Bored

Internet is down at home. I'm now at the public library. I miss Firefox.Ctrl+f? pops up a damned window instead of searching while I type!No tabs!The address bar as a search thing? Gives me some pos microsoft search thing that is most definately not based on an analysis of usage patterns. If I wanted dumb search I'd have gone to altavista. At least they aren't noticably filtered.Gir!

I keep coming back to this comic.


from xkcd.com

Baby Toolkit: A Year's Worth of Fun: Giving Kids' Magazines

Baby Toolkit: A Year's Worth of Fun: Giving Kids' Magazines
Depending on the kid and the parents, for about the 12+ crowd, another great set would be F&SF, Analogue, Asimov's, Ellery Quinn's Mystery Magazine, Interzone, etc.

This is one where you'd have to be sure to check with the parents first, since they don't have the same level of content filtering that the ones aimed primarily at kids, though I've reread some of the things I read at 12, and I glossed over the bits that might worry parents.

I for one, wish I had known these magazines existed at that age. The fantasy and SF magazines still have a real sense of wonder about their stories that make them a joy for kids and adults.

posted here first because livejournal has a truly obnoxious password system

With the recent announcement that Dumbledore is gay Rowling has thrown open the doors to a brand new original wave of Harry Potter slash fic. The slash community held its collective breath at the news before they rushed to start working on their new grand masterpieces based on a whole new unexplored field of Harry Potter Fan Fic.

Just a second, my assistant seems to want to show me something.

What?
Wait! The timestamp on that one is before the first book was even...
Oh my GOD ARRGH! The grammarmakes me bleed!
I'm fairly sure that is not physically possible.

I have just been informed that, indeed, there was actually slash fic that assumed that Dumbledore was gay dating before this recent announcement, and all the way back to the origins of HP fan fiction. And GAH! Some of these folks made a horrible mishmash of Rule 35, Harry Potter, and a language not quite completely unlike modern English. Also? they need to buy some anatomy books or something.

Hee hee! Curry flavored (read turmeric and coriander) chicken/rice pilaf for lunch.

Also? The standard deviation on primary stats for Fatal is on the order of 8 points. The stat range is almost about 200 points wide.

444 miles to Rivendell

From pope_guilty
I run into this review every so often on the net. Fatal: Quite possibly the worst RPG ever. And not funny like Kill Puppies of Satan


Hey Scott, you are mentioned as potential backup to keep the authors from climbing a bell tower with a rifle.

:(

I was reading BoingBoing today when I ran across this.

Ugh. I googled the situation, and she seems to be pulling an Orson Scott Card here. She asked Andrew Burt to contact Cory over this, which got absolutely no results since Burt is in Cory's kill file due to his blackhatish actions. She should have tried to contact Cory herself instead of sending one of the bad guys to do it.

*sigh* I hate it when my heroes fall. Card, Ellison, Bradbury, and now possibly Le Guin.

"Regan won the Cold War and lost his mind."

some people have the oddest questions

this was a question of the D&D website's feature "save my game"

"My games have been bogging down recently due to what I believe is my players’ uncanny ability to focus on the mundane. For example, when I established a base of operations for the group, two hours later they were still arguing over whether to hire skilled or unskilled labor to fix the place up. Another time I designed a goblin mook for an encounter, and made the mistake of naming it. My players kept on slowing down the game to discuss the fate of this obviously important NPC. How do I get them to stop going off into these annoying tangents?"

Dude! If your players spend two hours talking about how to set up their base of operations or use all of their headspace pondering the fate of a throw off NPC? You just won the game. I mean seriously, not only have you won thos round, but you were just handed the lever that is going to let you build the next one with a minimal amount of work from you and a maximal amount of involvement from them.

If they focus so hard on the workers? Time to have a plot involving one of them. Maybe a thief gets the layout of the base from one of the people that they spent so much time worrying about. Maybe they picked the unskilled labor and now the guilds of the city are up in arms that they didn't use guild labor.

As for the goblin? "Hello, My Name is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father: Prepare to Die!"

Any adventure that ends with me having almost all of my prepared materials still unused? It is a win.

Library Trip

Went to the library today. Ugh their classification system is maddening. SF and YA are right next to each other, and a number of books that should be in the SF section are in the YA section. I'd not have a problem with them being in the YA section (mostly the Dresden Files books maybe aren't YA at all. I'm waiting to see if Red Seas Under Red Skies ends up there in a month or three. I mean it is sort of an adventure story) except that other book in the same series are in the SF section. This makes it rather hard to keep track. Also the patrons apparently do a lot of reshelving themselves and it is less than skillful. I'm by no means an obsessive order type. (Perish the though. Ask anyone who knows me. Make sure there is no food or drink in their mouths first though, unless you wish to wear it.) That said, I've been rearranging books to put all of the stuff by a given author adjacent to each other. You know, casually, and I'm not seeking it out, but when I notice, I fix it. (Well and also I've reordered series stuff so that they were in order. Looks like they need a full time person or two to do just those two tasks. I'd be good at it, though I'd probably not actually enjoy it.)

Oh yeah, the whole point of this post.

I grabbed the next several Babylon 5 disks, the next Sarah Monette that I haven't read, an Eberron Hardback, the Ghost in the Shell TPB, Wen Spencer's A brother's Price (I've read it, but I want to see if some of the questions that have been bugging me about it are answered on a more careful reading of the text. Silly genetics/ecology classes.) And I grabbed a starter set of Tamora Pierce books, First Test, Magic Steps, Trickster's Choice, Page, and Alanna The First Adventure. Mostly the first books of a number of series. I've been running into her in various places about live journal, and thought that I ought to try to read a few of her books. It's why I read the E.Bear stuff and the S.Monette stuff. Left over from the previous trips are a bunch of books on board game design, a Michael Stackpole, the Lackey/Guon Wingcommander, and several Warhammer 40k books) Eek, I need to finish writing my brief reviews and post the 3rd quarter list in the next couple of days.

451.5 miles to Rivendell

Miles to go

I mirrored this journal over on blogger back in February,but lacking decent double posting software, I didn't keep up with it. A friend of mine who had thought I'd dropped off the face of the Earth because of that inspired me to update. Instead, I deleted the whole mirror and blogger has a pain in the butt limit on automated posts using the API. It limits you to 50 a day. I have 750 left. Ugh.

Also? I am going to do the miles to Rivendell thing, based on time walking and assuming 20 minutes a mile. Me being me, I already have a spreadsheet to keep track of these things. (I love spreadsheets. I wish I had the stats package one I used in Oregon instead of Excel, but you can't have everything if you are unwilling to pay for or steal it.)

Miles to Rivendell 456.5