Didn’t know or believe in anything

Did someone else’s job

Trent B’s New Feierland has taught me to be extremely wary of any sort of Australian Dream.

In other news, magic swords at the supermarket.

And they’re even pseudo-Japanese for the benefit of Chaos Monks everywhere. Chris Kutalik Jason K

If someone did a James Bond version of that still does his job meme it would go on for a long time.

I’ve pretty much given up on the ideas of a political Left and Right because the terms seem to mean totally different things to different people. I propose the following classification instead:

People that think we’re all in this together

People who think fuck the rest of you I’m scared and angry

If political parties could align themselves on this axis I think it would clear up a lot of ambiguity.

(very small circle linkage but I figure you guys won’t mind me spamming you with this politics claptrap)

Writing a G+ comment about death spiral mechanics made me realize I need to change some rules in Tartary Mechawrestling.

Do you guys have any playtest feedback (all those years ago)? I’ve played it with the kids a few times and made a few changes that seem obvious in retrospect. On one hand it’s supposed to be a lot lighter than Battletech. On the other, all the one-off weapons wind up making it kinda complicated.

So, changes:

1. everyone can always ram as if they have a ram attached

2. mechs SHOULD have a rear facing, otherwise there’s no creeping up on them/no advantage to being fast. That is, fundamentally, the distilled fun of Battletech.

…revising document. Trying to think of crazy magnet or harpoon attacks to replace the ram as an option.

My daughter’s school has fallen into a forum style fight over management and the autocracy of the headmaster.

It’s really, really hard to remember that this is a real political fight with practical repercussions, because it looks exactly like a web flamewar where nobody has anything of value invested. The behaviours are all the same, only this time the headmaster’s job is on the line.

Spoiler: it’s the day before school starts – do you think the parents will fire their head? I don’t.

So. Posturing, grandstanding, business as usual. Only my kid might not have a school to go to tomorrow. Weird.

“Dear gods” snapped Eragon, “do you never stop talking?”

“Lol no” Murtagh chortled, “it’s a free action.”

This week’s World In A Phrase:

Test Pharaoh

As in “and in this box there’s the Test Pharaoh.”

Thank you, my daughter.

Our victory will be glorious, even if undetectable to civilians.

Just started watching True Blood (man, it’s trashy – the titles look like a parody of HBO’s USPs) and I’m wondering – did HBO or Charlaine Harris pay any licensing fees to White Wolf? To say the vampires are reminiscent of or inspired by early VtM Vampires would be rather to understate the case. In another episode or two I’ll be able to reconstruct Bill Compton’s character sheet (11th gen Toreador, I reckon).

One for Erik Jensen, from Pepper & Carrot

http://www.peppercarrot.com/

hey – were you annoyed that I contacted Matthew Adams without consulting you first? If you were, I’m sorry about that – I could just see his mecha working perfectly for TMW.

I’m most intrigued by this because, being in London, it’ll be grey and cold most of the time… and while there’s something powerfully, hedonistically decadent about a 10′ deep (!!!) blue slice of paradise taunting the people on the street below, it’s maybe even more of a statement when it’s cloudy grey and there’s nobody in it. 

Originally shared by Joe Johnston

Wall of Water + Permanency = luxury wizard tower.

http://freshome.com/massive-sky-pool-london-seemingly-floats-10-stories-above-ground//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Joe Johnston

Wall of Water + Permanency = luxury wizard tower.

http://freshome.com/massive-sky-pool-london-seemingly-floats-10-stories-above-ground//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

are you up to date at all on Amazon’s work practices?

I confess, I buy from them all the time and have never once actually wondered how they deliver so cheaply – when it’s totally obvious in retrospect that the opacity of internet ordering must provide an ideal breeding ground for tyranny.

This bit in particular reminded me of Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told on plantation slavery:

At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.

Originally shared by null

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Watching Big Trouble in Little China with the kids made me realize two important things.

1. cheesy old special effects only bother anyone when the movie isn’t fun enough. The lightning effects and neon-limned stage sets didn’t slow my gang down one bit.

2. Netflix has a cult movies category. I finally have a section to browse.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/46/ee/0d/46ee0dbc1d7eab9baedefe3f5ade3691.jpg//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

oh hell yes. Via Sarah Perry-Shipp 

Originally shared by Irreverent Monk

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!  Love this school’s PTA!!!  Alternative Fundraiser form is great!  🙂

“I am making this donation to express my appreciation for having nothing to buy, sell, or do except fill out this form.”

Learned a new French word today: égayer – to cheer up or amuse.

Ce bouquet égaye votre intérieur.

Egayez vos courriers avec vos photos de vacances!

For a minute I wondered what they’d seen in my photos de vacances.

Some commercial vehicles use remote automatic tire inflation systems, activated by pressure sensors, that communicate wirelessly. These systems could be targeted by hijackers to potentially fool a driver into pulling off the road or to blow out the tires on a trailer if an attacker successfully fooled them.

…suddenly tempted to write an internet-of-things heist movie script, in which fridges and car tyres are the primary weapons, and surveillance is everywhere through cellphones, DVRs and smartcards. Maybe for my Bond vs Trump blockbuster.

https://boingboing.net/2015/08/23/car-information-security-is-a.html

via Winchell Chung 

Originally shared by Lowell Francis (edige23)

Discovering the Shaolin Afronauts on Spotify has led to a wonderful rabbit hole of music I don’t know the name for…

Brendan S have you played both Dark Souls and Thief? Is the fighting in DS much harder than in Thief?

…trying to find your old DS posts for my eldest.

Originally shared by Alex Schroeder

Oh my god the rabbit hole of old Russian maps… I was looking at the Gnomeyland icons by Greg MacKenzie – as one does! – thinking of adding a few icons.

http://www.busygamemaster.com/files.html

So then I start looking for old Russian map symbols. I’m looking at this article:

http://makingmaps.net/2009/01/13/map-symbols-trees-forests-on-old-russian-maps/

But how to find more examples? I’m not interested in just trees and forests! So, next stop is Old Maps Online and searching for Leningrad. After all, wouldn’t the rich old Russians be mostly interested in maps of the areas they already knew? That’s the 1% for you… OK, found something!

http://www.oldmapsonline.org/map/cuni/1014732

So, who’s this Matthäus Seutter dude? Sounds German. And he has a Wikipedia page. I love the Internet.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matth%C3%A4us_Seutter

Look at all those extra links! I love the sound of “Digitalisierte Ausgabe”. So now I’m clicking on this one:

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/9200365/BibliographicResource_2000092772825.html

Transylvaniae, Moldaviae, Walachiae, Bulgariae nova et accurata Delineatio, Magnam Partem Hodierni Theatri Bellici ob oculos ponens / opera et fumtibus Matthaei Seutteri, … Who doesn’t want old maps of Transylvania!? Too bad the resolution isn’t too good. But wait! I also love the sound of “View item at National Library of France”!

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84918315/f1.zoom

This is awesome because you can really zoom in!

OK. Now I just have to create those damn icons. Or fix myself some lunch.

http://makingmaps.net/2009/01/13/map-symbols-trees-forests-on-old-russian-maps//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Matthew Adams

Some mapping inspiration.

so I passed up Man From UNCLE 7 to see Mission Impossible 16 and watched a trailer for Bond 223 and I have only 2 questions:

1. with all the cold war spy show nostalgia, why aren’t any of these films about Putin?

2. will we finally get The Prisoner movie next year? Maybe in a two-movie deal, the first part being Danger Man.

Honestly I’d settle for Man In A Suitcase. The only thing I want even more is a decent Avengers. 

Originally shared by Richard LeBlanc

Welcome to week #2 of “New BX Classes” week. Today, the bogatyr—a slavic knight-errant with the supernatural ability to become a giant.

thinking about all those hackable Diebold voting machines…

A vote for DROP TABLES is a vote for democracy!

HIP HOP- Comfortable, appropriate clothes to dance in- NO JEANS! Clean sneakers/or dance shoes.

(you must have White sneakers for the dance recital)

I guess this is how classical music started up. Also reminds me that there must have been a time when tap and tango went through this same kind of absorption.

Originally shared by Joe Johnston

Now you can understand how dangerous the cargo of that truck in front of you is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Side by side on my piano keyboard.

…this could turn into a whole campaign setting. Maybe it already did.

Don’t flee! Make peace with our Martian overlords!  😉

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/11231264_909194102485783_304029299880264582_n.jpg?oh=8495ea54e9ba4504bfbc6fac8a2bf1e4&oe=567C9876

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/11231264_909194102485783_304029299880264582_n.jpg?oh=8495ea54e9ba4504bfbc6fac8a2bf1e4&oe=567C9876//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

so these guys just opened up a FLGS in Corning NY. Mostly MtG but they’re tryna get a regular dnd game together and they seem interested in Battletech too.

If anyone here on G+ is around the Corning area, hit them up.

https://m.facebook.com/theshoppecorningny?refsrc=https://www.facebook.com/theshoppecorningny//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So I haven’t quite finished Penny Dreadful season 2 yet, but I’m at that episode that has crystallized for me exactly what intrigued me about the program and also what bothers me:

It seems to me the fundamental conflict in the show is between the DM and the players. And it’s eerily familiar from some games I played in the early 90s. The DM wants to run Vampire or proto-Lady Blackbird or even something like Monsterhearts, and they’re trying to do it with their Call of Cthulhu group. But the CoC group is a motley mix of DnD and Ars Magica and yes, early WW gamers, so everything hits rather obliquely. The threat of the witches is insidious and the theme here is that a poison is placed inside you, and maybe the solution is some kind of Buddhist enlightenment (inside a Freudian frame) where you sublimate the poison or suffer and die but remain pure. But the CoC players are all fuck that, we are arming up and buying more guns. Ain’t no witch catching us napping.

But then this scene happens, and it actually makes me wonder if they’ve hired a different writer or if the DM’s repressed railroady tendencies will out despite all their better intentions. In this single episode everyone behaves way off their type, there are like 3 soliloquys and a Damascene conversion and the stakes are completely torn up and replanted. I imagine this being that disastrous game session where the DM won’t let anyone else get a word in.

Or maybe, just maybe, what I’m watching is a rather sophisticated bit of metafiction. See the whole witchy anxiety is that your mind – your very character – might not be your own. Maybe the point of this episode is that the writer himself has been possessed by an agency outside his control – some urge from beneath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk_G_41h9xI//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

so Shear has apparently unblocked me. And so I finally got to see the thread where he says he’s being followed by +Pokemon League or something and there’s a whole conversation about how it’s really me posing as Rey.

Odd.

So I shopped around for car insurance this month and was told I could reduce my rate a bit if I installed a little device that would report on my speed and if I was driving on Saturday nights and other “high risk behaviours,” because they wanted to “reward careful drivers.”

Feeling pretty smug right now that I refused.

Unjustifiably, really, because although I told myself I refused on principled grounds of privacy, really I was just nauseated.

But here’s another reason not to let Big Brother tempt you with a potential 7% saving.

…the headline is somewhat misleading. No doubt GM shouldn’t let some dongle into its command system, but the first problem is the dongles, not the cars.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

General Motors gets to join Fiat Chrysler and Tesla in an unenviable lineup this week: Using cheap gadgets and text messages, researchers have proven they can hack that most traditional of cars, the Chevy Corvette. And worse still is that this line of attack will work on basically any car with a computer in it, which is to say… all of them.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-cut-corvettes-brakes-via-common-car-gadget///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

When can Britain change its flag?

I mean at least it’s not a tricolore but it looks like a tricolore that’s exploding.

And the US flag has a canton, which seems half-hearted and afraid of commitment.

There are so few good flags.

Originally shared by null

40 Finalist Designs for New Zealand’s Next Flag http://trib.al/4ZJv7CR

http://trib.al/4ZJv7CR//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I don’t know why but it looks to me like this thing (Yithian?) is playing XBox

Originally shared by Fabian Küchler

Man Rider even got me to sign up to slacktivism.org!

Originally shared by Jez Gordon

To everyone who’s taken the time to sign up for stupid:

https://www.change.org/p/hasbro-warner-brothers-sweetpea-entertainment-cast-man-rider-in-the-upcoming-dungeons-amp-dragons-movie

Ted Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”) had a career as an advertising illustrator before The Cat In The Hat changed his prospects. The Flit ads are pretty gameable (paging Patrick Stuart’s Fiddlin Joe) and, given the time frame, there’s some inevitable catnip for people who are both easily offended and lack historical perspective.

To get the full range of his work, click on the clients’ names in the top bar.

http://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/#intro

the only game I have time for this year is Remodel: the Bankrupting.

Although I’m getting increasingly tempted by Home Depot By Night, a Fiasco supplement.

I love these.

See also Japanese Prints of Western Inventors, Artists and Scholars (1873)

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/japanese-prints-of-western-inventors-artists-and-scholars-1873/

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/japanese-depictions-of-north-americans-1860s///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Pixels manages to insult its subject, its audience and its actors all at the same time. It’s a look at the geeks movie on the old, abusive model, which also abuses military people, jocks, society at large, women, gamers (who are awful) and non-gamers (who are clueless). It highlights the geeks’ terrible sexual politics while also projecting similar terrible sexual politics.

One thing it got completely right for a 1982 nostalgia movie, though: the inclusion of weird off-colour sex jokes in what’s otherwise a kids’ movie. I think that must’ve been a deliberate nod to Ghostbusters.

the trouble with El Dorado demerara rum is, it’s delicious and tastes so smooth it seems kinda mild.

Like, you think you might have one (or two) just before bed. After a bottle of wine.

there we go

https://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/harry-warboy-and-the-raiders-of-humungus///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Things can hide in pictures, waiting to creep out when your attention wanders.

But labyrinths trap their attention and don’t let them follow their arrow-straight paths.

Especially if they contain 99 convoluted names.

it pleases me beyond any reasonable measure that the narrator in The Stanley Parable does a creditable impersonation of Geoffrey Perkins.

It gives me hope for humanity, in fact, that Geoffrey Perkins is not forgotten.

This has no business being as good as it is.

Also, where are you, King Chango? Whitest Venezuelan Ska-revival band ever. Your come-back was in 2011. Now what?

http://officialkingchango.blogspot.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwDNnUrxXrk//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I’m so sorry to burden you with this, but writing to you is helping me avoid a nerd fight where there can be no winners.

…I really need one of those collections of meme cartoon faces to express my reaction to the linked article. For about the first third I’m like “right on colonialism suxx.” Then I’m kind of “well if you’re going to make a Marxian argument then maybe say so,” and then quite shortly after that “wait, did you just say Hitler’s crimes were exaggerated?” and then “oh right, you’re some kind of nationalist.”

Sigh.

Originally shared by Bill Purkayastha

Admit it. You don’t care about Bond. You only watch those movies for the villains.

just finished the Strange & Norrell TV adaptation.

I’m so pleased that Norrell gets the best line of the whole thing. Not sure how much sense it made if you hadn’t read the book.

And dammit, where’s that sequel Clarke said she was writing, about Childermass and Vinculus?

a decent, un-sweet bourbon and a completely unique white dog whiskey made right in my neck of the woods?

Weird. But very good. They can sell outside NY state these days too. Recommended if you can get a tasting. The white is very distinctive, unlike anything else I’ve tried, and definitely not for everyone.

weird professional dialects #5443979:

In US interior decorating, all natural stones are “granites,” and all engineered stonepaste-and-resin products are “quartzes.”

So when I ask confusedly “wait isn’t this granite actually marble?” the answer “yes it’s granite” makes sense, even though it’s clearly marble. 

I declare my version of the Pearl Diver’s Punch to be perfected!

Varying from Doug Ford’s version on the link thus:

1. in the pearl diver’s mix, triple the quantity of allspice dram if using St Elizabeth.

2. sub 1oz of Mount Gay Eclipse and 1/2oz of Lost Spirits Navy for the 1.5oz of Bacardi 8.

3. double the quantity of Taylor’s falernum.

4. This is most important: mix all ingredients except the citrus juices a full day before and store them, mixed. Shake before use.

Then when you come to mix the drink, you need only put ice and your premade mix in the shaker/blender, add juices, shake or blend and then sieve-strain over ice in your serving glass. Cherry and done! The butter blends beautifully, the drink is rich and spicy, everyone’s happy.

http://cold-glass.com/2015/06/21/extra-effort-extra-reward-the-pearl-divers-punch///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

since Chris Kutalik hasn’t done it in a while, what are you reading and is it any good?

I’m in the middle of the first of Iain Banks’s Culture novels, Consider Phlebas, because I’d heard they were super smart and they dared to imagine beyond etc etc. So far, after a couple of self-consciously talky chapters about The Culture, it’s pretty much been the murderhobo misadventures of an unusually drunk/careless Traveller group with an unforgiving GM. Just got to the cartoon cannibals, weighing the page count ahead a bit wearily.

OTOH my eldest is reading The Anubis Gates and discovering the game where Tim Powers lets on what he’s about to do half a page before he does it. Except when he doesn’t. I’m looking forward to the moment when he discovers who Dog-Face Joe is.

http://www.amazon.com/Consider-Phlebas-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/031600538X//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js