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December 19th, 2009
nekobasu
 | 06:38 pm
Three naps later, and I'm back in Appleton. My parents have a dog!
Sparkee is a friendly little guy. Anyone who has been complaining about him being bitey or barky doesn't know what's what. He's a cuddler -- alternately, he's just extra hungry tonight. Speaking of which, it looks like I'm being drawn back into the familial web of wining and dining. I'm heading out right now for... some beans and chocolate, if what I have heard is correct.
Before that happens though, I'd be pleased as pie to announce that Savage Suzerain has been released in .pdf. It's good! I wrote a substantial portion of it. I can't wait to see more of it -- the layout previews have me wrought with anticipation. (Hard copies will come out early next year, iff'n that's more your wont.)
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December 18th, 2009
drivingblind
 | 09:18 am - Brutal
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. I just finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, a sort-of sequel to his The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings), in that it’s set in the same world.
I like grim fantasy (at least in some varieties). The horrible things that happen to characters in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire are right up my alley (though I’ve stopped reading that series until the author finishes). Glen Cook’s work ala The Black Company also sits right in my sweet spot. It’s not that I hate heroes — I don’t — but I really relish the explosion of chaos when a plan goes pear-shaped, and the sudden, bracing losses that happen to the people in these books. I suppose it feels real, or at least not-Hollywood. I like my Hollywood stories, but I also love it when those conventions get torpedoed merrily.
That said, Abercrombie has pushed me with the books in The First Law. My little inner Hollywood got hit with a mega-quake and slid right off into the ocean. Things end so poorly for several characters in the books, and things are so brutal along the way, that I had to put a little effort into shaking it off. But on the balance, after I while I found myself thinking that was pretty frickin’ cool.
Naturally, my thoughts then turned to gaming.
Read the rest of this entry »
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December 17th, 2009
omnicortex
 | 10:26 pm - I don't... feel famous
I came home from work today and turned on the radio to hear one of the department's professors on MPR talking about results from my experiment that were announced today in parallel talks at Fermilab and SLAC. Then they posted a story with some not-quite-justified claims, partly based on those quotes from professors not directly involved with the experiment. And now it's on the front page of The Guardian and The New York Times, for cryin' out loud. The criterion for "discovery" in particle physics is clear: less than a 1 in 1000 chance of the results being due to background, which would not have even been possible by just doubling our previous exposure, while remaining consistent with our previous null results. So I did not really convincingly discover dark matter today, though the world seems to think otherwise.
For a more subdued and cautious (realistic?) take on the situation, Symmetry and ScienceNews have very good articles.
MPR is now advertising the tiny little HEP seminar our local group's postdoc is giving tomorrow. I have no idea how we're going to fit everyone in that seminar room, even if no members of the public show up - and we've already been told reporters will be there. I guess people like being excited.
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nekobasu
| 04:24 pm
The Soldier/Demo update goes live tonight? Truly, the wages of a slow writing process are sin and death! Oh well. Back to writing about Child's Play.
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December 16th, 2009
amelia
 | 05:32 pm - Where have all the flours gone?
Whoa, hello Livejournal. It sure has been awhile since I used you for anything other than facebook-esque drunken injokes. I think it's because I feel like I do less things that might be interesting to an audience of friends and acquaintances, as well as a weird unwillingness to actually share the ultra personal details of my life that might actually interest people. So I will go back to the classic standby of reviewing stuff I like.
So, baking. If there is one thing on earth that everyone loves, it's baked goods. I recently tried out two craaaaazy sounding recipes, neither of which contain any flour.
First I made peanut butter cookies. The easiest peanut butter cookies ever.
Mix together...
1 Cup peanut butter (I used unsweetened ordinary bulk peanut butter. I'm curious how it would work with a sweeter, cheaper variety)
1 Cup sugar
1 Egg
Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Makes 12-15 cookies.
That's it. I was skeptical, but it was so easy I'd have been stupid not to try it and anyone on the internet who has made them swears by them. I am now one of those people on the internet. They will seem squishy and not done when you take them out of the oven, that's okay. They'll harden up. They make a slightly crumbly, slightly chewy, very peanut buttery, airy and delicious cookie and no one will ever know how simple they are. You can even mix them with a fork, none of that modern electricity required.
The other "defloured" recipe I made would take up too much space if I typed it out, and can be found here. I ate some of these when I was in Sweden and finally found a recipe. It turned out not quite like I remember, but still good. I remember it being more cakey and this was definitely more custardy. However, if you like custard and saffron it is amazing. And not as much work as it looks like, either. I made double rice porridge a couple days in advance, ate that for breakfast for a few days, and then tackled the "pancake". I wish the recipe was a little more specific about how large the pan should be. Out of this recipe I filled 1 cake pan very full, 1 cake pan very shallow, and some mini muffins. Also, I wish my oven had numbers for temperature. However, all of them turned out tasty in various states of solidity, with the most "done" ones being the best. Make sure to serve with some very yummy jam.
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drivingblind
| 09:42 am - Poblano Corn Chowder
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. This is an alternative version (though not much changed) of a recipe I found by “Mudflower” over on Recipezaar. I change a few methods here and there to make the preparation easier, and often make a one and a half times sized recipe, which just fills our ten quart pot (so you’ll want a reasonably large one even when making the regular amount). The soup that results is really damn good — spicy, for sure, but with a lot of flavor surrounding that heat, lots of nicely developed corn flavor.
You can look at the original recipe if you like at the link above, but I’m going to supply my take on it here, embellished by the experience of making it several times. Takes between 1 and 2 hours to get to the result, depending on how slow you are (I tend to be a bit slow). Enjoy!
Read the rest of this entry »
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December 15th, 2009
nekobasu
| 07:44 pm
"A key feature of Pseudo-Gothic RPGs is that they are overtly counter-cultural in symbolism. Werewolf: The Apocalypse, for example, features the characters engaged in a struggle against big business and corporate capitalism to prevent environmental catastrophe and preserve pristine wilderness. However, this seldom appears to relate to any form of political activism. Rather, the vehicle of RPGs seems to have a normative function akin to Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque.” They represent a space in which people can explore alternate forms of identity and reconcile tensions in real world scenarios without real world consequences. The virtual world of the RPG acts as an outlet for societal tension rather than encouraging behaviour in real world scenarios." David Waldron
I don't know if my livejournal is really the best place to respond to a 5-year old article, but my limited contact with Bakhtin suggests that carnivalesque events needn't be purely normative. The carnival can be a place to whip up an angry mob as well as a place to blow off steam. Nevertheless, I'm using this article in my exploration of gamer rhetoric. (Not that I engage in material action through my games. There's nothing inherent in the system or its traditions that prevents it though.)
Waldron's main point -- that persecution in the 80's created a united gamer identity -- is pretty interesting. Did having a common enemy drive us together? If so, wasn't it jerks and football rather than Big Media?
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drivingblind
| 01:39 pm - Some Last Minute Gift Ideas
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. I tend to leave my Tuesdays and Thursdays blank on Deadly Fredly; it doesn’t look like I have it in me to post daily, at least not yet. Need to get those creaky-tired muscles operational again, and need to leave time for stuff that isn’t blogging. You know, the stuff that gets me paid. As such you’ll see me occasionally fill these days with really short posts-of-the-moment, while the Monday/Wednesday/Friday stuff gets some greater length and forethought.
Today I push two things at you that deserve your money, and which may well work as excellent, cheap, last minute gifts.
I’ll likely return to these subjects again in later posts, but for now, I’m focusing solely on putting them out there and getting your eyeballs on ‘em.
Jennifer Rodgers’ Etsy Store: Jennifer is one of my favorite people and a very talented artist. When it turned out that we wanted to go for color in the Dresden Files RPG instead of our original notions of a black and white book, Jennifer’s the first artist I thought of, and with good reason: she has an incredible eye for color, and her art trends towards the twisted, supernatural, and dark. All good things in my book, and she did not disappoint with the DF work. Her Etsy store features gift cards and the occasional print or other art object. Anyway: Give her your dollars, stat, via her store!
Josh Roby’s Rooksbridge: Josh has designed some great games that bang around in the “indie” scene — Full Light, Full Steam and Sons of Liberty to name two. But so what? He has clearly missed, and now hopefully found, his calling as a fiction writer. Rooksbridge is his venture into this, publishing a series of interlinked but free-standing short stories set in a fantasy world that’s a lot of dirt and politics and a little bit of magic. Sort of like an episodic fantasy TV show in text form. Really solid stuff. I’m still reading through the stories, but I was taken with the free-in-PDF story Dirty Work and I think you will be, too. (I’m less taken with the audio versions of the fiction so far but there’s a lot that goes into whether or not that presentation will click for an individual. For my taset I’d rather Josh focus on the text alone.) The rest of the Rooksbridge stories can be bought cheaply, which makes them perfect stocking stuffers in an age when stockings can be virtual and your friends and family are scattered all over creation. Take a few minutes to become part of the Rooksbridge audience — if not as a holiday present to you or family and friends, then as a present to Josh for the work he’s doing here. It’s worth noting (and perhaps legally mandated) that I mention that I got my hands on the Rooksbridge stories for free via Josh, but there’s no way in hell I’d be talking about them if they hadn’t punched my buttons.
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cthuljew
 | 07:27 am
(03:01:44 AM) Amy: I just lost a bowl of soup
(03:01:50 AM) Amy: like...where is it?!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/acedia/littlegent/blah.gif) awake
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December 14th, 2009
nekobasu
| 08:38 pm
That's one stack out of the way. Time to reward myself with an episode of something, a dinner of something else, and a few questions that have been asked of me. Anyone else want to add to the heap? I'll answer until I run out of words.
1. There's another national anthem playing. What are the words?
Huzzah for Underground America,
we've got lava and big rocks.
If you disrespect us,
we'll knock off your socks!
Mole people mole people mole people
crystal laser centrifuge, k-zap!
Come visit us sometime, we're nice!
but bring special shoes -- we all walk upside doooo~ooown!
It's the marimba solo between verses three and four that make it.
2. If you could make a plucky underdog movie about any sport (or non-sport), what would it be?
Robot battles, in a world halfway between Bumpy Trot and Harry Potter, with the occasional dash of Girl Genius. It would be totally original though!
The plucky junkyard orphans would build a trash titan out of junked military surplus and enter it in a demonstration at the Luxford Institute for Applied Esoteric Sciences. The well-schooled nerds would put up a fight, but in the end... I think we know who the real winners will be: not the anarchist diamond-smugglers who were using the contest as a cover to transport their ill-gotten gains and run the queen over with a trainbot!
3. If you could eat a dish made from any real or imaginary product, what would it be?
Shoopuf burger. It would taste like the world's most awesome steak, and also marshmallow. Lettuce, tomato, grilled onion, blue cheese, mustard, ketchup, pickles, and pepperjack on a sesame seed lembas bun. Served with a side of fried pickles and hollandaise sauce.
4. What's your favorite fish?
The chubby tuna. It is the best friend that a hero could have. Second place: The wind fish. It sleeps alla time and has good dreams, just like me!
5. What's your least favorite fish?
Rotting beach-fish. I think that's what they're called, anyway. They get onto the sand at popular beaches and start rotting, making the whole place an open-air fish graveyard.
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drivingblind
| 06:24 pm - THWR Episode 6
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. [1h 2m 5s] Fred and Chris catch up on the last three months, including the impending release of the Dresden Files RPG at Origins 2010 and Chris’s impotent rage about not getting to order Jeni’s Ice Creams for delivery. Then on to talk about how they won’t be picking up on last episode’s cliffhanger and instead focusing talking about VSCA’s approach to publishing with Diaspora (the good and the bad) and Games Workshop’s surprising attitude towards its fans.
MP3 download: http://media.libsyn.com/media/thatshowweroll/Thats_How_We_Roll_S2E6_-_Catchin.mp3
Episode Post: http://thatshowweroll.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=560092
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ptpenguino
 | 02:53 pm - nerve misfire?
My back has been bothering me a bit over the past few days. This morning I woke up feeling pretty good, hardly any soreness or stiffness, beyond the usual waking-up routine. No limits in my range of movement everything seemed fine. And it was, until lumchtime. I was finished eating, and getting up... It felt as though I had poured cold water all down my right side. I reached around to feel with my left hand, my shirt, sweater, and skin were all dry. This is the "worst" symptom I have experienced with my spine & its tangled nerve-tree in years (worse than crippling pain? At least pain feels like what it is and can be dealt with accordingly... What to do about imaginary water?
Current Location: Wandering...
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raptavio
 | 11:29 am - Hate
I've been meaning to spew out a little philosophical treatise on hate and I haven't really had the time.
But I did want to note that I've seen out in Right Wing World the occasional report of some incident on some airline where Muslims were involved and this was supposedly evidence of a "dry run" of a future hijacking. Invariably, the hateful little people reading these reports begin chest-thumping about how they'd never let those Muzzies get the better of them, how they shouldn't let muslims (and sometimes, black men) on planes, and the invariable explanations of why Muslims are all evil and anti-American.
When people hate, they shut off their critical thinking abilities. The stories don't even begin to pass the smell test. One would think a little Google search would come up with some results, and ever-faithful Snopes is there:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/flight297.asp
Stories like these have circulated now and then, of course, e.g. http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/skyterror.asp - http://www.snopes.com/rumors/atonement.asp - two debunked stories - and http://www.snopes.com/rumors/soapbox/worryme.asp for an example of apocryphal letters stoking the fires.
It's kind of sad and pathetic that small, frightened, powerless people are so desperate to find a reason to justify their fear and to find someone to hate and blame for their own powerlessness that they rush to cling to these stories despite their obvious falsity.
What's sadder is that if you find people who believe in this, and present them with the Snopes-gathered evidence, they will claim A) it doesn't matter because Muslims are dangerous anyway and will do it again the next chance they have, B) Snopes is biased and not trustworthy, or C) It's all just a big cover-up by the (choose one) Obamanation/TOTUS Reader/Communistmuslimfakepresident to aid the terrorists in destroying America, in ascending order of crazy.
Hate poisons the mind as much as it poisons the soul. It turns wisdom into foolishness as surely as it turns goodness into evil.
An abject lesson for people on all sides of the political spectrum: Hate makes you stupid. Don't get stupid. (The thesis of the post I want to make but don't really have time.)
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drivingblind
| 08:23 am - No Silent Fan
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. I’m a loud guy. This is mostly true in person, but completely true online. I talk about what I like a lot, and at volume. This blog is a part of that, but so’s Twitter and elsewhere. I do my best not to push my way into faces that aren’t looking to hear me run my yap, but those who do will find themselves hit with a big wall of text.
Looking at this from a completely mercenary perspective, being loud in this fashion is very much about establishing a presence and a “brand of me”. In the Internet Age, silence is equivalent to invisibility. You might be out there producing great things and doing interesting stuff, but if you aren’t talking about it, and if other people aren’t talking about it, it may as well not be happening. Audience is king.
But beyond the whole “I’m loud so I’m seen” thing, I’m also loud in service of the things I like and love. I’m loud so those things are seen, too.
Read the rest of this entry »
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December 13th, 2009
raptavio
 | 12:01 am - Meh
I'm posting at a quarter to midnight on Saturday because I wanted to post before I went to bed because I just need to do something besides work.
I've been working. A lot. I have three jobs right now. One is ten hours a week. One is forty-plus-give-me-every-hour-you-can-spare. The other is omfg-please-for-the-love-of-God-help-get-this-project-finished.
Pretty much for the last two weeks it's been work/sleep/work/sleep. Next week should be no less so.
Today was an exception: I effed off the day, and had dinner with my dad's widow, her mom and her daughter. Just because I needed a break, and well, the dinner was planned as it would be Dad's 70th birthday and so I wasn't in the mood to work and I was missing my dad a lot. Go fig, lack of motivation, yay.
But I worked when I came home to clear the damn get-this-project-finished thing off my plate. Tomorrow I need to put in the majority of those ten hours a week - meaning the please-give-me-every-hour-you-can-spare gets shafted which is bad because we're up against an impossible deadline.
The only real bright spot here is I get paid by the hour which means I'm going to be making up for a lot of lost time in Oct and Nov with all I'm pulling in. I won't be so gauche as to say how much, but let's just say there's a bit of a feeling of guilt seeing some of my friends have to deal with poverty while I'm raking it in. (And I don't check LJ nearly enough because I'm so busy, because I missed an opportunity to help one or two out -- such opportunities always soothe my guilty conscience so I tend to jump at them.)
Oh, I also skidded on the ice and hit a school bus at about three miles per hour on Thursday. That ruined my day because it ruined my car's cheap ass plastic grill. Two accidents in one year, both my fault! Go go gadget arrgh! At least the bus was unharmed.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/marcus/beheadedboy/88.gif) laptop eating my face
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December 12th, 2009
cthuljew
| 07:26 am - Uploading
It struck me just now that there is one way in which I would allow my consciousness to be transferred to a machine.
Detour: I would not be willing to use a teletransporter that copied my entire physical form, sent the data to another terminal which reconstituted me, and then destroyed the original. Although I have no philosophical objections to this happening, I find the idea highly emotionally disturbing and would never go through with it. For that matter, even if the original wasn't destroyed but was rather pulled apart and transferred, I still wouldn't do it for reasons I think are obvious.
So: I would not be willing to be, say, put to sleep, have my brain scanned, then be uploaded to a machine and have my body destroyed. I would not object, of course, to having a copy of my mind made, to be run later or used as a sort of back up. However, there is a way I would be willing to actually abandon my body and live in a virtual world (assuming of course all assurances of liberty and safety, etc). If my various faculties — sight, hearing, language, independent limb motor control — were to be transfered one by one to an emulator running on a computer connected to the various sensors and devices which would temporarily mimic said faculties, I would be able to track the progress of my mind from my head to the computer. I imagine the process something rather like this:
I sit down in the chair, my head shaved and access plugs and sub-cranial scanning mesh installed. The technician behind me takes one long wire and inserts the end of it into the plug square in the back of my head. He asks me if I'm ready. I take a deep breath and then nod. I hear a switch flip, and then I vomit. My body thinks that I'm having a stroke, or have an eyeball knocked out of its socket, or am spinning faster than my eyes can focus on anything. After a few moments, I start to orient myself. I am looking ahead, at a large black box, the size of a television set, with a forest of instruments sticking out of it. I also see my body, sitting in a chair, a host of medical equipment and one technician behind me. I raise my right hand from the arm of the chair, and see it both out the corner of my eye and from across the room simultaneously. Finally, I come to grips with the fact: my brain is getting direct data from a video camera hooked up to a computer. The technician asks me again if I'm ready. I've long ago memorized the sequence of the procedure. I hear another switch flip and a loud humming, and slowly my vision of the computer in front of me fades. However, I can still clearly see my body. Nothing has changed, but that the part of my brain which receives data from my eyes has temporarily stopped working. Luckily, I am hooked up to a camera, which replaces the function of the eyes, and a computer, which now hosts the software needed to interface between eyes and cognitive and reflexive areas of the brain. The technician inserts another wire into the top left of my skull. Now I feel as if I have a third arm. I move the arm on my body, and it responds as it should. Then I move this new appendage, and see something wave in from of my new field of vision. It is a robot arm, identical in shape and construction to my natural arm. When the inhibitor is turned on, it prevents my brain from sending signals to my muscles, and I am no longer able to control my fleshy right arm. But I can still quite easily control both my left arm and the robot arm to the right of my field of vision. This continues — left arm, left leg, right leg, diaphragm — until every part of my brain has been mapped, transferred, and inhibited. Now comes the final moment. Up to now, I have been physically connected to all of my wetware. I could have, at a moment's notice, regained control of any part of my brain. But now the technician removes the first wire he inserted. My visual cortex is completely dormant and no longer connected to the computer, yet I can still see my body — I am still connected to my body — and I can still feel every part of it as if I'm still in my brain.
And so on. In this way, there would be no point at which I could feel "myself" "die" or disappear. I would simply phase from one substrate to another, and be awake and (at least nominally) in control the entire time. Of course, none of this might ever be possible, but since I am reading Accelerando by Charles Stross and thinking about mind and brain and computer and Singularity I figured I'd put my thoughts on metaphorical paper.
Also, hello LiveJournal. (Test, test. Is this thing on?)
Current Location: Work
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/acedia/littlegent/sleepy.gif) sleepy
Current Music: None
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December 11th, 2009
princeofcairo
 | 02:49 pm - Delightful Deep Ones? There's An App For That
Thanks to Derek "Monsieur Le SuperCool" Pearcy, you can now get a Where the Deep Ones Are as an iPhone or iPod Touch app.
I honestly have no idea what clicking that link will lead to on your end; on mine, it opened the iTunes Store to the app's sales page, which is probably right. But I'm sure a minimum of faffing around on iTunes will uncover it, too.
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nekobasu
| 12:22 pm
One of my favorite aspects of Seaguy is that every time that I read a new review, the author says something like "there's lots of symbolism, but this is a thematically uncomplicated work" or "unlike most of Grant Morrison's output, Seaguy is easy to comprehend."
Inevitably, everyone has a different interpretation.
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ptpenguino
 | 12:15 pm - Us?
Just look like you like each other, okay?
Okay.
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ptpenguino
| 12:06 pm - she never smiles / she's a grump
The receptionist had only so much to say about the lady, daughter of the bossman with the small firm that leases space from our small firm. Miniscule firm! smaller and smaller. Smallest yet is the firm where the attorney and secretary are one & the same person, fulfilling all needs and duties as required.
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