Monthly Archive for August, 2006

Elsewheres and Cobwebs

Published
by
Cineris
on August 13, 2006
in Miscellaneous and Personal
. 0 Comments

I’ve been quite busy lately working on a variety of projects. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the tide is going to abate anytime soon, with a good portion of every day in the coming week already dedicated to one thing or another — I’ll make it through, obviously, but I prefer to accomplish things and then check them off the list. Lately it seems like I’ve been adding things to the list and only crossing them off partially, leaving a thousand little loose ends about. Typically this sort of mental cluttering manifests itself in other ways as well — Desk clutter, desktop clutter… WordPress clutter. So, in the interests of cleaning up a bit around here…

I was introduced to http://www.somafm.com/ about two weeks ago and spent almost an entire week listening to it. They’ve got a number of stations for various tastes in electronic music.

About a week ago this link was featured on Digg.com. Although the comparisons of the sizes of the planets are nothing spectacular, the comparisons of the sizes of the suns is. Antares is just absurdly large. All I can say is that I hope we have salvaged ancient Orion technology before we encounter any Antarans, otherwise we’re toast.

When I saw this link about a teacher threatening a woman and child the first thing that came to mind was Deb Frisch. I think it’s probably a bit absurd to arrest someone for threats made via the internet (although I say this not having read the actual remarks — obviously there’s potential for the tenor to be serious enough to warrant action). I’d much rather see justice via social engineering, such as the southwestpaw’s own fan site: http://donthiredeb.blogspot.com/.

Stories like this are outrageous. They also seem to be quite common. I think the women pursuing these settlements need to be called what they are: prostitutes. I can’t imagine why any well-adjusted, ambitious young man would want to marry someone when things like this happen.

From Electronic Arts yet another story to get you mildly peeved: Electronic Arts to shut down game servers for roughly 50 games. Yes, in some ways, I think the people dumb enough to buy “Generic Sports Title (Year Numer)” deserve it. But EA’s brazen lust for money is just too apparent in this move. If I bought a game that was, say, five years old, I wouldn’t expect a thriving online community. But a game that’s two years old? That’s new to me. Clearly this move is just to force people into EA’s yearly ripoff upgrade cycle.

About a month or so back there was a ruling on the Clean Flicks legal battle. Clean Flicks lost and the judge ruled it was copyright infringement/unauthorized distribution to edit out objectionable content and then rent or sell the DVDs. The story appeared on Digg and many of the other top internet news sites, but sadly most people seemed to be in favor of the ruling. I find it hard to understand why people would celebrate a decision that reduces consumer choice. Can anyone explain this to me? The only rationale I can see is the “Stick it to those self-righteous Christians!” attitude. Is that all there is to it?

A Theory of Dungeons & Dragons

Published
by
Cineris
on August 10, 2006
in Personal and RPGs
. 0 Comments

One of the things running through my mind while I was writing my previous post was my irritation at the tendency of players to value printed material over custom material.

Although there’s some logic behind that strategy in other circumstances, when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons there’s simply too much material to care. Anyone with a few pieces of clipart and the ability to lay out tables with 20 rows can make a d20 supplement — And they probably have. The tiering system, of course, is customized content on the lowest rung, third-party publications above them and Wizards of the Coast books at the top. We all know, though, that being published by Wizards is no guarantee of quality or “balance.” Unless you’ve got the Wizards design team sitting at your table adjudicating balance for you… shouldn’t you trust your Game Master? It seems so strange to entrust so much otherwise to him, but to continue to make players reliant upon splatbooks for new character resources.

It occurred to me that one of the primary reasons why people enjoy Dungeons and Dragons is because… Everyone else plays it. That means when you tell someone how your character has such-and-such really high stats — People will understand what that means. The “ladder of reverence” makes a little more sense in this context. When you tell the story of how you created a “level 20 Fightermonkpaladin” with a Base Attack Bonus of +40 — Using only core rulebooks — it means something. A book, particularly a Wizards of the Coast book, provides a fixed frame of reference. If you’re using a custom class, race, item, or other material then your story will fall flat if someone questions the legitimacy of your “build.”

A greater part of this approach seems to be ego stroking for the socially inept– Vicariously living through your optimized characters — But not all of it. Every group has their own style and it’s not easy to tell a story about your adventures to other people if they’re not familiar with it at all. The person you’re telling your story to may not know that the villain in your campaign was a deposed King with such-and-such artifact of power… But everyone knows that when he calls down an adult red dragon to snack on your party of level 5 characters you’re in deep trouble. So then what happened? Did the players run away, or did they pull out an insane trick and emerge victorious?

See what I mean?

A “I’m Writing An RPG Book” Post

Published
by
Cineris
on August 10, 2006
in Personal and RPGs
. 0 Comments

I dread hearing those words. Unfortunately this has happened a few times in the past few years and is happening again. One of the guys from the gaming group has decided he’s going to write his own D&D book. What invariably ends up happening with these books is that they lose focus, spiral out of control, and putter out. In the meantime the rest of us are regaled with tales of how awesome the book will be.

Our gaming group met and we ended up having nothing to do– One of the other guys who is running a D&D campaign left his materials at home. One of the other guys who is also running a campaign was missing in action. Yet another guy had been talking to me repeatedly all week about a campaign he wanted to run… But he also left the materials at home. We tossed out some suggestions.

While we considered our options I managed to get sucked into looking over prospective material for said D&D book. About a month ago I had heard the first millings-about of this book. The book was a campaign setting with the idea of being a post-apocalyptic wasteland ala Fallout or Mad Max. The races were Humans, a selection of Human-Animal Mutants, and a Robot race. My advice at the time was to figure out a theme and stick to it without adding too much extra — There’s a lot of material that needs to be included in a new campaign setting, the most important of which is, or ought to be, information about the setting.

The current iteration of the book has moved on from a selection of roughly three races. Now the setting includes Elves, Dwarves, and all the rest of your typical Fantasy races. In addition, I’ve been informed that the setting is going to use a completely new class system, all new sets of feats, a new magic system, and a whole new array of spells. “Where,” I ask, “Is all the setting information going to go?”

A beat. And then… reassurances that it’ll all fit. I just get so sick of it sometimes — Losing track of what’s important for an extra +1 to an Attack Roll. Book after book of Classes, Prestige Classes, Races, Spells, Feats, Items… Sometimes I can’t help but feel Wizards is to blame.

BibliOdyssey

Published
by
Cineris
on August 8, 2006
in Art and Personal
. 0 Comments

BibliOdyssey1

I’ve come across this site before but it’s recently come to my attention again with this series of wonderful depictions of celestial phenomena.

BibliOdyssey2

Last time I was at this site I thought it was an interesting but overall not a great resource — The images are fantastic but the resolutions are fairly small to use them as wallpapers or otherwise. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, though.

BibliOdyssey3

There’s a great series of images from Norse Edda and another series of pseudo-mystic-Gnostic images that are amazing in their own right but could also be used for visualizations or handouts for my gaming groups.

AOLicide

Published
by
Cineris
on August 7, 2006
in Miscellaneous and Technology
. 0 Comments

This is too much.

Stories like this are getting all too frequent — And these aren’t even attacks. These are just companies or governments treating private records of customers’ or citizens’ actions lightly. What happens when actual malicious users go after this sort of information? The sad thing is that we can’t even have a public discussion on the issue because we have permitted the culture-at-large to remain technologically inept to the point that they don’t see the importance of the issue. Is it really right for private companies to maintain enough tracking data on their customers that, if stitched together, you could see their entire lives? Lets take bets on whether this issue gets even a fraction of the coverage that the NSA programs did earlier this year.

It’s time to get serious about privacy. AOL leaked this information and now they should have to pay the price. Class action lawsuit? Federal fines? Lets go. Sure, a class action lawsuit wouldn’t do a damned thing to help the people whose privacy has been compromised by this action, but it’d punish the hell out of AOL. Whenever a company blunders like this it needs to be the last thing they do.

—-

The entirety of the data (roughly 500 MB) is available online. I haven’t made an attempt to get it myself as I’m conflicted about whether it’s appropriate to be disseminating such information — It’s not tough to find if you’re curious. Some more thoughts on whether we should metaphorically avert our eyes by Alex.

The Plenty of Fish weblog reveals some very concerning searches conducted by one AOL user. (Plenty of Fish is actually a dating site, so I have no idea why this guy is writing about it.) Makes you wonder what impression others could draw from your own searches if exposed in a similar way. Especially as a fiction writer and a naturally inquisitive person I’m certain I’ve searched some dubious terms over the years. Still, it’s hard to see the alternate potential explanations when you’ve got someone looking up, “killing your wife” and “steak and cheese” (Steak and Cheese is presumably a repository of images of corpses and the like, although I have no interest in validating the claims).

Hacking Digg

Published
by
Cineris
on August 7, 2006
in Miscellaneous and Technology
. 0 Comments

Steven has a post up requesting some images of Digg (or a digg-like system) that he’s considering trying to hack. Well, here are some:

Digg1

Digg2

This is the Digg main page. Simple, as long as you’re logged in to Digg. No Captcha required.

I did a quick search for “Digg This!” links and came upon this page. I clicked on one of the “Digg This!” links, which redirects you to a page that looks like this:

Digg3

I didn’t continue on beyond that point. Presumably the initial, “Digg” of the story couldn’t be automated, as you (the submitter) need to input a title, a summary, and so on. I looked on Michelle Malkin’s page for one of the “Digg This!” links to see what would happen with one of those:

Digg4

Once you get to this stage it seems you just need to click the “Digg it” link on Digg (if you’re logged in). Hope that helps.

Censored by the RIAA

Published
by
Cineris
on August 7, 2006
in Culture, Personal, Politics and Technology
. 0 Comments

Years ago I used to be a huge song-lyrics junkie — A CD that came without song lyrics in the liner notes was an offense to decency. Particularly because I didn’t (at the time) listen to very much music I often found it difficult to decipher what the lyrics to a song were. I remember one particular night when I was working out and listening to the radio a new song came on — I couldn’t understand the lyrics entirely, but it was a rock song that seemed to be, from what I could tell, a song about a group of young English lads going to a convenience store and robbing it for cigarettes.

Awhile later I ended up buying the album that the song was on, without knowing that the song was from that band or album. I heard the song and remembered it, but when I looked up the lyrics online their content was quite different from my pseudo-narrative rock song robbing a store for cigarettes. It turns out the lyrics were about California falling into the ocean. Minor mistake.

In any case I eventually grew out of the phase of needing to know all the lyrics to a song — Since I have started listening to much more music in the past few years than I ever have before I am usually much better about discerning lyrics. But it’s not that I don’t need written lyrics, it’s that in a sense the lyrics are ephemeral so long as they are only part of the song. As soon as I see them written down a different part of my brain kicks in — A critical-reading part of my brain that will look at song lyrics and realize how poor they are. Once this has happened my critical instinct will bleed over into my enjoyment of the song.

Well, even though I’m no longer a lyrics junkie I can respect those who are. That’s why when I saw this Digg.com story I became, at least for a few seconds, totally incensed. I suppose I should just consider it par for the course that the RIAA will attempt to use the legal system to shut down anything they don’t like. Sharing songs you like? Wrong. Sharing lyrics you like? Wrong. What’s next, going after a cappella groups? Tabulature sites? Please.

Related: RIAA Radar. Check to see if your music purchases support the RIAA. Surprisingly few (mostly old CDs) in my library.

Update: Funny comment on Digg by a user named Frostcrow:

Once upon a time people didn’t have refrigerators / freezers. If you wanted ice you had to buy it from the ice company , they brought it by in big blocks.

If the RIAA had been the ice company, when freezers started showing up in homes they would have started suing people for using their freezers to freeze water…

I Know What it Is You Seek…

Published
by
Cineris
on August 6, 2006
in Games, Guild Wars and Personal
. 0 Comments

For I seek it as well.

GWArena1

So speaks the Ghostly Hero in Hero’s Ascent when you set out upon your quest together to claim the Hall of Heroes. In Guild Wars, the Hall of Heroes is the ultimate battleground. Teams of up to eight players assemble in Heroes Ascent and battle through a series of up to 10 battlegrounds against other teams until they reach the Hall of Heroes.

GWArena2

A few days ago I managed to join a group in Hero’s Ascent and we managed to fight our way to the Hall of Heroes. I’ve never really seriously done PvP before, so it was a climactic experience for me. I’ve done some Random and Team Arena games but I’d never presumed to be one who belonged in the Hall of Heroes — Being there was a sign that I’d finally joined the upper echelons of Guild Wars players.

GWArena3

My group was primarily geared towards offense. We’d made it as far as we had not by finesse but simply by overwhelming opponents. Naturally, being in the Hall of Heroes, I didn’t expect we would find our simpleminded tactics so successful. In the Hall of Heroes one team, the previous victors, defends against two attacking teams. The team whose Ghostly Hero has claimed the Altar at the end of the match is victorious.

GWArena4

GWArena5

Our team decided to hang back while the other attacking team rushed in headlong — That was just as well for us. The other teams would soften each other up and we could move in for the kill. It was a simple plan. Our ranged attackers moved up to let loose a few attacks and spells towards members of the enemy teams who drew close. We saw some of the defending team’s healers fall, our opportunity was nigh — We charged in! First we targeted the other attacking team’s healers, disabling and destroying them. By then the defending team was trying to recover by resurrecting their comrades but it was too late. Enemy after enemy fell, and our Ghostly Hero drew near to the Altar. The remaining enemies focused their attacks on our hero, but their efforts were for naught — Our hero claimed the Altar and the enemies fell defeated.

GWArena6

I had claimed the Hall of Heroes.

Nix on the Pool

Published
by
Cineris
on August 4, 2006
in Personal and RPGs
. 1 Comment

So last week I mentioned to the guys in my gaming group that I would like to try run a game of The Pool. I explained it a bit to them and got some interest so later on that evening I sent a link out to the rules page for them to peruse at their leisure. I got a few responses back to the effect of, “I’ll make up a character,” but I had one pretty strongly negative response to it so I don’t think we’re going to be running it.

I can’t say I’m too surprised or disappointed. I figured a few of the guys would feel uncomfortable with it and that a few others would be gung-ho about it, so I kept my expectations low. After all — I don’t even know if I would like it. The only really surprising thing is who fell where: One of the guys who is relatively inexperienced in playing RPGs seemed to really like the idea. It was one of my experienced RPG players who had a strong negative reaction to it.

In any case, we’ve currently got a glut of games in need of playing, so I suppose adding anything else to the pile is just gratuitous.