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| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 |
immlass
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3:06p |
Weekly media report
I've really admired some of the regular reports on what people are watching, reading, and listening to recently. I've decided I want to do reports for myself this year. These are mostly for my own journal-keeping purposes (as opposed to the gig reports, which are supposed to be enticements for the locals!). ( Under the cut to preserve your flist. ) Current Mood:  productiveCurrent Music: Ronn McFarlane, If Thou Wert My Own Thing |
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marcochacon
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3:48p |
Today at the gym we did these push up things where you have a weight (20lbs) in each hand and when you reach the top of your push-up you then lift one arm and take the weight and lift that. One on each side counts as 'one.' I was like "you have to be shitting me." -Marco |
immlass
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10:39a |
My goals are to find a cure for irony and make a fool out of god.
One of the rules of keeping my life as simple as I can is that I shouldn't own things I can't or won't use. Some things I may not have an immediate use for (and if I think I never will, they should go) but if something is "too nice to use", it's too nice for me. A particular example of that is a set of spare sheets for the guest bed, which was mine when I was single, that I set aside because it was a particularly nice set of sheets and I'd get around to sleeping on them sometime. Sometime never came. Yesterday they went on the bed because I needed to put out spare sheets and the ones on the bed had been slept on recently, since we use the spare room when we're sick. This morning, one of the cats had yarfed all over the special clean sheets. I guess now they're just sheets and I can use them when I want to. Current Mood:  amusedCurrent Music: Podcast:Music, Laura Marling: Devil's Spoke |
drivingblind
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9:44a |
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robin_d_laws
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9:20a |
Recruitment Drive
 Apologies to non-locals while I take care of some important business...
The demon of busy scheduling has struck again, leaving me regretting the departure of a recent but much appreciated addition to my Thursday night gaming group. As a result I am putting out an open call for one new recruit. In the past I’ve kept a waiting list, but it’s been many years since I’ve done a call and want to start from scratch. Apologies if you’ve contacted me in the past; please bear with me by getting in touch again.
To join the group, you’ll need to be reliably free on Thursday nights and able to get to the Bloor-Bathurst area in downtown Toronto. We meet from 7 pm to 10 pm.
You will also need a saintly tolerance for my playtesting needs. I run games I’m either designing or need to familiarize myself in order to do freelance work for. Lately we’ve had an unusually long run with a single campaign, which happens to be D&D4. Soon we’ll be switching to the as-yet-unnamed GUMSHOE space game. Often I’ll have to suddenly abandon a successful series in midstream to go on to the next thing. We usually play RPGs but there’s always the chance you may be asked to test-drive a card or board game along the way.
In the past I’ve accepted players on a first-come, first-served basis. This time, I’m looking to cast the new candidate a little more, with an eye to keeping our group dynamic fresh.
If you’re interested, leave a comment or private LJ message with a way of contacting me back. Or if you’re seeing this on the Facebook, leave a message in my inbox. Give me a quick sense of your gaming tastes.
Whether you jump in for the last few weeks of the D&D game or wait till Space GUMSHOE will be up to you. |
get_medieval
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8:45a |
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simonjrogers
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10:57a |
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xkcd_rss
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5:00a |
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| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 |
immlass
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9:33p |
All things purple are my hair
I got my hair cut and colored purple today. I don't have a good photo, although I've published a crappy cell phone photo to Facebook for those who care. I'm hoping someone will get pictures of us at karaoke on Saturday, if not sooner, and there'll be a good shot I didn't take in the mirror before the color starts to fade. Advantages of getting your hair cut in the mall: there are college-age kids wearing Bellatrix Lestrange mug shot T-shirts getting their hair cut at the same time as you. Also, the mall has the purple color in stock, and they're not afraid to brighten you up with it. Mild bad thing: the colorist spotted a grey hair (my 4th ever) and plucked it. Most of my hair is fine and limp, but this thing was thick and kinky. I'd like a bit more texture as I go grey, but not that much, thanks. I haven't seen a grey hair in months, so I'm wondering if it's not the same hair follicle. At this rate, I should be completely grey sometime about, oh, never. Current Mood:  purple!Current Music: silence is golden |
heron61
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6:32p |
Remarkably nifty toy
Here's info and a video on a very cool looking iphone (& ipod touch) controlled microcopter. Once I get an ereading tablet, this is going to be next on my list of gadgets to acquire (assuming the price is not too high and all the bugs are worked out). I imagine our cats will learn to either loathe or ignore it :) Of course, given that this is effectively a mobile spy camera platform, I imagine that people will find all manner of amusing and annoying uses for it. Here's more info + another video. Current Mood:  impressed |
heron61
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5:45p |
Poly visibility
Yet another article about polyamory. Almost all of the examples are het, but the article does mention that close connection with the bi community. In any case, we're definitely becoming more visible. |
the_tall_man
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2:24p |
Current copyright and information laws, when applied to any electronic product that can be perfectly and infinitely copied, and to electronic publication, are: 1. Absolutely necessary, in that they're representative of the only frame of reference we have for these... things. And if we don't have something to hang onto while we develop a smarter view, it'll take us far longer to get there from here. 2. Totally silly, in that these laws grew into existence under a differing set of publication and distribution facts. Electronic products don't act like the ones those laws came into existence to manage (I have a blog. Am I a publisher? If I report news on it, am I a journalist in the "sheild laws" sense?). 3. Deeply corrosive to respect for law itself, in that they are wildly unenforceable and in that those who have accepted some the realities of infinite perfect copying are annoyed by the obvious mismatch between the necessary governance and the utter difference in things governed. 4. Likely not going to be repaired in any kind of short order by normal legal battles, where the various lobbies are screaming. Nor by the central planning of government, where the actors have no more clue than the rest of us slobs in terms of what such laws ought to look like. 5. Horribly important. ...What did I miss? |
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marcochacon
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4:57p |
Heaven is a place in upstate New York
According to this chilling article a Taliban kindergarten has been discovered where children are shown pictures of 'heaven' painted on the walls and are told that if they blow themselves up they'll go there. They're told that this life is pretty much just a waste and it's in prep for the good stuff to come.  This is, kinda, what I was told about high school ... and it turned out to be true. What gets me, other than 'teh evil,' is how low-rent their heaven is. I mean, sure, they say those are rivers of milk and honey--but do even the serious younglings think they'd actually want to dive into a sticky honey-milk river? I doubt it. The pictures look like a nice place to go on a family camping trip and I don't for a minute believe that those kids have any idea what to do with a virgin. I think we should start an outreach program that picks up kids from the village and flies them to a campground in New York State that's set up to look like that. Then we tell 'em: "Yeah, it's heaven. You can die and go there--but it really hurts and you might not get the right people and stuff ... or you can apply for this visa." -Marco |
robin_d_laws
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9:20a |
Courage Is Smart-Assery Under Pressure
This blog’s first Hero Of Freedom Award goes to whoever first coined the term crotch-bomber to describe Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, along with all of those who have wisely promulgated its use. Ridicule is an important and all-too-underused weapon in the battle against global terrorism. It may not directly deter the depressed and anomic young loner types or the outsourcing psychokillers who recruit them. However, by refusing to act as if we are terrified, we can remove the alleged geopolitical benefit of bombing attempts. With it goes the psychological thrills these guys are chasing, and which keep their rolls called and their coffers filled.
At the same time I humbly submit that the alternate terms underwear bomber and especially pantie-bomber are overdoing it. They smack a mite of schoolyard desperation, where crotch-bomber somehow strikes the right note of dismissive contempt. Let’s, as Ron Burgundy would have us do, stay classy, people.
My hope is that the ridiculously restrictive new TSA regulations handed down after the failed attempt will trigger an overdue attitude adjustment. In the name of warding off a statistically unlikely catastrophe, air travelers have demonstrated a willingness to be ritually inconvenienced for about twenty minutes in the scanner line-up. Not being able to hold anything in your hands or open your carry-on luggage for the last hour of flight crosses a line that might get voters thinking about the costs of ill-targeted fearfulness. Until now, the career incentives for politicians and officials have pushed them in the direction of ever more restrictive measures. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I’d love to see some countervailing pressure that rewards them for playing it cool and not overreacting. Make the intelligence effort smarter, by all means. But airport precautions that don’t change the odds give the attackers much of what they want even when the bombs remain undetonated.
Granted, it’s easier to adopt a stiff upper lip in the event of a near miss. When a plane full of people dies as the result of human malice, odds calculation goes out the window. We are horrified and angered in a way that we wouldn’t be by an equivalent number of fatal road accidents or deaths from lack of preventative medical care.
But even if something spectacularly horrible happens, we North Americans need to toughen up. We’d muster defiance in the face of an actual war. Let’s try some in this ongoing low intensity conflict. |
get_medieval
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5:43a |
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heron61
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2:06a |
Intellectual Dilettantism
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) teaotter and I were talking today about how we found it odd that some people who are close to aren’t intellectual dilettantes. I’ve always read widely [[1]], and watch a wide range of shows on the history & discovery channels & PBS. I have a general grounding in pretty much every field of social and physical science, from anthropology to zoology, and a (often rather vague) grasp of most eras of history. What I have a hard time doing is focusing in detail on one topic. I’d vastly rather learn a little about many things than a lot about one topic. Becca feels exactly the same way. I definitely have topics that I'm more interested in – I’m most interested in space travel, the history of technology, social history, trends in modern consumer electronics, alternate energy generation technology, and a few other areas, but I lack a specialist’s interest in focusing on a small subset of a topic and gaining an actual understanding of it, and I almost exclusively indulge my knowledge at the level of books and other media designed for intelligent and interested amateurs. Unsurprisingly, this is one of the reasons that I never completed my PhD, since those by definition require specialization, and it bores me. I’d rather watch a TV show on the history of refrigeration, read a book about the social history of 19th century Shanghai, and then read a long magazine article about the latest ideas about human evolution. What struck Becca as odd is that some of the people we know, and in fact some of the people we are close to, including amberite is considerably more focused on her interests. Some of her interests shift and expand, but her tastes often involve studying one topic very extensively, rather than shifting between a myriad of more lightly studied topics. In our conversation, Becca and I both realized that we were puzzled both by the desire to focus so much on any single topic and by the lower of general interest that is pretty much an inevitable consequence of having a specialist’s interest. It was odd to realize that I really don’t understand why someone would focus when there’s so much out there of potential interest. Of course, while wonders like wikipedia and the internet as a whole are a generalist's paradise, RPG writing is pretty much the only living that I've found that makes use of my interests. [[1]] At least in non-fiction – I’ve no interest in fiction that isn’t SF, fantasy, or very occasionally mystery or horror Current Mood:  contemplative |
| Monday, January 4th, 2010 |
immlass
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11:45p |
Roku and the Netflix queue
We've added a bunch of shows to our Netflix instant queue because the Roku has been such a great success for us. Mostly what we've actually watched on the Roku has been old Doctor Who serials, but there are also a lot of documentaries, and as of a recent update, a bunch of TV shows. For about a year, I've had a rule that we can only have 100 DVDs in the queue. This goes with our rule that we can only keep a DVD for two weeks (not counting nights we're at concerts, out of town, etc.) and if we haven't watched it, we send it back because we obviously didn't want to watch it. The rules are designed to keep the lists to manageable quantities and keep our sense of what we can watch realistic. Some movies, as intriguing as they sound, are never going to get to the top of the queue, and it's better to recognize that. The instant queue complicates matters because we can keep adding things to it and, worse, the number of "discs" is different. For instance, the first two seasons of Primeval are four discs on DVD, but count as one item in the instant queue. So there's no way to keep a total count that's meaningful. We finally settled on a new rule: 75 DVDs in the DVD queue (where many more movies and shows are available) and 50 items in the instant queue. Right now the DVD queue is full to bursting, with a huge backlog of items Netflix doesn't have, mostly because they're not out yet, and the instant queue is about 80% full. Since we seem to be using the DVD queue first and the instant queue when we run out of DVDs or when we want to watch a shorter show (like old Doctor Who serials), that should work out right for now. I'm sure we'll have to change those numbers as more and more movies and TV shows migrate to the instant queue. (Also, Netflix now has Waters of Mars scheduled to be available on February 2 and still doesn't have a date for The End of Time. Grrr.) Current Mood: productiveCurrent Music: silence is golden |
jimhenley
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8:33p |
I Ate Fred Hicks's Lunch!
Okay, not his lunch, his dinner. Actually, not his dinner, but his recipe. Strictly speaking, I didn't eat the recipe, I suppose. I ate the delicious result of following it. My wife did the actual cooking. We cut the portions way down, but Mrs. Bolton's pastured chuck roast became very, very delicious. Current Mood:  full |
princejvstin
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7:31p |
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rob_donoghue
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7:46p |
Actually played Dragon Age
Cross Posted from here: I ran a game of Dragon Age tabletop on New Years Day, and it went quite well. The positives I expected were there (as were the negatives) but I still ended up pleasantly surprised. Random chargen started out interestingly as one of my players nailed an 18 on the first roll, in plain sight of everyone. At ten end, the final distribution was a little unkind, with respective total bonuses of 12, 10 and 7. I let #2 and #1 at 1 and 2 points to their total respectively - this was entirely outside the scope of the rules, but I'm ok with that.[1] They ended up going mage, fighter and rogue. ( Onwards and sideways ) |
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marcochacon
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11:11a |
The Health Care Post
Jeff sent me this:  This is a picture of how much various nations pay for health care vs. how long we live. Here's what might be a slightly easier version to read of it:  The take-away is this: Americans pay a lot and our life expectancy is at best middlin'. This implies that we are not getting our money's worth. And you know what? Maybe we're not. But let's examine a few possibilities. ( How come we pay so much and get so little? )-Marco |
the_never
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10:52a |
Annemarie and I had a great weekend as usual... On Saturday we got up a little late and went to brunch.. and after we came home we fell asleep again. (I say she wears me out because she's a tigress, ;) Well, it felt good snuggled up next to my hot girlfriend). On Sunday we went to Avatar (3D!) and then walked around the mall together, hand in hand. We were looking for a hat and scarf kind of thing but she didn't see any that she liked. Eventually she found a real inexpensive hat that reminded us of the knitted red hat in Lollilove, haha. We came home (mmhmm) and then ordered some things on Amazon for our kids. I am getting us the Carcassonne big box for the whole family. I know the kids will all love it. Later on we went to the library together and I found a book I had been looking for (The Looking Glass Wars, Frank Beddor, I want to see if Noah will like it). Annemarie found a book for me called 'The Sociopath Next Door' that was recommended to us regarding my ongoing situation; so far it explains a lot about my ex. I also checked out a bunch of Yo La Tengo albums. It was a wonderful weekend. What I am finding out is that there's a few really terrible people out there; there are people who are quick to take offense, completely lacking in conscience or empathy or goodness- no sense of humor or sense of fun. They are full of anger and resentment and bitterness... they usually poison themselves on alcohol and petty hostilities.. and go out of their way to hide their real personalities. Because if we knew them for who they really are, we'd regard them as monstrous. In the end-- there's nothing inside these people except an overblown sense of self-regard. They can't be saved unless they save themselves. But real happiness is so funny. You can find it if you just look. I found it when I did, and it's been over a year now that I've lived this way. I remember when Annemarie and I first started going out and we watched Vanilla Sky- there's a line that says "..every waking moment is another chance to turn things around and change your life." That was the universe talking to me. I nearly cried, hearing that line. There are two messages here, really: You can change your life for the better, yes. That's message #1. The second thing I didn't figure out until recently: be conscious of your decisions and don't be afraid to love and to find happiness. It's right there, it's waiting for you. It was waiting for me all along and I'm so glad I found her. Don't be afraid. Don't tolerate threats or sociopaths. They can't be helped, but you don't have to let them get away with anything. 2009 was a learning experience. 2010 is when the lesson gets applied. |
get_medieval
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10:49a |
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simonjrogers
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3:47p |
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simonjrogers
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3:18p |
Mutant City Reviews
Mark Kinney of Game Cryer reviews Mutant City Blues, as does Alisdair Stuart on bleedingcool.com. Mr Stuart says: Mutant City Blues in general and GUMSHOE in particular is arguably the best system on the market at the moment and whilst it’s tailored to investigative groups there’s more than enough potential for creative superhuman mayhem to keep most players happy. |
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