boom de ah dah

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/260910.html
So XKCD often takes inspiration from other places. Usually it adds awesome to whatever it is based on.
Today's: http://xkcd.com/442/ would have, except, well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0 is hard to best. (There are some damned good fan vid attempts though.)

Faans Mark 2

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/260688.html

Gods, Faans is as good as it ever was. "It is not a slippery slope from here to Heinlein"

Faans!!!!

The drill, you know it: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/260367.html
There is new Fans!
http://www.faans.com/index.php?p=1628
(link goes to first page of new story.)

GSL

Snarked: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/260188.html

So the GSL is out. It has a major poison pill clause, a we can unilaterally revise without warning clause, several incredibly stupid restrictions on what sorts of products you can sell as gsl material, a "you can't reference page numbers or print stat blocks from our books in the products you are writing to make our books sell better" clause, and several other things that remind me of the bad old days when TSR was busy burning their bridges with their support community and crashing and burning. Add to that the incredibly poor showing of the DDI material, some rules that seem to have had any mathematical analysis done, and been either not play tested or the playtesters were ignored, and an odd mismash of finicky detail and giant gaping holes in the material, much of which will be released in the dribbleware manuals that come next, and you have an incredibly painful turn of events for a company that we were coming to like again. Fucking Hasbro. (The buzz is that the folks in charge didn't want even the GSL that we got, which would explain why it seems like they designed it to encourage people not to use their product. Which is bad enough. Then add the fact that their release was both buggy and delayed, and then add the fact that a partner they screwed over last year is releasing a modified version of the 3.5 rules that seems to be doing things pretty right, and you have a shot in the foot for the fun of it situation over at Wizards.)

Totally OMG

initially posted: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/260044.html

So, I've been watching Oh My Goddess TV. I'm at the end of the second series, into the post climax filler episodes where they do one of the minor story arcs per episode. This particular episode is all about Peorth trying to get Keichi to tell Belldandy that he loves her. I know. you are thinking "Michael, so what? It is a romantic comedy series. They all have an episode or four like that."
Well, the problem is that he already has, repeatedly and on screen. And not always in response to stress stimuli. Goo.

RE: W3C

Posted at http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/259758.html first.

I know that when I am confused about the intended meaning of something on a website, my first resort is going to "view page source" so I can see exactly how the tags were set up. That is where all information about meaning is carried, not in context, word choice, and formatting.

Dialogues

Well, I usually post my posts both here and on my main blog over in live journal land, but I may eventually decide that I want these two to be behind a friends lock, depending on what I end up doing with them, so for now, just links to the LJ.

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/259122.html

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/259467.html

Firefoxing

from: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/259003.html
So I just installed firefox 3 preview 2. I like it so far, but it did break my live bookmark wrapping thingy. The new code is less elegant and a little pickier than the old code.
To have bookmarks wrap to a new line in the new edition insert

/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar for Fx3b5pre*/
#bookmarksBarContent
{display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items
{display:block !important;
height: 43px !important;
overflow-y:auto !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator
{display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item
{visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}

this into your userChrome.css file. The height line will probably need to be fiddled with to work with your display settings though.
Also? when I went to about:config it gave me this wonderful warning message:
firefoxwarning

I don't wanna be a po-litical commentator....

First seen: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/258587.html
Hum... So Clinton is scheduled to make/has already made her concession speech today. On the one hand I'm actually pretty happy. We are getting a candidate who is quite a bit more liberal than she is. It is nice that the campaign will get to shift from trying to beat other democrats to beating Bush Mk3.
On the other hand, it means that the right's PR machine is going to be kicking into high gear. So far, most of the attacks on the democrats have been diffuse and targeted at the true believers. The McCain campaign hasn't been able to effectively push their message because it has to be wrapped in oppositional terms and there hasn't been a single person to cast as the opposition. At the same time, both Clinton and Obama have been able to get their messages out to the general public, and (more on Obama's side than Clinton's) have been reinforcing each other's core positions, the places where they both opposed McCain's position, though possibly in different ways. Even though they may have been arguing positions y1 and y2, both ys stood directly in opposition to McCain's x position. Essentially, while they were running against each other, they grabbed more than half, possibly even more than 2/3rds of the media space available to candidates. Now that they aren't both in the running, there will likely be a readjustment, giving McCain Half (in a world where the media wasn't owned by a relatively few white rich conservatives) or more (in a world more like our own) of the communications space.

So far, the left has been running campaigns against people who agree with their core message. We'll get to see how well they do running against people who don't and are willing to lie to oppose it.