If the model of WW2 offered by Axis & Allies 1941 is accurate* then the historical outcome of the Battle of Britain was close to miraculous.

Every time, first turn, Germany takes London with aircraft. Britain must’ve rolled really well.

I just realised something about the ship’s boats/landing craft of interstellar Startrekky space liners:

At least one of them should have absolutely enormous wings. Assuming a wide variation in atmosphere densities and ultrastrong materials, it could be useful to have some kind of megaglider around. Out in space the amount of room they take up doesn’t matter, and whatever magic warp bubble FTL technology you’re handwaving can just stretch to cover it against the stresses of ludicrous acceleration.

I also just realised that my galactic exploration vessels probably look like big ugly Katamaris covered in random spiky equipment, rather than Patrick Stuart’s preferred sleek 60s space-whales. Once you’ve got your manufacturing facilities in space, supposedly stuff becomes cheap to build and move around (says Clarke?)… so why not bring it all with you? I’m imagining it working on the logic of town planning, like having Milton Keynes but in unrestricted 3D, lumbering around the galaxy having petty feuds about differential water pressure in the apartments and neighbourhood watch.

…ETA: d’oh. Of course the way to go with this is on-the-spot manufacture, adapted to local conditions. When you show up in a new star system you find out what kinds of equipment make sense, so then you grab a couple of asteroids to chew up in your fast-fabricator/3d printer and spit out whatever machines you need. Which gives rise to the possibility of ultratech junk knocking around the Lagrange points, discarded by a spacefaring civilisation that’s moved on.

Maybe the entire asteroid belt is one great Roadside Picnic.

hey Jeremy Duncan I’ve been getting notifications of your plus ones – sorry if that’s intentional, thought you might want to know

Your Olympian White Paradise has suffered an incursion by the Autocrats of the Red Palace. What will you do?

Let us make a game of appropriating the cultures of others

Or, check out these Berber and other North-west African houses, shops and mosques. Don’t you want them in your DnD?

life after the internet

The Faculty Senate uses Survey Monkey for surveys and balloting

Imagine getting some luminary of the academy from before the internet age – say, Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell, and telling them that their faculty senate is now using something called Survey Monkey.

Better, imagine telling Roland Barthes. Or Marshall McLuhan.

my daughter’s response: “it would be cool if we got the goat that bit your knee”

Originally shared by Ben Gerber

RENT A GOAT on Amazon.com. Seriously. 

Not pictured: Goats. 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UBYDXXQ?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393177&creativeASIN=B00UBYDXXQ&linkCode=shr&tag=dtcjuly2003-20&linkId=N4T3B36G2DT2NA2R&qid=1427822413&sr=8-4&keywords=rent+a+goat//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

more out-of-the-way wargaming raw materials: Byzantine castle plans

travels in Persia, 1840ish

…some really beautiful straight up representative Orientalist-documentary pictures for all your 19th century caravanserai needs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_and_plots_by_Pascal_Coste_and_Eug%C3%A8ne_Flandin//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I’ve been a bit worried that I’ve lost my pleasure in reading. Haven’t really felt like reading much of anything in ages. Picked up books, only to put them down again after a couple of sentences. Not interested in stuff others have recommended to me passionately.

But I just read my son the first 2 pages of George MacDonald Fraser’s The Pyrates and it’s as good as ever I remember. Gripped. In danger of rereading the whole thing this week.

In short, Captain Avery was the young Errol Flynn, only more so

Right now, right this minute, which would you rather watch?

Hexcrawlers’ amenities: the roadside Khan or Caravanserai

by N. Elisseeff, in The Encyclopedia of Islam:

The… highway k̲h̲ān, which was most often located in an isolated position, needed to provide for the security of people and of animals and of warehouse goods stored there for long or short periods. The construction material varied according to the regions: it might be brick, fired or unfired; it might be limestone; lastly, it might be basalt. The building comprised rooms for the accomodation of travellers, an oratory and sometimes a bath-house. There were places for the stabling of pack-animals and saddle-animals, covered stables for horses and donkeys, stalls for mules and camels or dromedaries, according to the area. The installations needed to take account of the temperament of each species, for horses cannot endure the smell of dromedaries and mules do not readily accept the proximity of donkeys.

From the outside, the k̲h̲ān appears as a quadrangular structure, often having two storeys, with massive towers at each corner and exterior walls supported by buttresses. It resembles a small fortress [with] a monumental gateway [giving] access to a deep vestibule on which there open, on either side, the warden’s quarters and sometimes shops from which items of basic necessity could be purchased. From here there is access to a large central courtyard, usually square, with a water-cistern. Around the courtyard on ground level there would be storerooms and shops, living-quarters and stables, sometimes a forge for the shoeing of animals. In many k̲h̲āns, the travellers would sleep in a communal hall on raised platforms. In a k̲h̲ān of some importance there is an upper floor laid out on the same plan as the ground level…

The houris of paradise, seen through a monster manual lens:

“…everyone will have two houri wives, so beautiful, pure and transparent that the marrow of the bones of their legs will be seen through the bones and the flesh.”

…further, on transparency: “The marrow of her bones is visible like the interior lines of pearls and rubies. She looks like red wine in a white glass.”

– al Tirmidhi. Who also tells us that the houris “have large breasts which are round and not inclined to dangle.”

“They will not urinate, relieve nature, spit, or have any nasal secretions. Their combs will be of gold, and their sweat will smell like musk. All of them will look alike and will [stand] sixty cubits tall.”

—Muhammad al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari,

Note, houris are not necessarily female (or, indeed, gendered).

And there are also servant “boys of perpetual freshness. If you see them, you would think they were scattered pearls”

You have found a diminutive would-be world dictator.

Do you want to recruit, execute, trap ?

Choose your prison island:

Ken Hite called me erudite!

OK I can stop pretending with this academic stuff at last. I have arrived.

Pearce Shea Hi there – I have a request for the current Santicore>places volume

Right now the file that’s up shows my work email address under my name/entry. I didn’t know this was going to be the case. Can it be removed, please?

I had totally forgotten about this excellent Scrap Princess post. I had forgotten the homohate and the political correctness hate and the dullness of it all.

My only, minor counter is that Skyrealms of Jorune also has “becoming a respectable citizen” as a big element of gameplay – it is assumed the players want to get full benefits of citizenship and further to be productive citizens, not murderhoboes – and Skyrealms does not seem deathly dull because of that. It seems weird and wonderful and ready for the players to do something different with it.

Although that’s probably all the art. 

Originally shared by Scrap Princess

BLUE ROSE, scrapprincess’s I-walked-around-abit-and-got-bored

field report

Based on my scant research, it seems like only the writer of blue rose runs with the mood, and everyone else just plays it like d&d, and it seems like it does not have a secret swell of people , playing heart felt games of atomic level twee.

And I’m kinda disappointed, and not in a “oh I wanted to laugh at the freaks” way.

I’m not sure why, it seemed so batshit, I wanted to there to people to be living this crazy batshit dream and even as I stare slack jawed at their ways alien and horrid to me, it just makes the world bigger ya’know?

Also the reaction to blue rose being all like “omg p.c utopia shoved down our throats wtf? ew how fucked is the world a magic deer chooses the king? and homo homo homo”

It makes me twitchy. TWITCHY.

Having trouble articulating myself here… it’s like no one complains about the politics of crazy ass macho macho settings,I’m in concord with this because who gives a shit about the politics? Solving problems with violence and guile is FUN in a game, and crazy ass macho macho settings work great with this. But when bluerose has a setting (a fwappingly ordinary setting it must be said) that isn’t crazy ass macho macho, to support a style of gaming which is fucking twee , there’s all this nerd rage about the politics and p.c this.

Bluerose maybe has a preachy tone which would inflame this?

bah

jokers to left of me jokers to the right of me

my snobbery of the blue rose is because the setting is so fucking dull, like this kings was friends with this king and then some greedy merchants turned them against each other and the p.c s can help them be friends again. And the emphasis being on this kind of deeply dull social interactions with dull people and it being like assumed that this is all deeply fascinating all this rotary club tea party shit.

Its a vanilla-as setting, and exceedingly prissy, but I feel not to the point of nightmarish caricature.

Damn it I don’t wanna defend blue rose. It’s twee. TWEE!

I don’t like blue rose’s prim and firm , this society is tolerate of homos because That’s The Right Thing To Do And We Are Enlightened.

I put homos all over my damn campaign setting because homos exist and people can just fucking deal.

And over here? This culture? Groupsex cults . All the goddamn time. Why? because I’m pushing my creepy p.c agenda?

(…but you know a little more group sex around the place couldn’t hurt…)No because I had a map to fill and I got bored.

Anyone know how to edit the text in a pdf if it’s not letting you?

I wanna make unofficial bluerose 2nd edition.

Maybe I’ll just print it out and draw over it with crayon

Lankhmar-on-the-Zarafshan

from Heinz Gaube’s paper on 10th century sources for the city of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, in Petruccioli et al: Bukhara, the myth and the architecture.

BTW Mateo Diaz Torres I have a paper here that says Firdawsi first drafted the Shahnameh in Arabic and it was translated into Persian by one Bal’ami, a Samanid vizier of Bukhara. This surprises me greatly: is there any clarification in your beautiful edition?

Apparently the foundation of Bukhara is related in the Shahnameh: Siyavush is supposed to have built a castle there to defend himself against his dad.

not gaming, useful only if you’re traveling somewhere

arranging a trip again for the first time in several months, I am reminded of which parts are easy and which are difficult.

Car rental: sucks. Most results aggregator sites don’t let you specify little things like automatic transmission and some popular ones offer outright fraud

Flights: pretty much solved thanks to Expedia and Kayak, although you still really need to know your airports because there might be a much better deal if you drive 4 hours north instead of 4 hours south.

Hotels: I just use booking.com because it works. I do not receive anything from them for this glowing review, but it is seriously the easiest, most flexible part of the whole experience. Tripadvisor’s good too, especially if you need a skiing resort or something, but for simple/business travel Booking takes a lot less time and I have an actual hotel at the end of it, rather than some intriguing leads.

Billy Fish is my favourite character too.

…just rewatched The Man Who Would Be King with the kids. It’s a colonial tour-de-force: not reliable for anything except the depravity of men. On which, I suppose John Huston knew more than most. 

My Tartary players always thought it strange that Otan, vizier to the seldom-seen Pit Boss Of Komtor, spoke wiv a broad Cockney accent. Then, when the Pit Boss himself finally spoke, he turned out to be Sean Connery, colonial adventurer with a god complex. 

http://netflixcommunity.ning.com/m/group/discussion?id=1993323:Topic:684215//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

photog Erica Simone, when she’s not walking around naked in New York

why do I GM?

Because nobody else is going to run the games I have in my head.

To find out what the players will do.

Because I like co-creating stuff with smart, funny people.

Because sometimes instead of having conversations about what people bought or what they saw online I like to ask them how they’ll escape from the clutches of a Mi-go brain surgeon.

Need insect photos?

…………….of course!

Originally shared by Mindy Weisberger

Need insect photos? Consider supporting INSECTS UNLOCKED, as they create and release thousands of free-to-use images. 

https://hornraiser.utexas.edu/project/54e79bbc14bdf7205ddd5ab7//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Islamic garden edition war time!

I say that only gardens with a clear Persian/Sasanian paradeisos agenda are pure celestial Islamic gardens and the Alhambra can GTFO with its convivencia stylings.

 

Wannabe noobs. Really, get serious guys.

Just finished listening to Hugh Laurie reading Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog).

To his credit, he resists doing the whole thing exactly as Bertie Wooster, but it’s pretty close.

Relevant to the social media zeitgeist, it’s a handbook on privilege. The author parades it in obvious and less obvious ways – not only his incompetence in packing, washing clothes and peeling potatoes but his willingness to tell you about it tells you volumes about the security he feels in late colonial, white, male supremacy. His bit on “being pulled by girls” seems calculated to infuriate proto-suffragettes.

…and it’s completely deliberate. The chauvinism of the current perspective, no matter how contingent, is the major theme of the work. When he is rowing among the steam launches of the truly rich, he curses them as a dangerous nuisance on the river. When he is being towed by the steam launch of a friend, he curses the rowers for their slowness to get out of the way. When he is working and others are idling, he remarks on his resentment for their life of ease. When he is idling and others are working he remarks on the others’ undignified contortions. It’s as precise (and affable) a discourse on the rage of the internet’s infinite commentators as you’re ever likely to find.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Three_Men_in_a_Boat_-_map_of_tour.svg//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Ken does not post enough around here.

Now considering a burning goat class for Tartary.

Originally shared by Ken Rolston

The following is a Team Diary I wrote during Oblivion Development. Ever-vigilant against my seizures of Unseemly Whimsicality, my Insect Overlords deemed it ‘not appropriate’ for publication.

I came across images of flaming sheep in Picasa today, and thought it would be a good tiem to redress this literary injustice.

Ken Rolston – Team Diary [composed 6/13/2005]

THE NO-SHEEP-LEFT-BEHIND PROJECT

I know many of you are asking yourselves right now, “How can I get my horse inside the Elder Council Chambers and ride it up and down the stairs?”

You’ll need two spells. One is the standard off-the-rack Apprentice Command Creature. The other is a homebrew Fortify Intelligence Other. The first will enable you get the horse to follow you through a door. The second you will need because, alas, the horse is not smart enough to use doors in OBLIVION. [Actually, I believe that is also true in the real world. At least, I am fairly sure they do not know how to use car doors, because I have never found a horse grazing in my Miata.] Once you have led the horse through a door, into the Imperial Palace and along various corridors and through various doors, you can enter the Elder Council and ride up and down the stairs to your heart’s content.

Others of you are asking yourselves, “How do I get lots and lots of sheep in the Chapels?”

This is a lot more work than getting horses indoors, because you can ride the horse right to the door, but not the sheep. [Alas. I did so want to ride a Heavily Barded War Sheep in OBLIVION. But a knight riding a barded war sheep doesn’t make such a good magazine cover.] Sheep must be led, and you will need to cast the Apprentice Command Creature spell over and over again. And you have to first lead the sheep through the streets of the city, which will present quite a spectacle, but, again will require a lot of patience, or a VERY Powerful Wizard. Then, at last, when you reach the doors of the chapel, you need to raise the sheep’s intelligence so it can use a door. There are no schools for sheep in OBLIVION, and no heroic advancement ladders they may climb to improve their intelligence, so you must bless them with a Fortify Intelligence spell before leading your flock into the Chapel.

Those of you with the PC version, of course, can just skip the time-consuming labor of leading the sheep to the Chapel. You can just use the editor to fill a Chapel with sheep. And then you can share the plugin with a grateful community.

Some of you may be wondering if Nords are smart enough to open doors. So were we. But we have found many Nords hanging around indoors, where all the beer is, so the evidence is conclusive. Nords are smarter than sheep and horses.

[The sound you hear in the background is my colleagues gasping with horror as they read this, and rushing off to change the code so you will never be able to get horses or sheep indoors again.]

SECRETS OF THE GAME DESIGN GODS

Some of you want to learn the Secrets of the Game Design Gods. And I am here to reveal to you one of our special, most closely held secrets.

            “Everything is better on fire.”

                    — Ken Rolston

For example, sheep are better on fire.

Screenshot Priestess gazes on flaming sheep.bmp or high angle shot of flaming sheep.bmp

“FOOLING AROUND WITH STUFF”

When I was a fresh, young, rosy-cheeked lad of unquestionable integrity and high purpose, my mother used to ask me questions like: “Where are you going with my aluminum sauce pan and all those earthworms on this hot, sunny day?”

I would look up into my mother’s eyes and say with perfect sincerity: “I’m going to do some experiments.”

Even as a bright-eyed youth I had isolated the key strategy for one interested in a creative career — “Fooling Around With Stuff”.

Fundamentally I am a harmless drudge. I have the earnest Puritan’s belief that working very hard and very seriously is the path to success. As I have grown old and wizened in the service of my art, experience and sagacity are still my most reliable tools. But I must also regularly paddle about in the Trough of Madness for inspiration.

A case in point is the Fleece of Fire. I decided I wanted a chapel full of burning sheep. I had no good thematic or narrative purpose for it. In fact, burning sheep for OBLIVION is clearly a Very Bad Idea. [Sound of anxious colleagues nodding their heads vigorously in indignant agreement.] But in the process of creating this dubious feature, I was forced to explore some rather obscure… and powerful… aspects of our editor and engine. I collaborated with three colleagues who, innocent of my Dark Purpose, successively led me towards a better understanding of our tools and features.

I also had the pleasure of making my coworkers nervous. As I tested and refined the effect, I was treated to the wary and distrustful admiration of colleagues passing my cubicle. Peering over my shoulder at the monitor, they would casually observe, “Ken… what the hell are you doing with all those sheep? And why are they on fire?”

You won’t ever encounter my Ever-Burning Sheep in OBLIVION. Because that would be Just Silly… and Wrong. OBLIVION is an epic heroic game of high fantasy. And Ever-Burning Sheep would spoil the tone of the game. But the exercise of creating the burning sheep got me thinking in fresh, new ways, and taught me how to use some of the coolest features of OBLIVION’s engine and editor.

And, of course, when OBLIVION ships, and if any PC user wants to create a plugin that features burning sheep, or burning horses, or burning dogs, or burning anything, I’d be happy to share my Dark Secrets with the world….

Raggi does not, in fact, promote Nazis. Instead he’s written a very clear and thoughtful piece about the legitimate separation of writing from its author.

sorry, once I’d thought of this I couldn’t prevent myself.

This might be the only drunken ecclesiastical Irish nationalist song I feel comfortable posting for St. Patrick’s Day.

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

Dimmi is very, very tasty. I’m not even sure I want to make cocktails with it, because it already tastes of everything.

…although I might use it in place of Maraschino in my next Aviation, which I will make with Creme Yvette in place of the dodgy Rothman’s Violette I can get here in the US.

Anyone have experience with this thing? What do you use it for?

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/blogs/cocktail/2012/08/dimmi_the_next_big_thing.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

when someone is scared of asking a question about the debate, when they’re worried about being roasted alive for simply venturing their ignorance, then there’s a problem with the debate itself

…shorn of its context, I agree with this statement. Angry mobs make everything worse and more difficult.

Adam Thornton modified Boulevardier, in line with Negroni proportions:

1 rittenhouse

1 cynar

1 campari.

Tried this with a squeezed kumquat rubbed around the rim of the glass. Maybe wants a dash of orange bitters.

Also Joseph H. Vilas and Natalie Bennett

Reading copy-edits of my work, I find myself wondering if my idiolect is bizarre or merely unusual and maybe a bit archaic.

Is the following phrase actually difficult?

Success is effected but not without loss

context is for the weak:

Yes. The literature is full of examples that prove you wrong.

You should read more European works to understand more of human ethics.

moment of “duh:”

watching the Star Trek movies with my kids, I suddenly realized how Spock and McCoy dramatize Kirk’s internal conflict – whether he should go with analytical reasoning or intuition.

And of course, that’s why Jim calls McCoy “Bones.” Because they couldn’t really call him “Gut.”

(Yes I know and because “Sawbones” was allegedly a common nickname for the ship’s surgeon on US ships in the War of 1812).

…and actually the real McCoy suggests a kind of reflexive reliability so he’s double-nicknamed.

…which made me wonder if there’s anything behind “Spock.” He operates the Scope…

…or was there a deliberate reference to the famous pediatrician? Is he the only real adult aboard?

Pursuing this in another direction, I’m told heroic pulp fiction around WW1 was informed by two types – submarine stories with an ensemble cast and airman stories with a solitary hero. Doc Savage is like a prototype aviator – the strongest and smartest (and luckiest) man in the world, he’s a Platonic/Nietzschian/Fascist Superman. I’ve long considered Trek to be a submarine story with a crew full of personalities. But there’s a definite hierarchy between Jim/Spock/Bones and the rest, who really personify functions of the ship. So is Trek really an aviator story in submarine drag? Are TOS and TNG different in this regard?

Nathan Ryder beautiful work on the vegetable prison in Santicore. I had no idea I needed it so badly. Thank you.

question just before I go to bed:

people seem to love arguing about exactly how bad 19th century US plantation slavery was.

Also this seems to be an important issue for some people who hold racist views and/or would like to reintroduce segregation.

I get that that’s close to some people’s identity and how they feel about their family history and so on. But can anyone help me understand exactly what the practical stakes are today of the question of how bad slavery was? What are the practical implications of arguing whether it was entirely miserable or it might have had occasional moments of non-misery? Is anyone actually trying to bring it back? What does this question, of the terribleness of slavery, actually have to do with political action in the present and the value/applicability/acceptability of racist thinking in the present and future?

If we can all agree that we would not want, ourselves, to be slaves and that nobody should be a slave, is that not sufficient for getting agreement that it was bad? How is it helpful or necessary for us to assign it a specific level of badness?

I can see that the question is very relevant to questions of workers’ rights and slavery-like conditions that apply in, for instance, textiles and clothing manufacturing in China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other places where most of our clothes are made. But that doesn’t seem to be what people are talking about.

Actually, in terms of concrete political action and goals in the US, what are they talking about?

I think my taste buds might be broken. Campari used to make me feel like the guy in the picture, now I like it. I’ve been told that Cynar is dangerously, murderously bitter but… it seems delicious to me. Where is my calibration!?

Just kidding, I’m sure I can find some Malort on my own.

M. Mugnier is my glamour shot. Watch out for Astrid, I hear she’s still not over the break-up. And vote for artichoke sounds like a Vic Reeves sketch.

hi Paolo

would you happen to know anything about Biancosarti? According to Campari Group it’s the vigorous aperitif, which makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Ity’s also clear, brilliant… fresh and elegant… delicate and delicious. And vigorous.

Just curious.

dear flickr

yes it’s great that you’ve managed to get this community of photograph-collectors together and you’re building a library of images of stuff. Awesome.

But. Crippling google image search so I have to browse through your shitty unindexed browsing tool for the full size picture, when I’ve already seen the image I want and what size it is and everything using the preview on google image search?

That’s a dick move. Now I hate you.

Humza K here’s what my class is reading this semester (Islamic Architecture, first 1000 years)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/83w1hbiny0642j9/AAAieNIpAqXAk-y-_oG2VwJwa?dl=0//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Mirko Ilić illustrations and graphic design

http://www.mirkoilicillo.com/

The short-lived Tulunid dynasty had style, if not the best political sense.

Ibn Tulun started out as a Turkish slave soldier in the Abbasid Caliph’s garrison at Samarra, Iraq. He rose to the position of governor of Egypt in 868. He immediately went on a building and spending spree, which lasted until his son was deposed by the same Abbasid Caliphs in 905.

so I’m still supposed to be working like a dog, but I miss Tartary. I’ve found myself musing about the Tartary TV schedule. So far we know about Amputation Hour and alien advertising, music videos/Carcosan rituals, the mecha bouts and the wildly camp halftime shows.

It seems to me there must be a Yes, Minister clone with interstitial hidden camera segments, that reveal exactly what the satire of the week is really about.

What else? I see a TV Guide style fanzine sometime in 2030.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEo8sjnU8Jo//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Now that John Stewart’s hanging up his gloves, John Oliver is the go-to guy in the US for telling you things that make you angry but in a funny way.

Colonialism has been a big topic of concern in US academia for the past 30 years, with good reason: economic colonialism, or what Lenin (yes, Lenin) described as imperialism, defines US foreign policy, with ever-increasingly obvious costs. But it’s usually discussed through British and French examples, and hardly anyone talks about the long-standing, old-fashioned colonialism of the US territories – a colonialism worked out to deal with the Philippines (1898-1946) but still applied to Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, among other “territories.”

Originally shared by Tore Nielsen

The U.S. territories really are being treated in a stepmotherly fashion. I did not know this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

from the Scrap/Patrick mutual interview:

I would love to blithely dismiss the entire internet and condemn it as good for squirt and pits but there is no way this alliance would of happened without it. I think 90% of the reason I bother putting art into the world is to somehow generate more art that I like.

Yes. Thank you Scrap Princess. Kinda sad I’m not making anything art-like right now.

Would my family play the XCom boardgame?

Reasons for skepticism:

1. probably too complex AND too geekily themed for my youngest (8)

2. multiple modes of engagement (planes, small unit tactics, politics): just how complex are the rules? How long is a game?

3. use of a software app:

a. may not work/will probably stop working in a few years

b. eldest’s school boardgame club will probably veto b/c cellphones in school.

Anyone played it? Thoughts?

Samurai Jack can’t be lazy because it’s good

Pearce Shea Christopher Wood hey guys – Santicore’s looking amazing. Just one thing – could you take my email address off? I had no idea it was going to be included. Thanks!

Maths and “hard science” classes are the places in the school curriculum where you get* the highest, most powerful concentration of what humans have achieved so far. Nothing else beats them in terms of effort invested and useful knowledge extracted per minute of classtime introduction, or in terms of the breadth of validity of their findings.** Discuss.

* assuming you’re getting good classes that aren’t broken

** useful concept: any true statement has a domain within which it’s true and, presumably, a larger domain where it would not be. Physical laws are, as far as we know, applicable everywhere. Observations about history and how civilizations tend to behave have much smaller domains of validity – you can generally find a case for pretty much every historical, theoretical statement that stands as an exception to it.

Tomb-tower of the Archmage

…which Qabus, King of Gurgan, built as his mausoleum in the eleventh century. tradition says that his body was suspended in a glass casket inside the top of the tower

Robert Byron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonbad-e_Qabus_%28tower%29//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Kenneth Hite  has observed that magic almost always seems to work like electricity.

I find religious acts seem sometimes electrical, sometimes… something else.

According to hadith, Mohammed (pbuh) gave a system of differentials for prayer efficacy. Prayers could me made more efficient by:

1. proximity to Mecca, Medina or Jerusalem

2. pooling many people’s prayers together

Thus: using an SI unit of 1 prayer given individually, efficiencies of scale and distance are:

•in a small mosque: x25

•in a big Friday mosque: x500

•in Jerusalem: x5000

•in the Prophet’s mosque, Medina: x50,000

•at the Ka’aba: x100,000

Since there seems to be no advantage to praying at some point between Jerusalem and Medina (eg. Amman in Jordan) I’m guessing the proximity benefit to each of the three sites cited must drop off sharply. Let’s approximate it to a Lorentzian distribution.

How can we account for the reliability of multipliers in neighbourhood and Friday mosques?

1. It seems like resistance goes down rather than up with increasing (collective) power, suggesting something like a dam breaking or a lasing threshold* rather than an electrical conduit. Possibly the higher multiplier for Friday prayers is due to the simultaneity of prayer at multiple sites.

2. possibly neighbourhood mosques have more or less standard catchment areas/congregation sizes? More likely, such simultaneous action serves to pass a fixed resistance barrier* set just a bit above one person’s power threshold, so the x25 is a simple step function.

Note that prayers must be accurately aimed toward the black cube at Mecca, which is identified as the foot of the axis of heaven and contains a black stone, allegedly dropped from heaven.

Note further that the tertiary center – Jerusalem – contains the shettiyeh: the foundation stone of the world, also identified as a stepping-off point for entering the heavens.

%orgoneaccumulator

%nephilimplot

%arsmagicaconduitoflightcampaign

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasing_threshold

So we’ve got to that point in the year when I go what the hell am I doing north of the Mason-Dixon line?

I’m on the same latitude as Corsica, Rome, Istanbul… and I don’t see any of them shoveling snow in March.

Thinking about the thermohaline cycle. Thinking about how mortality spikes around this time of year. Thinking about the effect of the climate on mood, diet and exercise.

Thinking about Gary. Thanks, man. You proved that something good could come from this frozen waste.

Ars Magica points of light campaign:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Skete//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

S Robertson 

We could roam the wasteland of YouTube comments like Humungus’ gang from The Road Warrior.

Oh gods I needed that laugh today. Thank you, Mr. Robertson.

One day, when I get the time, I must read Jan Struys’s Travels, because I’m all about remarkable and awful journeys through Italy, Greece, Lyfland (?) Muscovy, Tartary, Meden (?), Persia, East India, Japan and various other places…. with wondrous and true happenings the author survived, of shipwrecks, plundering, slavery under the Turks and Persians, severe starvation, pains and other misfortunes, between 1647 and 1673.

also it occurs to me that some of y’all might not be familiar with the Monty Hall problem.

No, you’re welcome. I would summon Paolo Greco but

(a) I’m pretty sure he knows this one, and

(b) the one thing that is certain is you cannot win a goat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

“We can not hope to find truth except in matters which carry their evidence in themselves—that is to say, in sense-perceptions and necessary principles; we must therefore establish these on a firm basis.

“Is my absolute confidence in sense-perceptions and on the infallibility of necessary principles analogous to the confidence which I formerly possessed in matters believed on the authority of others? Is it only analogous to the reliance most people place on their organs of vision, or is it rigorously true without admixture of illusion or doubt?”

I then set myself earnestly to examine the notions we derive from the evidence of the senses and from sight in order to see if they could be called in question. The result of a careful examination was that my confidence in them was shaken. Our sight, for instance, perhaps the best practiced of all our senses, observes a shadow, and finding it apparently stationary pronounces it devoid of movement. Observation and experience, however, show subsequently that a shadow moves not suddenly, it is true, but gradually and imperceptibly, so that it is never really motionless.

Again, the eye sees a star and believes it as large as a piece of gold, but mathematical calculations prove, on the contrary, that it is larger than the earth. These notions, and all others which the senses declare true, are subsequently contradicted and convicted of falsity in an irrefragable manner by the verdict of reason.

Then I reflected in myself: “Since I can not trust to the evidence of my senses, I must rely only on intellectual notions based on fundamental principles, such as the following axioms: ‘Ten is more than three. Affirmation and negation can not coexist together. A thing can not both be created and also existent from eternity, living and annihilated simultaneously, at once necessary and impossible.'” To this the notions I derived from my senses made the following objections: “Who can guarantee you that you can trust to the evidence of reason more than to that of the senses? You believed in our testimony till it was contradicted by the verdict of reason, otherwise you would have continued to believe it to this day. Well, perhaps, there is above reason another judge who, if he appeared, would convict reason of falsehood, just as reason has confuted us. And if such a third arbiter is not yet apparent, it does not follow that he does not exist.”

To this argument I remained some time without reply; a reflection drawn from the phenomena of sleep deepened my doubt. “Do you not see,” I reflected, “that while asleep you assume your dreams to be indisputably real? Once awake, you recognize them for what they are—baseless chimeras. Who can assure you, then, of the reliability of notions which, when awake, you derive from the senses and from reason? In relation to your present state they may be real; but it is possible also that you may enter upon another state of being which will bear the same relation to your present state as this does to your condition when asleep. In that new sphere you will recognize that the conclusions of reason are only chimeras.”

http://www.ghazali.org/books/md/gz101.htm

Beloch Shrike the game I worked on was Monkey Magic – not at all my best effort, it was already late and over budget when I joined the company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Magic_%28PlayStation_game%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Magic_%28PlayStation_game%29//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

re: Kingsman. I too was terribly disappointed some years ago when I went into Holland and Holland and found, in place of the elephant gun shop of my dreams, a kind of Calvin Burberry’s.

http://hollandandholland.com//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Occasionally I like to play “Three Musketeers,” in which you choose a story (not always The Three Musketeers) and try to come up with the ideal cast of actors for it.

Here’s a reverse: what story would Michael Emerson, Christoph Waltz and Robin Wright be perfect for?

Would there be any reason not to include Dominique Pinon and Willem Dafoe in that mix?

What other actresses would you put in? I guess I have a mood in mind and few actresses fit that mood, but maybe you can enlighten me.

some days when I’m listening to the radio I can’t stop seeing the mixing desk app in front of me with all the in and out points for the samples.

I’m like Joe Jackson this week, I really want to hear music played by an actual band who are reacting to each other.

Uptown Funk is all the tricks and ticks funk ever developed squeezed into one song. When he starts with the “say what?” over the top of the horn stabs and the bass backing vocals I wonder: if you could take this back to 1976 and play it to some Supreme Funk Council, would they think it was the best thing ever or would they find it weirdly soulless?

pet peeve: when I mention Khalid ibn Barmak in passing as the originator of the old Grand Vizier trope and give a quick rundown of the whole generous-warrior-emperor vs. tight-fisted Persian moneyman thing like you see in orientalist fantasies from the Arabian Nights to Flash Gordon and nobody even blinks. Either they already know me and my enthusiasms or they’re asleep.

I think maybe I introduced Hefnocracy too early in the semester.