Sadly, this post is not about a game in which you play ancient tomes or cheap paperbacks. Though I have played an ex-book in a game before. No, this is just a quick observation that my FLGS has fewer RPGs than the nearest Borders, though of course a similarly DnD-heavy selection. But, curiously, both have the Mouse Guard RPG.
That was a bust. EveryDNS doesn’t yet support SRV records. If I’m not going to move all my services to the new server, I need support for that. So I may yet do it, but only when I can move XMPP and LDAP services over, too.
I am going to move the hosting of this blog to a more stable server soon. This will involve as much as a day of downtime, and then it will hopefully cut the amount of subsequent downtime significantly. With luck there’ll be no more than a half-hour break in availability, though. Keep an eye on @Transneptune for updates about when this will happen; with luck, it’ll be this Saturday.
This means that other blogs here will also be down briefly: Kipilefti, Chiyaa, Oddletters. Keep an eye on that Twitter account for updates and server status!
John over at The Mighty Atom has some good advice. Reproduced here:
Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.
Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.
Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.
Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.
Also, Gregor Hutton has some great advice in 3:16:
PLAY, DON’T WORK
Play is fun, so embrace the kill-happy machismo [this particular point is specific to the game. –Kit] and play with it. It’s not work, right? You shouldn’t be stressing over this.LIVE THE MOMENT
Each moment might be your character’s last, so don’t try and plan ahead. Events and dice rolls will throw you a curveball all the time. You’ll find that the bigger picture will take care of itself in play.BE A TEAM PLAYER
Listen to your other players at least as much as you speak. Do share your ideas but learn to enjoy the contributions of others too.DON’T TRY TO BE TOO CLEVER
If you spend all your time trying to be clever or bring in more twists and turns it’ll just be tiring. Instead, just go with the intuitive and obvious answers that pop into your head. Simple is best.BE DIRECT
Trying to be subtle can be confusing, and trying to make a convoluted plan worse. Be straight to the heart of the matter.BE OPEN
Be open minded and honest about how you feel. That’s the way.
I suppose I must comment on it. I went, I saw, I enjoyed. But I don’t think I enjoyed it for the reasons one “should” enjoy a movie.
Avatar has been dominating the airwaves and the conversations around me a lot. It’s certainly good in many respects, and the amount of conversational fodder it has provided is one of those. But the problems almost balance the good aspects. It has a schizoid attitude towards and portrayal of the indigenous people, well-addressed in this review. There are so many problems with it requiring a white, male, American soldier to make the indigenous people win that I don’t know where to start, but the short version is that all those things would be OK if they mattered to his ground-breaking plan. But actually? His plan was a non-plan. I’ll avoid saying more for spoilers-sake, in case you care.
So why was it good? I enjoyed watching it for much the same reasons I would enjoy looking at a painting. It was, quite simply, visually stunning. The story was thin, archetypal, problematic in terms of race-attitudes, but man was it pretty to look at. But it was also good in terms of inspiration for secondary-creation: the conlang for the Na’vi was fabulous, and well-acted, and the world had many compelling features, inspiring me to some fun co-exobiology thoughts. And the movie’s ecological message is not subtle, either, which I think is fabulous—no need to tread softly around such a message, just put it out there.
So, ultimately, the movie is good not for much in itself, besides the pretty, but it’s quite good for the topics it gets you thinking about and talking about, most clearly race/privilege, and the environment. I’d recommend it.
Too much happening lately to catch up on writing about: saw Vienna Teng, awesome as ever, with Allie, awesome as ever. Snow again, just after I made it into NYC for a quick seeing of Miles and Mendez and Lisa, and Avatar. The movie was visually stunning, had a fine but thin story, and some real problems with portrayal of indigenous cultures. But was basically fun. Now, I’m working on all sorts of coding projects, and really ought to admit to myself that I have many people to buy gifts for.
Too many project ideas is a great state to be in, when you have the chance to work on them as much as you want.
Oh yeah: snow, twice, BEAUTIFUL.
Is still cool. I’ve got a pile of invites; anyone want one?
(Since people keep asking: Google Wave is not, in and of itself, anything new. It is, rather, a beautifully conceived [though not yet quite fully implemented!] melding of existing technologies. The tag-line version is that it is a integration of wiki, IM, email, and collaborative document editing, with line-item threaded responses and real-time typing from other users visible. Many people balk at this last point, but it’s (a) really surprisingly useful and makes communication a lot more like, well, real conversation, and (b) eventually going to be configurable.)
The inimitable @andrewa121 pointed out that the iPhone has greater extended-latin input abilities than I had ascribed to it; he suggested touch-and-hold to get options for accented characters (which is exactly what one does in Android 2.0). I would like to state for the record that I had tried this unsuccessfully on an iPhone 3GS prior to writing the last post.
Well, I’ve had this phone for a bit now, and thought it time to give my thoughts on it. They are basically positive—if you’re a nerdy guy, this is a good smartphone for you.
The pros are good pros for me, and the cons are cons that don’t bother me, but might be bad for other people. I like the speed, UI, option for on-screen (for general use) or slide-out (for intensive, or SSH, use) keyboard. I like the selection of apps (by which I mean that there’s a good, free, SSH app, and then other, very Google-oriented apps, and a Pandora app).
I like the battery life, I like the resolution, I like the camera. I like running six different apps at a time, and I still like the battery life.
I think that the shape of it is very male, it’s a little thicker than I’d like (for fitting in my erstwhile cell-phone pockets), and many of the apps seem buggier than I’ve seen on the iPhone—but they’ve yet to be destructive bugs. Mostly, the Twitter app I use complains that it needs to force-quit a lot, and then doesn’t, because, actually, it doesn’t need to.
This point is a slight win for the Droid over the iPhone: it can input extended latin characters quite easily, and — and … particularly, but it doesn’t have the fonts to display weirder Unicode, like ♆.
It can’t (yet) play arbitrary Flash embeds, so I can’t watch ZP on it. But it can catch YouTube links and redirect them to the YouTube app.
In the end: nerdy guy, yes. Anyone else, probably not. Price is completely equivalent to the iPhone, in terms of data plan as well.
I sat in on a seminar at Berkeley. Fantastic. I feel like a fish back in water, my mind latching on to novel approaches to familiar problems—the Problem, really. Human language, what is its form? What are its possible forms?
There are reasons I love Cyteen.
The department seems to offer the most wonderful mix of field work and cognitive theory. The brain is most certainly not a Von Neumann architecture computer, though I think that the arguments for considering it a species of computer are compelling. And to talk of Language, of course you need a broad spectrum of data.