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Via Die Puny Humans, The 25 Best American Comic Book Covers. Also includes the 12 worst. Beautiful stuff.
Apr. 26th, 2003
MyMind looks like it has potential as an outliner. I suspect it does not export OPML files. Horrors! The cool thing is the linkage to a visual mindmap; that’s going to be really useful for sketching out campaigns. Um.
WISH 44 is all about picking games.
How do you choose games to join or to run? What factors influence you: timing, people, system, genre, etc.? Do you weigh different factors for different kinds of games, e.g., online vs. tabletop vs. LARP? Is it a group decision or a decision you make on your own?
Well, the easy answer is “yes.”
I’m attracted to games based on genre and people. For a new group, the genre needs to be interesting and the people need to seem suitable. I’ve never been particularly interested in random D&D games, and I’m careful about getting into games with people I don’t know.
Once I know people, though, I’ll try almost anything. If Carl wanted to run Senzar, I’d give it a try, because I’d know the people would be fun and in the worst case we could while away the hours mocking death jesters. In fact, I once joined a Lords of Creation game, fully aware of what I was getting into, because I trusted the GM.
For the past half a decade or so, my gaming group was pretty stable at the core: the aforementioned Carl (usually GMing), along with me, Brad, and Gretchen. Add a variable number of people from the greater gaming pool. This shouldn’t be taken to imply that we were the center of the gaming group, just that when I was gaming I tended to play with those three. This made decisions pretty simple. Moving out to Boston threw a wrench into this simplicity, but I’m pretty darned happy with the group I seem to have found.
All that said, the time factor is a limiter on what I can do. No matter how much I might want to play in four or five games, I just don’t have that kind of time to burn. I won’t join a game just cause I have time to do so, but lack of time can keep me from joining games I want to play.
Regarding mediums: I don’t LARP much, which is to say at all. I almost got into a cool UA LARP back in California, but knowing I’d have to move soon took some of the fun out of it and I’m probably too much of an introvert to LARP heavily. My online play has tailed off a lot; when I did RP online, it was mostly on one specific MUSH. A couple of people have been able to drag me into other MUSHes but that’s really a case of making a gaming choice based on people.
Newsweek breaks the news: Jeff Bezos is funding a space venture. Some dot-com CEOs buy basketball teams; some buy spaceships. Carl’s comment: “I guess he took to heart the analysts who pointed out that Amazon’s valuation required selling to other solar systems.”
Oh, and Neal Stephenson is working for the Bezos venture. That’s funky.
I was all set to feel smart about pointing out that Elon Musk, who founded PayPal, is also doing a private space company but Newsweek got there first. Alas. Still, it’s kind of a cool way to spend all that money.
The rest of article is a nice overview of the latest space company news, including notes on Burt Rutan’s new spacecraft and whatever it is that John Carmack is doing. I suspect most of the dot-com space companies will fail, but some may succeed, and it’s a heartening result of a generation of millionaire geeks.
So one frequent criticism of anti-war types is this: “You’re only against this war because Bush wants it.” Sometimes it’s phrased as “You wouldn’t be against this war if Clinton were fighting it,” which is nicely non-falsifiable. Either way, though, the appropriate answer is “No duh?”
It’s perfectly reasonable to be against a specific action because of the President who’s promulgating it. For example, if Bush said “I’m going to hold an overnight prayer meeting with the cast of ??Bend It Like Beckham??,” I wouldn’t particularly think twice about it. If Clinton said the same thing I’d think it was a rather unwise move on his part.
Some people have genuine moral objections to the war that are rooted in the fact that they simply don’t trust Bush. It’s also reasonable to say “I don’t think this war is being fought for moral reasons.” That doesn’t preclude a moral outcome — deposing Saddam, for example — it just speaks to motivation. Some people think motivations matter. Some of those people would have trusted Clinton if he’d said the exact same things Bush had said. (And some wouldn’t.) That doesn’t make them inconsistent. It just means they don’t trust Bush, and they don’t think a war should be fought for immoral reasons.
This becomes particularly relevant as the US backs off predictions of WMD. As ABC reports, “Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam’s weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.”
Tacitus thinks that the above news vindicates nobody, but I think he’s wrong. It isn’t necessary for anti-war folks to have argued against the existence of WMD. The point is that the Bush administration used the existence of WMD to tip the scales in their arguments. “Sure, it’s true that this may cause a wave of anti-Americanism, but the threat is so damned high we have to go in.” Now we’re finding out they misled us regarding the nature of the threat, and where does that leave their argument? I have to believe that the burden of proof is on the people who want to declare war — I’m not a pacifist, but surely the default state should be peace.
Which brings us back to trust. Yes, many people objected to this war because they didn’t like Bush and more importantly, didn’t trust him. And it looks more and more as though their lack of trust has been proven accurate. It doesn’t matter so much for the country if Americans decide they don’t trust Bush, although you can bet Howard Dean is praying no WMD turns up. On the other hand, it’s gonna matter a lot to the rest of the world if Chirac and Schroder can say, a year from now, “Bush lied to you.”
I was wandering through work today prior to some network maintenance, and happened to notice a copy of GURPS Prisoner on someone’s desk. I really like my coworkers. And my company, for that matter.
“We expected to see a lot of meat slapping here tonight.”
I’d like to introduce the above quote as the most convincing evidence yet that the first round of the NBA playoffs should not have gone to seven games. The announcers are starting to get just a little punchy.