conversion — and Englishmen have both raided across the border for decades, but there is change in the air. Mithraic Northumbria and Celtic Scotland are now drawn tenuously together as they clash against Muslim England. At the same time, the old grievances between Scotland and England are not easily cast aside.

The fantasy elements are more subtle. The creatures of Celtic myth exist, but have been driven to near extinction as mankind advances into the wilderness. Only in the wilderness will you find mythic creatures. Belief is an important aspect. Muslim prayers (and Christian prayers, too) are answered, if the correct conditions are met. For an example of the feel I'm looking for I have in mind the old Land of the Ninja supplement for RuneQuest. Basically, the world works as people perceived it to work in the 13th century.

The characters are Celtic Scots living along the Borders.

This brings me to my problem. I haven't figured out, yet, how to closely connect the characters to the setting. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure I should closely connect the characters to the setting.

So, that's what I've been doing lately instead of blogging. I'll do some more research and then see how this game works out.

New anti-pseudoscience blog

2007-12-16T10:37:00.000-06:00

Okay, it's not new, it's just new to me.

The blog is Respectful Influence, found at http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/.

I came across the blog after seeing an add on cable for Miracle Foot Patches. These things are supposed to "detoxify" your body by drawing "toxins" out of your feet. You can tell, because the patches get this dirty colour on them! It's got to be toxins, right? I mean, why else would the soles of your feet make a sticky pad of goo turn dirty?

The debunking of these things is here: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/10/
your_friday_dose_of_woo_these_boots_were_1.php

Perusing the blog I found something political that should have been noted in regular media, but really wasn't. Republican Dan Burton has been interfering in the Autism Omnibus hearings. These are hearings that were ordered to look into whether or not vaccinations cause autism. Forget the fact that science has debunked the autism/vaccination "link". Anyway, the first few test cases weren't going well in the hearings, so Burton — a believer in autism/vaccination link pseudoscience — wrote to the hearings to try and influence them.

The mainstream media might have missed it, but it's documented here: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/12/
representative_dan_burton_trying_to_use.php#more

This is going to be one of my "must go to, daily" blogs.

Moved in

2007-12-02T10:23:00.000-06:00

It was a lot of work over the last month, but we're finally in the new apartment.

The actual move took place over U.S. Thanksgiving weekend. We got the 16 foot truck on Wednesday. We ran over to the new place with some boxes and then we loaded the truck until 11:30 at night. We were up the next morning at 7, finished the first load of the truck, and then met with Alana's supervisor's husband and son, who helped us get the first load — of heavy furniture — into the apartment. We ran back to the house for another load in the early afternoon, unpacked that, and then took the truck back to the Penske place, getting home at 11 p.m.

(Driving the truck was interesting. It was the largest vehicle I'd ever driven. The only problem I had was with stupid drivers, like the idiot on the highway that passed me on the right just before I was about to start changing into the right lane...)

Friday was Black Friday, of course. We didn't bother getting up early for it, mostly because there was very little that interested us. That's two years in a row that the sales were less than interesting. We did get out to Academy Sports around 10, and Kohl's just before 1, mostly to get me much needed clothes. We then went back to the old apartment and packed up yet more stuff!

Saturday we didn't do anything at all, taking a day off to unpack a little and just generally veg. Sunday afternoon and early evening was spent cleaning the old place. We finished that off with another four hours of scrubbing, etc. on Tuesday.

So that gets you up to speed with our life the last couple of months.

I hope to have more time to blog, though I suspect I've lost most of my audience with my silence up until now. Over the next few weeks I'll evaluate whether or not it's worth keeping the blog going.

Busy moving...

2007-11-05T14:12:00.000-06:00

We spent the weekend moving or doing stuff in preparation for the move.

Almost all our books (or all the books I plan to move; the rest are in the storage locker) are in the new apartment. So are four of our book cases. If you saw the number of books I have, you'd realize this is a Big Deal. It also means that aside from the furniture, all our heavy lifting is pretty much done.

We don't have any real furniture in the apartment yet, aside from Logan's bed, which we just bought. Unfortunately the bed was damaged in shipping and we're waiting for replacement parts. The old papasan chair is in Logan's room. My dresser is in our room. Aside from three metal chairs, a card table, and a smattering of kitchen and bathroom stuff, that's about it.

Alana's bike is at the apartment, as is our new sound system. The new apartment is about the same size as the current apartment, but the layout is different enough that our living room is smaller, so we needed to get rid of the two big speakers. You can't just buy speakers in Monroe, we found out, so now we have a whole home theatre system just to replace those two speakers!

I look around our living room at the old place and I shudder at all the stuff we still have to pack. Thankfully we still have about three weeks to complete the move. Part of that is going to be eaten up with football games. Logan's flag football team went undefeated in the regular season and are in the playoffs! They get a bye for the first game. I don't know when he'll be playing; rumour had it that the first game was on Thursday, but the YMCA web site says the playoffs are on Saturday.

So, until further notice just assume that we're stuffing things into boxes and shifting them from one apartment to another...

Mongoose Traveller

2007-11-02T00:14:00.000-05:00

Mongoose Publishing is a British company that made a name for itself with D20 (the system used by Dungeons and Dragons) supplements, but is now as well known for miniatures games and other roleplaying game systems. Most recently they released an open gaming license version of RuneQuest, a variant of the original BRP system published by Chaosium. Yes, it is legal for you to build games based on Mongoose's version of BRP, and include the rules in the book.

The reviews of MRQ (Mongoose RuneQuest) are mixed. The rules aren't that much different from Chaosium's house system. Some of the changes, though, did not go down well. In particular, there's a weirdness involving characters with a skill over 100% versus a character with a skill under 100%. Actually "weirdness" doesn't cover it; the rule as written is broken. Still, those who like the rules point out that Mongoose has done a better job of supporting the rules than Chaosium.

Mongoose recently released a roleplaying game based on Michael Moorcock's Elric series of books. Chaosium published 5 versions of their own game (mostly just variants of the original) based on the same source material using their BRP system. Apparently Michael Moorcock was unhappy with what Chaosium was doing with it; Mongoose gained the license, basing it on their version of RuneQuest. Some folk said previous versions were better, but apparently Mongoose's Elric game is good, and has the advantage of covering stories published after the original six books.

Continuing their tradition of reproducing classic roleplaying games, Mongoose will be publishing the next version of Traveller, Marc Miller's classic science fiction roleplaying game. Traveller could be used as a generic science fiction game, but it gained its greatest acceptance with the far future universe it portrayed. Interestingly, when the Firefly TV show came out, a lot of roleplayers noticed more than a passing resemblance to Traveller.

Traveller has gone through several iterations, including four versions using Miller's original rule system, a D20 version and a GURPS version. Mongoose will produce a game based roughly on the original game system, but with a fair number of modifications.

For those of you interested in Traveller, you'll want to check out Mongoose's blog for more information. You can find it here: http://blog.mongoosepublishing.co.uk/.

There are a number of innovative game systems out there, including the One Roll Engine system created by Arc Dream. What's funny is how classic games like RQ, GURPS, and Traveller are still quite popular.

Chaosium's BRP cover less than impressive

2007-10-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

Chaosium is releasing a new version of their Basic Role Playing system. This is the game system used in the roleplaying games RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. The new book combines all the rules from several games into one volume, and it's intended to be used as a generic system.

Now, I'm a fan of BRP. The system is a little long in the tooth right now, but it's a clean system and I know it very well. Even still, I'm a little trepidacious about this volume. The automatic weapon rules are the same as found in Call of Cthulhu, which is unfortunate as they are a bit broken. Also, though there are advantage/disadvantage rules for super powers, the playtesters vetoed such rules for other settings. In other words, this is not a rewriting or retooling of the game system, it's a compilation. The automatic weapon rules, in particular, worry me because the fact they made it untouched from Call of Cthulhu tells me that they were never properly playtested, and makes me worry about the usability of the rules in a modern setting.

(Yes, I have used them for modern Call of Cthulhu games, which is why I know they have problems, and why I wrote my own house rules.)

Still, I like the game system and think it would work very well as a generic system. I'm looking forward to seeing it published (even if it means yet another book produced by Chaosium that's little more than a reprint).

I hope the game sells well. It's an "old school" game system, but it's pretty elegant. Thus, I guess the intention of the proposed cover is to reflect it's generic nature, show it's flexibility, but also draw a link to the past. Unfortunately for Chaosium, the proposed cover doesn't get much love on the RPG.net site. Besides the obvious artistic issues of perspective and scale, the cover simply isn't that inspiring. I don't see anything on the cover that makes me think, "Yeah, I want to game that". Apparently most of the folks that participated on the RPG.net thread agreed.

I'll let you decide for yourself. Here's the cover:

"Portraits of America" includes Canadian landmark

2007-10-30T22:01:00.000-05:00

No additional comment necessary:

Video claims Horseshoe Falls for U.S.

Oct 29, 2007 04:30 AM
Matthew Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON–The Bush administration appears to have annexed a major Canadian landmark as part of a slick new campaign to promote U.S. tourism.

A Disney-produced promotional video released last week by the departments of State and Homeland Security highlights majestic American landscapes, from New England's colourful fall foliage and the Grand Canyon to the Rocky Mountains and Hawaii's pounding surf.

But about four minutes into the seven-minute video, Welcome: Portraits of America, viewers are treated to the impressive sight and sound of water roaring over Niagara Falls.

In showing the natural wonder, Disney's filmmakers, however, chose the Horseshoe Falls, the only one of Niagara's three waterfalls to lie almost entirely on the Canadian side of the border separating New York State from Ontario.

Making matters worse, a visitor to the U.S. would not even be able to get the same view of the falls in the video because the scene was shot from a vantage point in Canada, according to Paul Gromosiak, a Niagara Falls, N.Y., historian and author.

Also, he said the video leaves out the two cascades that actually are on U.S. territory, the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls.

"This is not the United States, this is 100 per cent Canada, shot from the Canadian side," Gromosiak said. "This is an insult.''

The distinction between the U.S. and Canadian sides is clear to most people who have visited the Falls.

But it seems to have escaped the notice of the producers and U.S. officials, who presumably vetted the video.

In a separate "making of" video, Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts, speaks over the falls footage about the importance of showing would-be tourists "the great sites, the great vistas that they dream about all their lives when they dream about America.''

Karen Hughes, the U.S. undersecretary of state for diplomacy, said in a posting to the department's blog last week that the production has the administration's blessing.

"We're going to play it in waiting rooms and at embassy events – and we hope it will inspire many who otherwise might not have thought about travelling to America to come and see it for themselves," Hughes wrote.

Or maybe Canada.

Days of cardboard

2007-10-30T21:57:00.001-05:00

Been too busy packing for the move to post! Up to our armpits in cardboard and packing tape. Had a yard sale on Saturday that did quite well. Alana and Logan have new bikes, as we'll be living near a park with bike paths.

Busy times!

The Tragically Hip on Saturday Night Live

2007-10-18T23:34:00.000-05:00

Alana and I were thinking, at one point, of going to see The Tragically Hip play in New Orleans this weekend. Unfortunately, it fell through for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact we're up to our eyeballs in boxes.

So, instead of going to the concert I've been listening to their music, in the car, at work, and at home.

For those who don't know, The Hip are my favourite band, and somewhat of a phenomenon in Canada, though relatively unknown outside of the country. While web surfing I was finally able to find The Hip's performance on Saturday Night Live, back on March 25, 1995. I remember this performance rather fondly. Ironically I was up to my eyeballs in boxes (preparing for a move) the weekend they played.

This was The Hip's big introduction to the U.S. market. The song is "Grace, Too", from the album Day For Night. It happens to be my favourite Hip song. I hope you enjoy it:

Video: Tragically Hip - SNL - Live

We're Moving!

2007-10-16T00:10:00.000-05:00

My legs still hurt, my back is a little achy, and we're up to our necks in boxes.

Yes, we're moving! Last week we put a deposit down on a new apartment. We can move into the apartment November 1, but we still have the old apartment to December 1. We expect to move in over the course of the month, with the final move over Thanksgiving weekend.

The main reason we're moving is because we're tired of the current place.

The neighbourhood has gone downhill. The school Logan goes to is pretty good, but the middle schools and the high schools in Monroe, LA don't have a good reputation. This is particularly true of Ouachita High School, which Logan would have to attend if we stayed around here. So, we knew we had to move to West Monroe, where the middle schools and the high school are much better.

We were pretty much set on moving after the air conditioning drain pipe stuck and overflowed onto our floor. This happens yearly, but the apartment manager refuses to send someone through each year to blow it out as a preventive measure. The big burner on our stove doesn't work, the door badly needs weather stripping, and our front light doesn't work (it used to, but it stopped, and yes, we did change the bulb).

So, it came down to the fact that we wanted out of the apartment and we're unlikely to move again for a long time.

The new apartment is still a two bedroom, but it's less than two years old. It has two bathrooms, and a good sized kitchen. The living room area is a bit bigger, too. It is more expensive (the current place has price going for it) but in all other ways it's much nicer.

So why do I hurt? Alana and I were at our storage locker on Saturday shifting all the boxes out, opening them, and shifting things around. We were there all day Saturday, almost literally. We left the house a bit after 8:00 a.m., and got to the locker (after breakfast) at 9:00 a.m. We were done at 7:45 p.m. I got a sunburn on my neck, and Alana on her back. It certainly didn't feel like a whole day's work. Unfortunately it also didn't feel like we had a whole weekend off...

Anyway, now our "hobby" is packing. It doesn't help that I have to go on a business trip next month, so I'm going to lose a week. I hope to have most of our stuff packed up, and even a fair bit of it over at the new place, before then.

When we get the keys to the new apartment I'll take some pictures. It will never look as clean and tidy as it does right now!

Comics get it, but the president doesn't

2007-10-07T15:58:00.000-05:00

Get Fuzzy isn't usually this political. It's funny, though!

Get Your War On

2007-10-07T15:00:00.001-05:00

Indy, one of the guys on the Ground Zero Games mailing list, sent a link to Get Your War On, a web comic dedicated to putting down the Bush administration.

Here's one of the strips that tickled my funny bone. Click on the picture for a bigger version:

The comic's archive is here: http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war68.html

Best steakhouse in the country?

2007-10-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

We may have found the best steakhouse in the country. It's in LaGrange, Georgia. Take the second exit, the one by the Jameson Inn. The place is called the Conestoga Steakhouse.

We went there on our last night in LaGrange. We worked 12 hours the day before and 10 hours that day, and we were starved. We went to the Longhorn Steakhouse the first night in town and it wasn't bad, at least for a chain restaurant. The Conestoga was intriguing, so we went there on a whim.

The place is no hell to look at. It's a generic "local restaurant" built in the 60s or 70s. There is none of the original architecture common to chain restaurants. The most promising aspect of the exterior were all the cars in the parking lot.

The interior didn't instill us with much confidence. It's done in a horse stable motif. When there weren't stable flourishes, there were country kitchen bits. I seem to remember chickens on the wallpaper. There was no mood lighting, either. None of that fancy darkness except over your table. No, sir, this place was lit up like a high school football field on a Friday night.

Again, we weren't sure what we were getting into, except that the place was pretty busy with local folks. Really big local folks. The kind of local folks who require two chairs each.

The steaks were reasonably priced. All that remained was to taste them. Travis bit into his while I fixed my backed potato. He said I might not need a knife. Sure enough, I cut a piece of steak by running my knife back and forth over a few times with absolutely no pressure applied on the knife. Its own weight was enough. The stake, a rib eye, had an extraordinary taste. Succulent with the just the right seasoning. Although the steaks were large enough, I was seriously tempted to order a second!

So, if you find yourself heading east toward Atlanta along I-20, it's worth taking the extra hour by going via Montgomery, Alabama and stopping for supper in LaGrange, GA, it's that good.

Raising Cane's concept a ripoff? Say it ain't so!

2007-10-07T14:25:00.000-05:00

Last month I trained a client in LaGrange, Georgia, about 15 miles east of the Alabama border and an hour from Atlanta. It was the most fun I've had on a business trip, largely due to the company. Travis — one of my "peeps" — attended with me, so that he could see what it was like to train someone in person. It turned out that we have an amazing amount of stuff in common. As an example, during the eight hour drive home — and half hour lunch break — we didn't bother turning on the radio once. We just yapped the whole way.

Anyway, one of the first restaurants we saw was a place called Zaxby's. When we first saw it, we thought, "Gee, that looks just like Raising Cane's." Raising Cane's is a chicken finger franchise that started in Baton Rouge in 1996. They serve chicken fingers as their main entree, and that's it. Alana and I went nuts for it when the first opened a store in West Monroe, and we got Jimmy and Jason hooked on it soon after. Recently, though, there's been a serious drop in our interest for Raising Cane's. I'm not sure why. I had it last Friday and enjoyed it, but Alana has gone almost completely off it. Jimmy and Jason aren't as interested, either. I think maybe we just OD'd on it.

So, we entered Zaxby's. That's when we discovered that it was almost exactly like Raising Cane's! Well, okay, we didn't realize this at first. Zaxby's has a wider range of menu items (mostly featuring chicken). The decor in Zaxby's was a modern interpretation of the 1920s and 1930s, while Raising Cane's is a post-modern interpretation of a 1950s diner. And, of course, Cane's ony does chicken fingers.

We ordered a chicken strip dinner, the same thing we would order at Raising Cane's. This is when we noticed some startling similarities:

Cane's gives you three our four battered chicken fingers made from white breast meat. Unlike KFC, the chicken isn't greasy. Zaxby's gives you the same thing, only the pieces are smaller but you get one additional piece.

Both serve crinkle cut.

Both serve their own special form of mayonnaise-based sauce. Zaxby's is mass produced and comes in packaged containers. Cane's is served in clear plastic cups with lids, suggesting that they are at least packaged at each store.

Both serve Texas toast with the meal.

Both serve coleslaw, which you can substitute for extra fries.

Both dispense ketchup into small paper cups. In both cases, the ketchup is on tap with the dispenser built into the surface of the counter top.

Both dispense crushed ice instead of ice cubes.

The comparisons were beyond eerie. It was quite clear that someone had ripped off someone else. I mean, it couldn't be co-incidence that the both had crinkle cut fries and crushed ice and Texas toast and their own special type of mayonnaise-based sauce.

I did some checking. Raising Cane's was founded in 1997. Zaxby's, which even has its own NASCAR car, was founded in 1990. Oops! It looks like Raising Cane's is a direct steal from Zaxby's (though, perhaps, with the added wrinkle that they would only specialize in chicken fingers).

What's the verdict on taste? The sauce was no contest. Cane's sauce is better, though it wasn't like Zaxby's was inedible or anything. The chicken was a little less obvious. At first I gave Cane's the win. Their fingers are bigger, a little juicier, and seemed a little less crispy. However, we ate at Zaxby's twice that week, while I can't do Cane's more than a couple of times a month (and we went from monthly with our roleplaying game group to maybe once every four or six months). Zaxby's chicken fingers seem to sit lighter in the tummy.

So, overall — and though I hate to do it — I would have to give Zaxby's a slight nod. I can see how some folks would prefer Cane's chicken, but it can't be just coincidence that four of us have taken less of a shine to them in recent months. Added to my disappointment that Raising Cane's is not as original as I thought they were, our estimation of the chain has dropped a bit since those heady days of two years ago when they first opened in West Monroe.

News roundup

2007-10-07T13:39:00.000-05:00

While I was busy writing, a whole bunch of blog-worthy stuff happened that I had to ignore.

Locally, there was the Jena 6 protest in Jena (pronounced "JEE-na"), Louisiana. Not much to add at this late date, other than to say that there as a whole lot of anti-black paranoia among locals. One person at work asked if we were "ready for the looting". Apparently white Jena residents ran out of town, afraid of what would happen. (The protests were mostly peaceful.)

I'm of two minds on the attack myself. On the one hand, it seems that the local justice system treated various incidents too lightly until it looked like a race war was developing, at which point they treated the next incident severely, an incident that just happened to include black kids. On the other hand, inequality doesn't justify six kids beating up another kid. On the other, other hand, what's the point of having one set of laws for kids and another set for adults when you choose to try kids as adults seemingly on a whim?

The biggest issue is that the actual events of the affair is not well known, largely due to the filters applied by the people repeating the story. The Jena 6 are not the martyrs that is now being portrayed. The local portrayal (which I've seen on news sites and in the office) that this is another "O.J." (i.e. blacks playing the race card to get away with a crime) is very wrong, and just masks the general level of racism that's common in northeast Louisiana.

The best account of the incidents is this article from the Associated Press:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jOl6L858y0iDf4k_28ojhYLcuLGg

On the national level, Alberto Gonzales quit. I'm actually surprised at this. I didn't think Gonzales would remember how to write a resignation letter.

On the international level, the Canadian dollar is now trading at a higher level than the U.S. dollar.

First, the serioius part. The fact that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the U.S. dollar is not readily understood by Americans. Part of the reason for the higher Canadian dollar is a need for Canadian dollars to purchase Canadian oil. Another reason is because problems with the U.S. economy mean that outside investors no longer think the U.S. is quite as good a place in which to invest. Gee, you think maybe giving tax cuts to the rich while paying for an expensive and unnecessary war, and the resulting explosion in the deficit, isn't a good idea?

On a less serious note, I am now officially accepting apologies from all those Americans who made fun of the 65¢ Canadian dollar a few years ago. Please post your apologies here. No, it's okay, I'll wait...

There were other items, but I'm too tired from watching the Grand Prix of China (and despondent over Lewis Hamilton's big mistake that stopped him from finishing and might just have cost him the Formula One championship) to go into them right now.

He's alive!

2007-10-07T12:49:00.000-05:00

Howdy, folks!

Yep, I'm alive and kicking!

I finished the manuscript for This Favored Land, the American Civil War supplement for the Wild Talents roleplaying game last week. I was technically late, getting it in about 12:30 a.m. on October 2 (it was due October 1), but everything was cool.

I wish I had about another two weeks to work on it. I didn't have the time to sit back and not think about it for a week and then go back and edit it. I know it will need some editing, maybe some substatinal editing. On the other hand, Alana said to just forget about it for a while. She realizes I'm second guessing myself.

I wish I had another 10,000 words. I had to strip out some good stuff that I wanted to leave in. I didn't get a chance to write a couple of things I wanted to include, such as what it was like to be a sailor during the Civil War. There were a couple of really cool bits, like the loading procedure for cap and ball pistols, that I had to strip out for space reasons.

I'm sure the manuscript will require some heavy editing. I was writing it in a vaccuum, as far as what the publisher wanted. Did I focus too much on the backgrounds of the four groups I created? Was there too much information about life as a soldier? Is the adventure good enough for inclusion, or should it be scrapped?

The adventure was the hardest part to write, which was surprising. I realized part way through testing that my home-grown scenarios are designed with my group's characters in mind. Writing a generic scenario isn't easy. The location is pretty interesting (Missouri), but it's not where I would set a long term campaign of my own, which would either be set in New Orleans, or as a spy campaign in Virginia. I also sort of wich I had created a scenario set in the mountains of North Carolina (I have a thing for hill and mountain country) but I thought that might come out a bit too much like Cold Mountain. I ended up re-writing most of the scenario in the last two weeks based on playtesting. I think the adventure is tighter now.

There's nothing to do now but wait for the feedback, at which point I'll probably be back into heavy-duty writing mode again. I'll keep you posted.

Scifi info

2007-09-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed The Dresden Files on SciFi (the science fiction channel) this year. It wasn't perfect, by any means. I found the tendency for Harry Dresden, the main character, to get into fights by the end of the second act to be too formulaic. Still, the story about a modern day wizard detective (based on the novels of the same name) was interesting. It was also filmed in Toronto, which brought a smile to my homesick lips.

It's been cancelled. Figures.

In the spring SciFi ran the show Painkiller Jane, a stupid title for a show about a near invulnerable woman working for a shadowy government agency (a cheap ripoff of Nikita, which itself was based on the French move La Femme Nikita). The show was about as stupid as its title, at least that's the feeling I had from watching the premiere episode. It's been cancelled, too. Good, because it didn't deserve to stick around after they cancelled Dresden.

This summer SciFi premiered an updated version of Flash Gordon, based loosely around the film that came out in 1980. It even used the same theme song by rock group Queen. It had potential. I saw the first episode. So did a lot of people, as it had the strongest ratings of any new SciFi show this year, suggesting it would be around for a while.

It was awful. The acting was horrid, the writing was about as bad as the acting. It looked like it was filmed by a high school film arts class.

Fortunately, it's been cancelled, too, and much quicker than the other two shows. This is good, because it didn't deserve to stick around after they cancelled Painkiller Jane. Yeah, it was that bad.

I learned some new stuff about Battlestar Galactica. If you only remember Battlestar Galactica from the campy show from the 70s and 80s (I actually paid to see the pilot in the theatres), you've been missing something good. It started as a miniseries based on the show but much darker and a lot better produced. Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell are the most well known actors in a very good cast.

The series is set in another part of the galaxy, where the people worship the Greek gods. They have legends of a lost tribe that settled on a far away planet called Earth. The humans built sentient machines, called the Cylons. The Cylons rebelled, destroying most of humanity with nuclear weapons. The survivors escaped in a hodge podge (known, officially, as a "rag tag") fleet of ships, including an aging battleship/carrier known as a "battlestar". The fleet is looking for a new home, and the ultimate destination is Earth.

Anyway, the season ended this spring with a cliffhanger. The new season wasn't supposed to start until early 2008. That's not quite the case, now. They are playing a telemovie, called "Razor", in November. Then the season will run in the new year. They're splitting the season in half, with a cliffhanger separating the two halves. The big question is the length of time between the first half and the second half. Jamie Bamber, who plays Lee "Apollo" Adama, said that the gap between the two halves will be long, perhaps as much as 10 months! Recently rumours have surfaced that it might be as short as a month.

Where did I get all this neat information? Syfy Portal.

Jessica Alba's attractiveness not good science

2007-09-04T15:21:00.000-05:00

About a week ago, a "science" article was released in various newspapers "proving" that "actress" Jessica Alba is attractive for scientific reasons. The article implies that researchers measured her hip to waist ratio and found a number that gives her the best wiggle when she walks. This, they said, is why she's attractive.

Here's an example of the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2007/08/25/nwiggle125.xml

This "study" was released as a mixture of science and entertainment. As it turns out, there's not a spec of science in the story. It's a bogus survey produced by Veet, a hair removal company.

Ben Goldacre writes a column for The Guardian newspaper in Britain titled Bad Science. Goldacre reports on stories reported in the media as true when they are actually, well, bad science.

In the case of the Jessica Alba story, Goldacre actually received an e-mail from Veet. According to the e-mail, they already knew what they wanted the survey to say. They asked:

We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top 10 sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it. We would like help from a doctor of psychology or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up our findings, as we feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the story more weight.

In a follow-up e-mail they admitted:

We haven't conducted the survey yet but we know what results we want to achieve. We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom eg - skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy..

The story said that the study came from Cambridge. Well, sort of. They went to Cambridge University and got a mathematician to analyze the data. There is no hard data in this survey at all. In other words, it's completely bogus.

Here's Ben Goldacre's column: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/01/1

Actually did some gaming!

2007-08-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

I was a bit homesick this past week. Not homesick for Toronto (though I do get that from time to time), but homesick for GenCon. I attended GenCon in Milwaukee, the largest game convention in North America, every year from 1995 to 2000. I waited in anticipation all year for those five days of GenCon. I've never felt so in tune with a place as at that game convention. GenCon ended last weekend, but last week all the GenCon reviews were hitting RPG.net. I tried to avoid most of them...

My hobbies have taken a back seat to my writing this summer. I'm enjoying writing, but I'm also looking forward to finishing this book so that I can do different game related stuff. In particular, I need to get some miniatures painting done.

The only gaming I've done is playtesting for This Favored Land, and a weekly (though due to scheduling conflicts it's come out as bi-weekly) game of Call of Cthulhu with friends on Skype. Three of us in our monthly roleplaying group also got to play Carcassonne: The Discovery a little while back. That's been it all summer, until this past week.

The Skype game has worked surprisingly well. Each week we seem to have some sort of technical problem, but I suspect it's because two of the players — Chris and his son Josh — play from the same house, sharing the same internet connection. I'll know better in a couple of weeks when Josh goes to college. The group plays well together, and there's something about a game over a VoIP line that focuses everyone. It's worked much better than I thought it would. Our monthly playtesting sessions have been fun, at least from my perspective. I'm a little less relaxed playing This Favored Land than I usually am, probably because I'm more analytical about the adventure. We had a pretty exciting episode last month, and I hope to capture the same excitement next week.

That was all the gaming I'd done until this past week. One of the folks at work is interested in history. We keep talking about going over to Vicksburg to visit the military park some time. His 12 year old son is into the Civil War. Last year I mentioned the game Memoir '44. He bought the game for his son, who loved it. They've been playing it off and on ever since. We decided to get together last Monday and play a game or two. He suggested he bring his son. At the last minute, his brother-in-law showed up, too. We ended up playing a game of Battle Cry (his son's side won in a squeaker) and Memoir '44 (which I won in a game that was almost as close). They enjoyed it so much that we're going to do it again, though no date has been set.

They also want to play a miniatures game. The likely game will be an American Civil War game. I have a lot of painted infantry for this (which I purchased about 8 years ago), but I don't have any artillery, cavalry, or leaders painted. I think they would also like a World War II game. Logan is interested in a World War II game, and I painted some 16 German tanks earlier this year. I started work on the Russians in the spring, but the book has curtailed my painting. I need to finish off the 16 Russians so we will be able to play. As you can tell, once the book is written I've got a bunch of miniatures to paint!

Last night Logan, Alana and I played a game of Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers. This is the first board game the three of us have played in a long time. I think we're going to play another game today, too.

On the roleplaying front, I have some ideas I want to try out. Once the the playtesting for This Favored Land is done, I'll be running a Call of Cthulhu campaign. This will be low impact, as it's likely to be a campaign I've already run. Jimmy has asked to run a D&D 3.5 game for us as our second game. This will let me play in a game for the first time in about eight or nine years. I'm looking forward to it, even if it is D&D (not exactly my favourite system). The time I save not having to prepare for a game will let me spend more time painting and writing. I also have an idea for another Skype game, if we can get the players.

It looks like I'm finally getting to play some more games, a trend I hope continues!

On The Lot is over!

2007-08-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

On The Lot is finished, probably quite literally. I ended up watching it until the second last week, when I turned it off in disgust.

It wasn't too bad for most of its run. Each week they had five or six short films by the contestants. They would run a 30 second spot showing the contestant producing his or her film, then they'd run the film, then Carrie Fisher, Gary Marshall, and some movie making guest would comment on the films. Carrie Fisher was an okay judge. The guest judges were usually the most brutally honest. Gary Marshall was a rambling waste of oxygen (as was his sister, Penny, when she took over one episode). Some of the films were pretty good, some were awful, but it was usually pretty entertaining.

I hoped to see longer films in the second last episode. They were down to three film makers, so I thought, "Cool, they can produce films that were twice as long." I thought it might be hard for them to do a longer film with only a week between episodes, but I figured they'd have some way to do it. At the very least I thought they'd do a regular length film while a crew filmed the contestants, showing you more of the process involved in making a movie. Either option would be interesting. Instead, they decided to insult the audience.

Every week the contestants would shoot a film and play it on the next episode. Not so for the second last episode. Instead of double length films or even three new films, they had the contestants pick their two best films from previosu episodes and they reran those. That's right, the penultimate episode, where they wanted to encourage people to vote for the winner, was a greatest hits show. I was so upset at the travesty that I shut off the TV right then and there. A number of people on the show's web site were peeved, too. I didn't bother watching the final episode. I did turn it to the channel just in time to see who won, and then I turned it off again.

This was a mess of a show from the beginning. It was patterned after American Idol when it should have been patterned after Top Chef or even Project Greenlight. They blew the opening episode by not showing any movies. The first set of movies turned out to be the contestants' sample movie (the movie they made to get into the show) even though it wasn't advertised as such. At least one of the films was essentially a ripoff of two old Twilight Zone episodes, but none of the judges caught it (and praised the film instead). The second place winner produced a film early on that was offensive to people with mental disabilities, yet he still made it to the final two. And there was the insult in the second last episode. They did pretty much everything they could to wreck the show from the get go. The ratings were poor, so it's highly unlikely that there will ever be another On The Lot. Funny enough, I'm okay with that.

Writing progress

2007-08-26T11:35:00.000-05:00

Work continues apace on This Favored Land for the Wild Talents roleplaying game. I lost essentially two weekends of work due to allergies. I've made up some time this weekend, though. Obviously my plan to finish most of the writing by the end of August and then spend September editing it isn't going to happen. That was a bit aggressive anyway.

The first chapter has been more difficult than I had thought it would be. It's the "splat" portion of the book. A "splatbook" is a roleplaying game supplement that focuses on a particular group in the roleplaying game's universe. The term "splatbook" comes from the way these books tend to cover a particular faction in the universe. White Wolf's vampire books are like this. They did a bunch of books on vampire clans that were named "Clanbook *", such as "Clanbook Tremere" and "Clanbook Brujah", etc. The "*" represents a "wild card" indicator in computers, or "insert word here". An asterisk looks like a smashed bug, so it's sometimes called a "splat". This is a long way of explaining that chapter one covers The Gifted (the people with super heroic powers), and four different groups that arose from the appearance of these super powered people. This requires the most imagination, and the most "refactoring" as I started writing each group's description. I stalled on a couple of the groups because my original ideas just didn't work once I started explaining them. I will have this chapter done tonight (with the exception of some character statistics, which I'll do later this week).

The second chapter is finished. This is the rules chapter that explains how to create characters. Chapter 3 is done, too. This is the chapter with the rules specific to the Civil War, including Civil War era weapons. I'm about 3,000 words into chapter 5, which is the "what was it like to live during the Civil War" section. Later today I will start on Chapter 5, and maybe even finish it. Chapter 6 is the "campaign" chapter. It gives the game master ideas for using the book. Chapter 7 is the introductory adventure. It's mostly done. I just have to write up the climax of the adventure, which I have in my head. I'm debating waiting until after next weekend to do that, as we should finish our playtesting of the scenario at that point. Chapter 8 is the references chapter and that's done. This leaves chapter 4. Chapter 4 is a timeline of the Civil War. It will be written like a journal, listing the major events of the war. In addition, there will be sidebars — which we envision will appear as hand written notes — describing activities of The Gifted. I hope to begin this in a couple of weeks.

It's been an enjoyable run, if a little frustrating at times. Now I'm getting into the stuff that will take less time to write, so I expect to see an acceleration in my writing in the next few weeks. I plan to take a vacation day the day after Labour Day. I'm also a bit concerned over the amount of time I'll have for writing the week after that, as I have to travel to Georgia to train clients. I certainly won't be bored...

My dice type!

2007-08-23T17:56:00.000-05:00

It's been a month since I posted? Wow...

I'm not posting much today, but I'll do a longer blog entry on Sunday (while I'm watching the Turkish Grand Prix).

For now, I thought you'd like to see what kind of polyhedral die I am!

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Here's what it said about me:

Ah, the d10! While you aren't actually a true regular polyhedron, you are the only die that makes logical sense — metrically speaking. Chances are, others see you as over-analytical or a goody-goody. While that may be true, you also have a gift for patience and tolerance. Growing up you probably had a calculator wristwatch that you never really needed to use (since you were faster on your own), and you probably aced all your classes (except for gym). You use the metric system almost exclusively, but are able to quickly convert in mid-conversation for the sake of your backwards Imperalist friends. You've coded in at least two different programming languages, and have created more original gaming systems than you'll ever admit. You're generally not a show-off, but you do take pride in being called either a geek or a nerd.

Steady progress

2007-07-22T11:14:00.000-05:00

I'm watching the European Grand Prix (Formula One racing, of which I'm a big fan) on video right now. The coverage was over almost two hours ago, but I didn't get up in time to watch it live. So far I haven't missed a single race. I saw several live (including the Australian Grand Prix, which ended at 4:30 in the morning back in April), but most on tape. It's been a great year for Maclaren fans (of which I'm one). Maclaren is in the lead in constructor points, and young Lewis Hamilton ha been having a great year (this race not withstanding). It's been an excellent F1 season.

So how have we been doing? Okay, I guess. Logan is about three weeks away from going back to school, which still throws me as I'm just now (mentally) used to us being in the summer. This has been a weird summer, as I've been busy working on the roleplaying supplement pretty much every day.

As some of you may be wondering, the book is going pretty good. I'm not as far along as I'd like, but I've been concentrating on the truly creative parts of the book, the parts I knew would take the most time. This means that for the rush to the end I'll be mostly writing historical facts, which takes a lot less time.

I hope to be at the 40,000 word mark by the end of today. I finished the chapter on the combat rules (which is going to end up about 10 pages long instead of my estimate of 4!). The introduction and reference sections are done. I'm mostly finished the adventure, which is the last chapter of the book. We're playtesting it, with one session under our belts and another planned for next weekend. I know in my head what will happen in the adventure; I just have, oh, 6 pages left to write, plus the stats for the non-player characters.

I'm currently finishing the first chapter. The book is based on the idea that super-powered humans (we're not talking Superman abilities here, but more like psychic powers, and the bending of the laws of physics, rather than the breaking of those laws). This is the chapter describing "The Gifted" (the "parahumans" of my universe), the Ethereals (a physical manifestation of The Gift), and the four organizations directly affected by The Gift and The Gifted. I originally had five organizations, but I'm going to have to drop one for space reasons. I can always write it up and release it in a PDF or something after the book comes out. In fact, I have enough ideas running through my head that I might throw a couple of ideas into a PDF file.

Each of the sections I've written has gone over my estimated word count. I'm not that worried about it. I know I'm going to have to trim stuff out of the final manuscript. I expect to have to trim at least 10,000 words some time in September, for an early October finish. When I signed the contract, that date seemed such a long way off...

That's it for this post. I have a lot I'd like to talk about, just no time to do it! Not when I'm spending time watching F1 races! This one has been a good one, though. Incredibly wild with a downpour early in the race, and rain for the last couple of laps. Maclaren came in first, with Fernando Alonso just beating Massa's Ferrari. That puts Alonso within 2 points of the phenomenal Lewis Hamilton, who is leading the championships in his first F1 season. Hamilton was thrown into 10th place due to a mechanical problem in qualifying, and then he fell to 17th after he went off the track due to the rain, but he still finished a respectable 9th. It's going to be an interesting finish to the season.

Okay, enough of that, back to writing...

What is roleplaying?

2007-06-26T20:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a month since I blogged. That's because I've been steadily researching and writing This Favored Land, an American Civil War supplement for Arc Dream's Wild Talents roleplaying game. My writing output has dropped considerably on the project this past week, but that's because I've been doing an awful lot of research. I now know more about the antebellum South, the Civil War in Missouri, 19th century ghosts, and the Spiritualism movement than I ever thought possible! I'm taking tomorrow off work to do some writing. By this weekend I should be back on track. (By "on track", I mean that I'll have the first draft of the 80,000 word manuscript done by September 1. This will give me a month to polish it and reorganize it before it is ready for submission.)

In the meantime, John mentioned in a response to one of my blogs that he wasn't sure what I meant by a "roleplaying game". So, I thought I'd take a short break and explain roleplaying.

---

A roleplaying game is make believe for teens and adults (kids can roleplay too, but most child activities are already essentially unstructured roleplaying games). Since "make believe" is child stuff, adults have to add complicated rules to make it "mature" and acceptable. Then, they strip out those complicated rules and give it a fancy label like "diceless" or "rules light", bringing it back to make believe but with an adult label.

Roleplaying consists of people pretending to be somebody else. It's acting, essentially, but usually without all the body movement of acting. You'll sometimes hear about roleplaying in the work place. Corporate consultants started using the idea in the 90s, about a decade after psychologists discovered it, but gamers were there first. (At least I think so; this is all subjective based on my own experience.)

In a roleplaying game, one person takes the part of the gamemaster, or GM. She (the convention in roleplaying books is to refer to gamemasters as "she" and players as "he") acts as a combination referee, story writer, and movie director. The GM's job is to create a world — or use one that's already been published — where the game takes place, come up with a story — or use a published story — for the players to play, and then adjudicate what happens based on the players actions. The story is also called an "advenure" or a "scenario". A gamemaster is also called a referee, a storyteller, and a host of other game-specific names (from Dungeon & Dragons' Dungeon Master, to Spycraft's Game Control, to Call of Cthulhu's Keeper of Arcane Lore &mndash; Keeper, for short). "Game Master", or GM, is widely used as the generic name for this participant in the game. Wild Talents uses the term "GM".

The other participants in the game are the players. They take on the persona of a character within the game. A character might be a 1920s Sam Spade-like detective, or he might be an Elven warrior from Middle Earth. He could be captain of a starship, or sailor on a World War II submarine, or a superhero, or just an average guy walking down the street. The universe where the game is set will dictate the kinds of characters a player can create. There are roleplaying games licenses for literary and movie fiction. Yes, you can play a Jedi in the Star Wars universe, a starship commander from Star Trek, or a "double-O" agent from the James Bond films. These are all popular, but games based on deeper background universes tend to be more popular.

The GM invents a story in whatever universe the game is set. For instance, if the game is Spycraft the universe is a world very similar to the James Bond movies (and if the game is the James Bond Roleplaying Game, the universe is exactly like the movies). The players are going to take on the role of spies, and the GM's adventure will be a story about what happens to those spies. If the game is Sidewinder, the universe is the American Wild West of the 19th century. In a game of Sidewinder, the characters are likely to stop gun-toting bank robbers, or thwart the plans of evil cattle barons.

The universe doesn't have to be based on reality, though it often is. Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920s, but where the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction are alive. Dungeons & Dragons is often set in fantasy worlds not unlike Tolkien's Middle Earth (and, yes, there are roleplaying games actually set in the world of The Lord of the Rings). There's a Star Wars roleplaying game, a Matrix roleplaying game, and roleplaying games based on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Conan the Barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, the Second World War, DC and Marvel comics, and Hong Kong action movies.

The GM's story moves the game along. The GM might invent a murder mystery and the players' characters have to solve the mystery. The GM might send the characters on a quest to save a kidnapped princess. The characters may have to stop a terrible monster in the wilds of New Jersey, or the wilds of Mordor. The GM puts together the story, complete with clues and a cast of characters. Usually the GM figures out a way for the characters to get through the story, too, but that's just in case the players get stumped.

How much direction is required by the GM depends on the type of story. Some games are essentially miniatures wargames. The GM creates a map of an area, writes down where the monsters appear, and then the players move through the area killing evil things. After the set up, there's very little for the GM to do but move monsters and roll the dice to see if they hit and damage the characters. Other games require more GM control. In these games the players interact with the non-player characters (called NPCs) of the universe, asking questions, befriending them, or making enemies. The GM has to take on the persona of each NPC. Some games feature players competing against each other in big political or conspiratorial games. In these settings the players run the whole thing pretty much by themselves, with the GM acting as referee and the source of plot complications.

The players "generate" their characters. This is where the adult rules come in. It usually involves dice, and most often it involves dice of more — or less — than six sides. Four, eight, ten, twelve, and twenty-sided dice are all common. The rules use dice to come up with various attributes for the characters, depending on the game system. Some game systems don't use dice to generate characters, but give players points that they spend on various attributes. Some games even use a combination of points and dice rolls.

The attributes might indicate the character's strength, how clumsy he is, how smart, or how good looking. Some games go so far as to generate eye and hair colour, and the character's exact height and weight (but this sort of detail is usually left to the player to invent). Most modern games also have some sort of skill list. These are things the character can do. The player might not be able to repair a computer or speak Chinese, but his character could. The game rules give every player a fair shot at creating a character they like, with enough abilities to be interesting but with room for growth.

After the characters are created, it's off to play the game. The GM will describe the setting of the game. At some point the GM will ask each player what they are doing. The player tells the GM, and the GM lets them do what they said they were doing, or tells them they can't do it, or uses the rules to figure out whether or not they can do it.

For instance, if the game was set in the Wild West, the players might all be cowboys. The GM would describe the saloon where they are congregating. The GM would then say something like, "The local sheriff runs into the saloon and yells, 'The afternoon stage coach has been held up! I need a posse!'" The players would then have to decide what they are going to do. Are they law-abiding citizens who will get their horses and help the sheriff? Or are they bank robbers who will take the opportunity to rob the bank while the posse is gone? Or perhaps they'll just sit in the saloon, minding their own business, until something else happens. Let's say they all go to help the sheriff. While riding out to the stage coach they are shot at by bandits. One player wants his character to jump off his horse and crawl for cover. Another wants to shoot a bandit while remaining on his horse. Can the characters do these actions? Can the first player jump off his horse without hurting himself? And if he is hurt, how badly? Can the second character shoot the bandit? This is where the rules and the dice come in.

The GM's job is to make sure everyone has fun. Except for a rare number of games that have competition as a premise, the other players do not compete against the GM (although there is a great deal of pleasure taken from outsmarting the GM's story). The players pretend to be their characters and participate in the story as though they were actors in a play. It's like reading a book or watching a movie, but with the players participating. It's like make believe, except that the GM tells the others whether or not they can do a stated action, and how well, using the game system's rules as guide.

The GM might dictate that the character on horseback can't shoot at the bandit because it's too hard to hit while riding. Usually the game rules will cover this situation, but if they don't the GM has to figure it out by herself. She may even "cheat" for the sake of the story. Perhaps the bandit is Black Bart, who has to make it to the next town in order for the story to work. The character shoots at Black Bart, hitting him. The GM might roll the damage herself, so that Black Bart will miraculously survive. Or she might have Bart duck at the last second. Or, she might just let the player roll the dice and if Black Bart dies, he dies. Then she might have to change her story altogether, on the fly. Perhaps Black Bart was going to ride to the next town to hole up with his brother. Now her story changes, and Black Bart's brother is going to want revenge on the man who shot Bart.

The fun in roleplaying games comes from pretending to be a character and doing things that are impossible in real life. Players are encouraged to talk like their characters. A player playing a cowboy could tell the GM, "I walk up to the sheriff and ask him if there's any reward for joining the posse," but he's encouraged to do something like, "I'm going to walk up to the sheriff. 'Say, sheriff, there any reward for capturing this here Black Bart gang?'" The GM would then interact with the player by pretending to be the sheriff. This is where NPCs come in. The GM plays the part of every NPC in the game, acting like that NPC and dictating what the NPC does. The GM will take on the role of the Sheriff, Black Bart, and that cute saloon girl the cowboys have their eyes on. The GM tries to make them feel like individual characters.

Because the GM runs the NPCs, the players never know what's happening behind the scenes. Maybe the sheriff has been bribed by Black Bart. Maybe Black Bart is a Pinkerton agent under cover. The players will never know unless they dig into the story.

Another key aspect of roleplaying is the ability to dictate the direction of the story. There are roleplaying games for computers and game consoles, but they tend to be "linear". The player usually has to follow the script to get through the story. So called "pen and paper" RPGs have a human deciding the outcome, but that human can change the direction of the story at any time. Often a better story comes along when the players do something the GM hadn't thought about. For instance, one player might say, "Hey, what if we found out where Black Bart's girlfriend lived and wait for him to appear!" In a video game the designers likely wouldn't give the players this sort of freedom (not yet, anyway). In a pen and paper game, this sort of alteration on the fly happens all the time.

The style of play is different from one game group to another. One group may use miniature figures and a dry erase board for a map so that they can tell where any player is at a given time. They can glance at the board and see that one character is standing by the piano while another is near the stairs when Black Bart enters the saloon. Other groups might not bother with miniatures and just keep the action straight in their imaginations. Some groups like murder mystery stories, whether they are straight detective stories or based around some kind of horror element. Other groups just want to be heroes, like Conan or Captain Kirk. Some groups want intense realism (if they shoot someone they want to know what organs and bones are hit), while others emphasize speed and flexibility. A lot of game groups jump from style to style, wanting a realistic game set in World War II but a fast paced, heroic game when playing games set in Hong Kong action movies, as an example.

After an adventure is completed, the characters are usually rewarded for the way their players ran them during the game. This is usually in the form of experience. Characters will improve at skills, and sometimes attributes, as the game (known as a "campaign") continues. This gives players incentive to keep playing the same character. It also gives players an incentive not to just throw the character away doing stupid things. If a character dies, the player will usually have to create a new character from scratch, losing all those hard won experience points or skill increases. Players usually develop a fondness for their characters, which also helps mitigate against doing stupid things. The game does not prevent you from doing stupid things. If you want to try and dismantle a bomb by shooting it from five feet away, there's nothing in the rules stopping you...

In roleplaying there truly is no winning or losing. It really is all about how you play the game. (Okay, there are competitive roleplaying games. Rune, a Viking game that's actually based on a console game has the players actively compete against each other, but it is the rare exception rather than the rule.) Sure, an entire party might be killed off by some monster in Victorian London, but if it was exciting and heroic, and the players killed the monster too, then they could very well feel like they "won". The idea isn't to win like in a conventional game, but to enjoy the story that the players and the GM mutually create.

As I said, it's make believe. With rules. And usually dice.

So far I've written about what you can do in a game, but I haven't explained how the game is actually played. How do you tell if you shot Black Bart, or how do you determine how badly hurt you were jumping out of a window? That's where the rules come in.

Roleplaying games have two main parts to them: the game mechanics and the game universe.

The game mechanics control how the game is played. These are rules that tell you how to create a character, how long a "game turn" represents, how far a character can move in a turn, whether or not a character can shoot a target with a gun, whether or not a character can cast a magic spell, etc., etc. These are the rules that dictate if a character can do something and how well they succeeded at doing it.

Game mechanics come in many forms. Some games have "character levels", where characters don't rise in ability until they've accumulated enough experience points, and then *poof* they suddenly jump up to the next level. Often in these games, every character of the same type (or "class") at the same level has roughly the same ability. This was how D&D worked.

Some games give characters skills, with each skill representing the character's ability in one area. Each character can have a unique combination of skills and skill abilities. One character could have a high score in the Read Chinese skill but a poor score in their Pistol skill, while another character could have a high Pistol score but no ability in reading Chinese. In these games, characters increase abilities in the skills a little at a time. T

There are also games that use both character levels and skills, and games that don't use skills at all.

Even when games have a similar method of handling character abilities, like having a list of skills, the actual method of determining outcomes is different. The game company Chaosium calls their rule system (or, rather, their primary rule system, as they've had several over the years) BRP for Basic Role Play. Characters have skills rated from 0 to 100. To attempt a skill you roll two 10-sided dice. One is usually numbered from 0 to 9, and the other is numbered 00 to 90 by tens. You roll both dice and read the 00 to 90 dice as the tens digit, and the 0 to 9 as the ones digit. This gives you a number from 1 to 100 (actually 00 to 99, but 00 is treated as 100). To succeed at a skill you have to roll less than or equal to your skill rating. If I have 60% in my handgun skill, I will have to roll 01 to 60 in order to shoot Black Bart. If I roll 61 to 100, I missed.

This is only one type of rule system. The most popular system in the world is the D20 system ("D20" standing for "20-sided die"). It's popular because it was based on the first major roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons. To succeed at anything you roll a twenty-sided die. The specific situation results in a target number. You want to roll equal to or greater than the target number. Skills and special abilities add bonuses to what you roll, raising the number.

Steve Jackson Games' GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) gives characters skills of 0 to 18 (roughly). The player rolls three six-sided dice, adds them up, and compares the result to their skill. Like Chaosium's system, rolling low is good and rolling high is bad. Arc Dream's Wild Talents is entirely different. Characters have "skill levels" from 0 to 10, and they have attributes (Body for physical ability, Mind for intelligence, etc) in the 1 to 10 range (with normal humans between 1 and 5). A player rolls a number of 10-sided dice equal to the sum of the character's skill and the attribute associated with it. They succeed if at least two of the dice roll the same number. The more dice tat match, the quicker the character succeeded at what he was doing, but the higher the number on the matching dice the better the result. (Yes, this may seem a little odd, but it works!)

The game universe is the background in which the game is played. If it is a Star Wars game, then the game is set in the Star Wars universe. If the game is Call of Cthulhu, the game is set in world as it was in the 1920s, with H.P. Lovecraft's monsters running loose. The universe can be a published roleplaying product, it could be a world taken from a book the GM read, or it could be something the GM made up all by herself.

Sometimes the game universe and the game mechanics are strongly connected, other times they are weakly connected. This is a difficult concept for a layman to get their head around, because if all you've ever played are board games you are used to the whole thing coming in one package. Here is an example that will hopefully help.

Most folks have heard of (even played) Monopoly. You can buy standard, every day Monopoly based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey. You can also buy, believe it or not, Star Wars Monopoly. The rules are pretty much the same, but the board and pieces are different and are based on the planets in Star Wars. You are still playing Monopoly, it's just that the setting is different.

Let's look at the board game Risk. You have regular Risk, set in the 19th century, and you have... you guessed it... Star Wars Risk. Same rules, but a different setting.

Now let's look at both Star Wars Monopoly and Star Wars Risk. Both games have the same Star Wars setting, the same characters, and many of the same kinds of pieces. However, the rules are quite a bit different, because one is Monopoly and the other is Risk.

This is how roleplaying games work. Different rules can be used with the same setting, and different settings can be used with the same set of rules. You can play a Lovecraftian horror game using Chaosium's BRP rules. The same rules can be used to play a Wild West game. You can play a superhero game using Arc Dream's Wild Talents, but you can also play a Lovecraftian horror game using the same set of rules.

Originally there was a strong connection between a game's rules and the game's universe. If you played D&D you played a fantasy game, period. Fairly early on, though, game companies realized that they could reuse the same rules in different universes to come up with entirely different games. As an example, the basic D&D rules were modified for a post-apocalypse game called Gamma World. Call of Cthulhu is actually a variation of the older fantasy game RuneQuest.

Usually the game rules are published in the same book as the game universe, so you have everything in one book. Game companies usually produce "sourcebooks" with additional universe information (expanding on what's in the main book), and "supplements" with additional game rules options. Supplements and sourcebooks keep the game fresh while generating new sales. Companies also sell adventure books which are almost exclusively adventures, to help the poor beleaguered GM.

Some rule books are all rules , with no universe information at all. GURPS, for instance, has no game universe information in its core rulebooks. For that you have to buy one of their sourcebooks, or make up your own universe. Sometimes a game company will give the game mechanics away for free so that you'll buy the sourcebooks. ACTION does this. Usually the sourcebooks are made to work with a particular set of mechanics. GURPS books reference the GURPS rules. D20 sourcebooks reference the Dungeons & Dragons rule books, or the D20 Modern book, etc. On the other hand, many universe source books are almost entirely generic. Transhuman Space, a science fiction game set 100 years in the future, is made for GURPS but is generic enough to be used with D20 Future or any number of sci-fi games.

It used to be that most games came with most of the rules and at least some of the universe information in them. The explosion of the D20 rules has produced a ton of games consisting entirely of universe information and setting-specific rules. You have to buy a D20 or OGL (Open Gaming License; essentially an unofficial D20 game) book with the core rules in order to play the game. GURPS has done it this way since its inception. White Wolf has gone this route with their World of Darkness games (Vampire: The Requiem being the most famous). Chaosium is planning to do the same thing with the release of Chaosium's BRP, a compendium of three decades worth of BRP rules.

This is just a broad overview of roleplaying and roleplaying games, and a fairly stereotypical one at that. I haven't discussed things like diceless roleplaying, troupe style games, or live action roleplaying. Let me know if you'd like me to go even further.

My work cut out for me...

2007-05-30T22:55:00.000-05:00

I'm warning my faithful readers (all four of you) that my posts will be sparse for the next four months. Earlier this evening I received a contract for a game book. I'm going to be writing a supplement for a roleplaying game! I'll write more about it in the coming weeks, but I don't want to say too much as I still haven't sent back the contract!

This is the reason I haven't posted much this month. Based on a post to an online forum I was asked about my idea for a game supplement. After some discussion I was asked to submit a proposal. When they liked that, they asked for a sample of my writing in the form of the book's introduction along with the outline for the book. I found out this evening that the guys liked it. That turned out to be the easy part; now I have to write the darned thing!

The book will run about 80,000 words, which is equivalent to a novel. And I have four months to write it (the first draft is due October 1). Even if I averaged 2,000 words a day (and that's a pretty good clip) it would still take me 40 days. So, when I have the option of writing a blog entry, playing a game, sleeping, or eating, I really should be writing.

I am running a Call of Cthulhu game by VoIP (voice over IP) using Skype on Thursday nights. That will continue. I am also running a couple of roleplaying games one weekend a month. That, too, will continue though I suspect that I'll end up using that group as playtesters for the scenario I'm including in the book. We hate when Logan goes away to stay at Alana's ex's place, but at least that will give me two-week long stints during the summer without distraction, and allow me to spend some time with Logan during the time he's with us.

I'm pretty buzzed about it, as you can imagine. I haven't been too productive this evening due to the excitement, though I did order some research materials online. This weekend I'll start working on it in earnest. I'm going to start with the chapters that require the most creative input first. There's one chapter I'm really looking forward to writing, but which will be more research and less thinking, so that's the one I'm doing last.

So, wish me luck, and if you don't see too many posts you'll know it's not because I've ignored the blog...

Not looking good...

2007-05-29T16:20:00.000-05:00

Things are not looking good for On The Lot. According to Media Life, last night On The Lot pulled in a rating of 1.3 in the key 18–49 demographic. That means that of all the viewers watching television last night, 1.3% of the people in the most desirable purchasing demographic were watching the show. Those are truly dismal numbers, the kind of numbers that get a show cancelled before the end of its run. A week ago, behind American Idol it had a 3.9 rating. On Thursday this fell to 2.1.

The only bright note, if you can call it that, is other shows faired poorly over the weekend, too. The Memorial Day weekend is at least partially to blame for this.

My own feelings were expressed yesterday, but to summarize I think Fox blew it with the first two episodes. You can't do a show about movies and not show movies in the first two episodes!

At any rate, it doesn't look like my dream to try out for On The Lot season 2 will come to fruition...

Two items on the acceptance of pagan beliefs

2007-05-28T22:36:00.000-05:00

Though I'm an agnostic secular humanist, I'm not against religion. I sometimes wish I had the comfort that comes with faith, and I sometimes envy those who have that faith. I do have a problem with organized religions that use doctrine as an excuse for hate. However, I respect everyone's right to have their own religious beliefs. Religious freedom is a hallmark of western democracy.

Of course, there isn't exactly religious freedom in the United States. You can't prevent people from being prejudiced. You have the right to believe anything you want, but there are certain places where you dare not point out that your not a Christian. This is particularly hard for people who believe in things that are beyond the "mainstream". Much of this is due to a holdover from the Dark Ages, particularly with regard to pagan beliefs. The early Christian church portrayed paganism (made up of a variety of faiths, such as Wicca and druidism, which are two different beliefs) not as a competitive religion but as an evil religion, or set of religions. This view of the pagan faiths has changed somewhat in recent years. This was shown very recently in two different events.

First, in the United States the Veterans Administration now recognizes the pentacle as a proper religious symbol that can be placed on the headstones of dead servicemen. Wiccan practitioners had requested this for a number of years, but it was only recently — with the threat of a lawsuit — that the pentacle was okayed by the VA. Since the settlement between the VA and Wiccan organizers, five headstones with the pentacle were delivered, and one request was pending. One of the headstones was for a World War II veteran, another for a Korean War veteran, and a third for a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. A pilot killed in Afghanistan in 2005 also received a Wiccan headstone.

Here is the story:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/27/
memorialday.wiccans.ap/index.html

In Scotland, Edinburgh University has given the Pagan Society the go ahead to hold its annual conference at the school next month. The conference will attract Wiccans, Druids, and various other believers in the "pagan" religions. Being a Celtic country, there has always been a pagan presence in Scotland, even through the turmoil of the Reformation. With greater religious freedom, paganism has expanded in Scotland.

The Edinburgh University case is interesting because it has sparked a controversy. The school's Christian Union is complaining because they believe they were discriminated against. The Christian Union was prevented from holding a conference last year about the "dangers of homosexuality". The conference, which was intent on showing gay sex was morally wrong, went up against the university's anti-discrimination policy. The conference was allowed to go on as long as the Christian Union put up posters indicating a differing view of gays and morality. The Christian Union is protesting the pagan conference because no such "differing view" requirement was made for them. It should be noted, though, that pagans in general do not discriminate against gays. It should also be noted that the Christian Union wasn't told to put up posters saying that there were alternatives to the holy trinity, or that Christ was the son of God, or he died and was resurrected three days later. They were told to put up alternatives to the view that homosexuality was immoral.

This is a thorny issue. As much as I find Christianity's view of homosexuality and bisexuality incredibly distasteful and offensive, I'm not sure that requiring disclaimers is the right way to go. I mean, does anyone today not understand the evangelical view of homosexuality's immorality? (They may not understand that such teachings were added in the Dark Ages, and that the early Christian church performed gay marriages, but the view of gays in the evangelical movement is not new.) If you're going to give a religion freedom of expression, you have to let it freely express itself without restriction. Let the freedom of expression for other religions speak for the alternatives.

Yes, it may seem unbelievable that I'm saying this. It's what I believe. It only works, though, if the body in question is willing to allow true freedom of religion without the slightest possibility of repercussion. The local high schools got into a flap because they held a student-led prayer before graduation. I don't see a problem with that. Where I do have a problem is if a student of another faith wanted to perform a prayer and was not allowed, or even disrespected. I would hope that the same schools that allowed a Christian prayer would also allow a Hindu prayer or a Muslim prayer, or even a pagan prayer. It would be interesting to see what would happen around here if after the Christian prayer a student was allowed to say a Wiccan prayer. I wonder if the same people who applauded the prayer in school would be quite so receptive to another religion's prayer, or if they'd immediately drop into the "America is a Christian nation" argument. For now, it's just a thought experiment...

Anyway, the article about Edinburgh University can be found here:
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=823222007

On The Lot

2007-05-28T21:38:00.000-05:00

I love movies. I don't watch as many as I really should. I did get to watch several this weekend (Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, half of Sands of Iwo Jima, half of The Sand Pebbles, half of Where Eagles Dare, and an episode of Band of Brothers; can you tell it's Memorial Day?). For three years in high school a friend and I went to see an average of 50 movies a year. I used to go to movies with my friend Michael when he was reviewing them for the CBC (bet he comments on this blog entry just for this reason!). I took a Film Arts class in high school. I was the only person in my class to get an A in a Film Arts elective course I took in college. I was accepted to Humber College in Toronto for the film making course (and to this day I still wonder what would have happened if I had gone that way instead of into computers...) Yes, I love movies. These days Alana and I just don't have the time to see all the films we want, either in the theatres or on DVD. We need to make more time.

Anyway, I was really excited about the new reality show On The Lot. It's essentially the film version of American Idol where budding film makers compete for a "million dollar deal" at Dreamworks. Not sure what they mean by "million dollar deal"; probably mean that the winner will be paid a guaranteed million to develop ideas for a certain length of time. For a million dollars these days you'd be hard pressed to film a commercial.

The initial ratings for On The Lot were not great. The lead in was American Idol but they lost a lot of viewers from the lead in. I think I know why. They followed the American Idol formula too closely, when they should have followed the formula for Rock Star or the Bravo reality shows. In the first episode we were introduced to about 50 people. They all made introductory films, but we never saw more than a few seconds of a handful of them. We saw a bunch of really bad pitches instead, reminding me of the really bad singers from Idol. The Bravo (Sheer Genius is an example, about hair dressing, which has surprised Alana and me by sucking us in)/Rock Star formula is to cut to the chase with about 16 competent contestants right up front. The worst contestants have been dropped before the show even really starts. This would have let the show start off by showing movies!

They pared down the 50 to 36 by having the contestants pitch a story. The winners were put into groups of three to make a one minute short. The second episode was on last Thursday when our Skype roleplaying group had our first meeting, so I didn't see it. Tonight is the third episode and, hurrah!, we get to see films!

The format is essentially identical to Idol. You see one film per film maker (this week it's a one-minute comedy short) and you vote for your favourite. The least favoured movie has the director dropped from the show. You can see all of the shorts on their web site, and you can phone in your vote, text it in, or vote via the Internet.

So far the movies have been pretty good. "Dance Man", "Deliver Me", "The Big Bad Heist", "Danger Zone" and "Replication Theory" were, in my opinion, the best. I had a couple of technical issues with the first two (a couple of shots that looked like they were out of film making 101), but they were funny and well made. The third one was by far the best made, but it wasn't a comedy movie, it was a trailer for a comedy movie (even though it was quite funny). "Danger Zone" had a crappy set (but considering the limitations it was okay) and not great actors, but the entire film was done in a single shot and is quite funny. The judges went nuts over "Check Out", about a sex fantasy at the airport. As much as I like sex fantasies, I think the "it was all a dream" plot is over done. "Replication Theory", on the other hand, told a story and had a neat little twist.

The bad ones were quite bad. "Wacky Alley Cab" just wasn't funny, and I couldn't tell what the director was getting at. "Getta Rhoom" was, apparently, supposed to be about a nerd who shouts "Get a room!" inappropriately, but the main character came across as mentally challenged (the director suggested that wasn't the idea, but I don't believe him), and only comes across as creepy. I'm not sure what ...To Screw In A Light Bulb was getting at.

The rest were, like most movies, "okay". Most produced a titter at least but were flawed in some way. The fascinating part is to see these films that didn't quite work and then try to figure out why they didn't work.

There is a problem with the judges: Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia, and recently added as host of Turner Movie Classics), D.J. Caruso (director of Disturbia), replacing Brett Ratner from the first episode (who directed Red Dragon, which wasn't as good as the original film Manhunter, and X-Men 3, which wasn't as good as the first two), and Garry Marshall (directed a bunch of TV stuff, as well as Pretty Woman and the recently panned Georgia Rule). They are too nice. There's a reason Idol has three very different judges. Randy is realistic, Simon is hateful, and Paula — who I argue is the most important judge for the success of the show — who likes everyone. Randy is the thinking person's reviewer. Simon peeves people off, encouraging them to vote to spite him. Paula reinforces everyone's vote, which also encourages them. The On The Lot judges, though, are all too nice. They qualify their votes. They encourage all the directors even when they put out crap. They give constructive criticism, but it tempers their message. They all sound the same. They need a Simon figure that says, "That was bloody awful!"

If the show is a success, it will be due to the films and not due to the show itself. The format of the first two episodes wrecked momentum. The judges don't add anything to the show. If people keep coming back, it will be to see the films themselves. If they don't come back I fear that the wrong lesson will be learned.

In the head!

2007-05-23T22:50:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching the Lost season finale. I wish the writers would pick up the pace (a theme for tonight's posts) during the main part of the season. I know it's feasible, because the finale is always a blast (sometimes, like tonight, literally...).

Anyway, I don't want to spoil the end for those who missed it, didn't tape it, don't have TiVO and are waiting for the DVDs.

Instead, I wanted to point out something that's obvious to me: television writers, in general, don't play roleplaying games.

From watching the Heroes finale (which was good in an understated way), and now Lost I have to think that these writers haven't watched zombie movies, either. Look, guys, three words, "in the head"!

If someone's bad enough to kill, he's bad enough to kill correctly. Don't just shoot him in the chest, do a 9mm double tap to the base of the skull. If you're going to stick a sword through the guy, why stop there? Take the head off at the neck!

Not a single roleplayer would take down the big bad without making sure the big bad stayed down.

The corollary is simple: someone isn't dead until you see the lifeless corpse. Even if the body is miles away, apparently dead, or lost in a planetary gravity well, they ain't dead until the lifeless (and preferably headless) corpse is in front of you.

Spidey review

2007-05-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

It looks like this month is going to be dismal for blog posts. I've been working on something, which I'll mention when I found out what happens. I had to complete something, and I submitted it last night. One way or another I should know within a week.

Meanwhile, a week ago Saturday we took Logan to see Spider-man 3. It turns out the professional reviews have this one correct. It was a little disappointing. That's not to say that it's a bad movie. As summer movies go it's pretty good, but it's not as good as the first two.

The film opens with Peter Parker watching Mary Jane's Broadway premiere. Peter's feeling pretty good, seeing as how Spidey is now a popular New Yorker. This is a welcome change from the comic books, which ran for decades under the premise that the people of New York couldn't tell if Spidey was good or evil. Peter wants to marry Mary Jane, but two things get in the way. First, Harry Osborne, son of Norman Osborne (who died attacking Spidey in the first movie) is out for revenge. Second, Mary Jane's career isn't going as she planned.

Besides the new Green Goblin attacking Spidey there is also the Sandman (an escaped convict who gets turned into living sand) and a mysterious symbiote (who corrupts Peter as a secondary black suit). There are a couple of other subplots vying for screen time.

That's the problem with the film: too many plots. This isn't the problem it was in the run of Batman movies that collapsed under the weight of all the supervillains in the final films (not to be confused with the pretty good Batman Forever). However, it does hurt the pacing. Like the first two movies, it starts slow, building up the story and the characterization. Unfortunately, the film's story never gains the proper momentum. Simply put, there's too much characterization. At least there's too much to fit in three villains.

The problem is the mating the Mary Jane/Peter plot with the three-way villain plot. Either the relationship plot should have been coupled to a single villain, or the relationship plot should have been dropped.

The special effects are excellent. Venom, the black suited Spidey, is well done from a technical perspective, but Venom's appearance is rushed. The folks at the Daily Bugle are a hoot. I loved Bruce Campbell's character as a maitre'd, but I thought the scene with his character was too distracting for what should have been a poignant scene. Sandman gets more character development than most super villains, and is probably the highlight of the movie (but it doesn't match the development of Doc Ock in the last film). The climax comes with not enough lead up, and the final resolution is a bit too sudden. The fight scenes are well choreographed. Peter's and Mary Jane's relationship is realistic.

This next bit is a spoiler. If you intend on seeing the movie, stop now... This covers a big plot hole.

You sure you want to keep reading?

Okay, you've been warned...

I'm convinced that at some point a change was made to the plot, and not for the better. It resulted in a big, stupid plot hole.

Mary Jane is upset with Peter for a couple of reasons. Instead of calling Peter, she calls Harry, and goes to see him. Harry has, by this time, recovered his memories. She has a nice night with Harry, and ends up kissing him. She then leaves, realizing she may go too far if she stays.

Now, as shown, Harry gets into his Goblin suit and goes after Mary Jane. He grabs her, and threatens to harm Peter if she doesn't do something for him. The next scene she tells Peter to meet him on the bridge. When he shows up, she dumps him. Harry looks on, smugly. He then confronts Peter, telling Peter that he was responsible for her dumping Peter.

While the film was running I thought that Harry would then attack Peter. He didn't. So, then I thought, "Why didn't Mary Jane phone Peter and warn him about Harry, and explain what happened?" Instead, Peter gets all upset, and tries to make her jealous. This didn't make any sense. If she really still loved Peter, if Harry really forced her to dump Peter, why did she not try to tell him or warn him? Harry couldn't have watched Peter all the time. There was no real threat to Peter.

It makes no sense. Unless...

I believe the story, as filmed, was a bit different. I believe the story followed her to Harry's place. She kissed Harry, and then left, all confused. I believe she then broke up with Peter, on her own. It makes the most sense.

Probably a focus group saw the film and reacted negatively to Mary Jane. So, they cooked up the idea that Harry forced her to break up with Peter. In the final version it wasn't her fault.

That's my take, anyway.

I did enjoy the movie, even if my review comes over as negative. It just wasn't what it could be. Hopefully the next one will be more focused.

Hot ice

2007-05-17T21:46:00.000-05:00

If this planet doesn't work out, maybe we can go to another one. Last month astronomers discovered a planet around a star about 30 light years away that was in the habitable band where scientists would expect to find water. Seeing as how the planet was something like twice the size of Earth and rocky (i.e. not a gas giant) it promises to be the closest planet to Earth, habitat wise, of any of the extrasolar planets found to date.

Recently astronomers found another planet, but we wouldn't want to live on it. The surface temperature is around 300°C... and it's made of ice.

The planet was found back in 2004 circling a star called GJ 436 about 30 light years from here. At the time they thought it was about the size of Neptune and rocky.

Scientists found the planet by looking for a wobble in nearby stars. Much like the way the moon pulls at Earth's water causing the rising and falling tides, a planet pulls at a star causing it to wobble. That's how the planet was found. Recently, though, they've been able to watch the dimming of the star as the planet passes between it and us. This gave them more information. It told them that the planet was half the size of Neptune. Now, Neptune is mostly made of hydrogen (but with an ice core). This planet was smaller than they thought, so it had to be more dense. But it wasn't small enough to be rocky. Based on this information, they think the planet is made of ice. It's close enough to its star that the surface temperature is around 300°C or about 570°F.

How can it be so hot and covered in ice?

There are two basic ways to make a solid out of a gas or liquid. One is to cool it. Molecules in a gas bounce around, and bounce into one another. Slow the molecules down by sucking out the energy and they will eventually slow down enough to capture each other. This causes them to bond. In the case of water vapour, if you cool it down it becomes liquid water (pools together into a liquid but it's easy to split apart), and cool it down some more it becomes a solid (the molecules in the water stick together and form a crystal structure we all know as ice).

The other way to form a solid is to push the molecules together with enough pressure that they can't help but bounce into each other. Press them together with even more pressure and they can't bounce off each other; they are forced to stick together and form a solid. One of the properties we like so much about water is that it's difficult to compress. If you put water in a container and push it you can't easily compress it. Instead, it presses out with the same force with which you push it. This is the basis of hydraulics. It takes an awful lot of pressure to turn liquid water into a solid, but it can be done. Push water molecules together hard enough and they will bind into each other, just like carbon molecules in the air if pressed together hard enough will form coal or a diamond.

This planet is not dense enough to be solid rock, so scientists speculate that it's a special form of ice created from a combination of the planet's own gravity and the weight of its atmosphere. This solid water, such as Ice VII and Ice X, can exist even at higher temperatures. The atmosphere would be basically steam, with a core of ice. Because the water would have boiled off early on, given the planet's proximity to its star, scientists think it was created further away from the star but was somehow pulled into a closer orbit.

For more information, here's the article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/
dn11864-strange-alien-world-made-of-hot-ice-and-steam.html

Another climate change symptom

2007-05-17T21:18:00.000-05:00

The Southern Ocean, the ocean around Antarctica, is saturated in carbon dioxide and can barely absorb any more. This is bad news because the Southern Ocean has been the world's biggest carbon sink. The ocean sucks (or sucked) carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, helping to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Experts expected to see the ocean saturated in carbon, but not until 2050. Now they have proof that it's been saturated from 1981 through 2004.

Part of the culprit, other than the fact that there's too much carbon in the atmosphere, has been wind. An increase in the wind around Antarctica has resulted in carbon lower in the water being pulled to the surface. This makes it harder for the water to absorb carbon at the surface boundary. More carbon dioxide means higher temperatures. Since most of the land — and, thus, most of us carbon generating humans — are in the north, the world's temperature has risen more in the northern hemisphere than the southern (though it has also risen in the south). This temperature difference has increased wind velocity in the south, which in turn has exasperated the carbon sink problem.

"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world's oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans," Chris Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement.

"The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean -- the strongest ocean sink -- is weakening is a cause for concern," Rapley said.

The full article is here:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/
05/17/climate.ocean.reut/index.html

Turtle pets

2007-05-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's really been over a week since I posted. I've been busy working on a couple of projects. More on this sometime in the future.

Driving in to work this morning I heard on NPR that the U.S. Senate is looking to legalize pet baby turtles. I remember when I was in junior high school my mother warned me, for whatever reason, that turtles were not safe pets. Back in the mid-70s baby turtles, usually red-eared sliders from Louisiana, were all the rage. They were small, and they were easy to care for. Unfortunately, 30% of them had salmonella (according to NPR).

Apparently a lot of them were harvested in water that was close to sewer outlets. Reptiles in general are susceptible to salmonella (as are chickens; wonder if their common ancestors, the dinosaurs, carried salmonella?). Adults know enough to wash their hands after handling a reptile. These little turtles were often the pets of small children, who would sometimes put them in their mouths (and never washed up afterwards).

A lot of kids got sick, and at least one child died. In 1976 the U.S. government outlawed the sale of the turtles. You can still buy them from people breaking the law; charging vendors of baby turtles is not high on the government's list of important criminal activity.

Recently the U.S. Senate passed a law that would remove the ban on their sale. The House of Representatives will vote on it in June. The baby turtle industry has literally cleaned up its act. The turtles are now being farm raised in Louisiana. One farmer on the radio discussed the procedure they use to clean the eggs. The FDA isn't happy about it as they still see them as a health risk. Salmonella in the turtles has been reduced from 30% to 1%, but to the FDA it still seems to be too high. It's likely, though, that the ban will be lifted. I guess there must be an unusually strong turtle lobby.

Here's the humane society's page on the turtles. They are against the sale of the animals, citing a 100% mortality rate within the first year due to improper feeding and handling of the creatures.

http://www.hsus.org/wildlife/wildlife_news/
baby_turtles_and_children_a_dangerous_combination.html

Okay, I"m crying I'm laughing so hard

2007-05-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

On a lighter note, The Daily Show is quite funny tonight, talking about Queen Elizabeth's visit to the U.S. (Yeah, I know, she calls herself QE2. Scotland never had a queen named Elizabeth, so she's not Scotland's second Queen Elizabeth...) John Oliver, the show's English correspondent, was being made fun of. At one point he retaliated by reminding Jon Stewart that once Britain was as arrogant as the U.S.

"We used to laugh at India. Then we realized that they outnumbered us. And that we didn't like to fight in the heat."

Hmmm... doesn't seem as funny in print, but it had me in stitches with tears streaming from my eyes.

Go to The Daily Show's web site tomorrow and watch it for yourself.