DirectX follow up

[For the record WotC has not said 'only windows'. They're just using a graphics tool set, DirectX, that is owned by Microsoft and, so far as I understand, only available on Windows.]

In the prior post I linked to Ryan D's post about how WotC made a mistake by not thinking in terms of groups in deciding to make their online gaming tool 'windows only'. I think it's a valid argument, but I also think that WotC isn't trying to facilitate gaming-over-the-net. They're just trying to make a run at World of Warcraft. For a division like WotC even 1% of the x millions of dollars that Blizzard is pulling in has to be a huge attraction. And that means flashy graphics, which means DirectX*.

Why does this matter?
I was trying to slice up my group among windows and non-windows users and I realized that there was one common denominator. Serious gamers (video gamers) all have windows computers. Because computer games are really only released for windows machines.

Lots of people who play WoW use non-windows stuff, but if you're a gamer (i.e. you regularly buy and play games for your computer) then you're either a windows user or have a solution of some sort (usually dual booting to windows).

*=More likely they hired somebody who only knows DirectX and then asked them 'what do you want to use'? It's relatively easy to make a platform that runs on multiple systems (even if the non-windows stuff isn't as pretty).
But WotC isn't a computer company, and historically their competency in this space is limited. (I was trying to find a link to the Dungeon Tools thing they released with 3.0 but it seems to have disappeared from the internet; it was a classic example of a non-tech savvy company wading part way into the 'internet space' getting hopelessly lost and just abandoning the effort completely)
So they're stuck trying to develop something which will be 'DirectX only'.

Sometimes you realize you really are weird

I don't mean weird in a good/bad/cool/uncool sense. Just in a different-than-other-people since. Recently WotC announced* that they're going to have a tool to play DnD over the 'net. But it only works for Windows. My response was, "people still use windows?"

Now, obviously, they do use windows. My mom uses windows. I still use windows at work.

But I don't use it at home. I can't imagine using it at home. I was about to post an angry post asking "what do you use? XP-which-is-about-to-be-discontinued-by-MS? Vista-which-is-XP-with-fancy-graphics,-more-system-requirements-and-a-higher-price-tag?"

Naturally I realized that would be a dumb post and restrained myself**. But I felt a gulf between myself and my fellow EnWorld posters (and it's weird to feel that when you're on a message board that self-selects for players of a specific game in a niche hobby).

*Where announced equals wrote down on the internet somewhere and it was pounced on by a rabid Mac fan.

**OK. So maybe I didn't. But I thought about restraining myself. And nobody decided to respond to my flamebait so it's like I didn't post. Right?

I'm back

This will last for about a day... but anyway.

Cause of Dungeon and Dragon Cancellations

One of the "core" assumptions of this post (profitability of the magazines) has been refuted by someone who would know.
I'm still a bit of a doubting Thomas regarding the degree of profitabilty. But I'll look at that some other time (maybe). The core piece of information is that the decision was apparently unilateral.
I'll leave the rest of the original post up (below) in the spirit of preservation.

Cause of Dungeon and Dragon Cancellations
Subtitle: Wizards was probably as surprised as everyone else.
The question, for me at least, is what caused the sudden cancellation of Dragon and Dungeon? The outcome seems disadvantageous to one decision maker (Paizo) and neutral-to-mildly-bad to another (Wizards). When two actors get together to make a decision that seems sub-optimal for both of them it’s basically time to deploy (a simple version of) game theory.
I think it’s relatively easy to demonstrate that the cancellation of Dungeon and Dragon was the only possible outcome given the payoffs for Paizo and Wizards. I think it’s also fairly apparent that Wizards wasn’t the main driver of this truck.

Background
It’s the end of the golden age (as I’ve called it in the past) for DnD. Dungeon, which had been a resource non-parallel for DMs for the past 5+ years is a solid magazine with a small but loyal readership.Dragon, however has (probably) been performing poorly. I’ll talk a little bit about the causes of dragon’s weak sales but the signs are all there. I stopped reading it regularly a long time ago, but still evaluate it most months and from both the aggressive “promoing” (free sorc on black dragon) and tie-in’s with both Dungeon’s Adventure Path and the “we guarantee Eberron and FR content in every issue” stuff recently I think wasn’t the only one. Likewise the proliferation of regular advertorials for gaming product suggests a “revenue squeeze”.

The coming battle for the only remaining market: Adventures
I think the crux of the issue was that the quality of Dungeon had been so high, and the price so reasonable that it’s basically completely starved the adventure market. When Wizards was into producing non-adventures this was good for them. But the oversupply of crunch has harmed their ability to sell books by adding a couple of extra feats (I also see this as the root of the problems with Dragon). So they shifted to adventures… Paizo’s success with the compilation of their first adventure project suggested that the sector had legs and the area was free of serious competition due to the dungeon effect.

Once they got in (probably after some market research) and started going with their Expedition to… series wizard’s realized they did have a competitor they needed to worry about. Paizo itself. Paizo's adventure path's when collected, were a serious threat... already paid for they could be priced reasonably cheaply and tie up a whole gaming group for a year.
So Wizards blocks them from releasing a second Adventure Path.


The Negotiations
WotC and Paizo get together and negotiate (prompted by the upcoming expiration of their contract). They're in very different postions.

Wizard’s Ace(s)
The key thing to understand is that Wizards’ holds all the cards and this is why they lose. The rules of the game mean that they have to play their cards to their maximum strength, and Paizo knows it. So Paizo picks from the best of a bad lot and go with an option that Wizards probably didn't anticipate.
Wizards' already have a contract that allows them to control Paizo’s publishing schedule (see: preventing them from releasing an Age of Worms collected hardcover, etc.), control the future publishing of anything that's already appeared in Dungeon or Dragon (see: no new releases of any Dungeon related material after the Paizo license expires), 100% control of all the IP (Greyhawk, FR, etc) and so forth.
Dragon and Dungeon continue to be barely profit making (or possibly unprofitable in Dragon’s case) but they aren’t on wizards balance sheet so that’s not an issue from wizard's standpoint; they may be making marketing payouts for specific features and providing free articles by staff or freelancers but those are one time marketing expenses (and small ones). Wizards’ products get fawned over in advertorials in Dragon, support materials for that appease various segments of their fan base are produced at minimal cost.
They’d like things to continue on ‘as-is’.

Paizo’s Position
Obliviously Paizo’s in an awkward spot; they aren't consistently profitable.
Dragon isn’t doing well. Dungeon is, but it’s only targeted at DMs (a much smaller base). They’ve been working on diversifying but, outside of Dungeon and Dragon they’re just another OGL publisher/online vendor. The Adventure Paths hardbacks are their ticket to “real” publisher status (and since they’re already paid for with a built in audience, very attractive on a risk basis).

The love their roll as “gatekeeper” to DnD; they have an excellent position with greater access to the casual DnD player than anybody (and I mean anybody, they probably have 10 times more exposure than Green Ronin or Necromancer). But they’re constrained by agreements with Wizards, almost certainly extremely restrictive ones. And they’re trapped on a very rapidly moving hamster wheel: they need people to buy their mags, every month.

The more IP they produce for wizards the worse their position gets. If they were still an internal unit and a cool adventure they produced using Aboleth glyphs drove up sales of the (excellent) Lords of Madness book they could fight for revenue…. Not an option as a 3rd party publisher. They’re fulfilling the core function of the mags in the DnD brand (drive sales, keep excitement up) but they don’t see the profit. Heck, they may be paying wizards for the privilege.

And that guy who spends 30+ dollars on the Lords of Madness may pass on the next issue of Dragon. And the hamster wheel is spinning faster and faster but each day they get a little bit less cheese.(Do hampster’s each cheese? I dunno. It’s a metaphor…)

The Meeting
So Paizo comes in, Wizards says “let’s keep this going as is” (maybe they bring up an internet component maybe they don’t) and Paizo says “No.”
Wizards: You’re nothing really without us, you’re only what you are because we make you official and let you play in our sandbox
Paizo: We need more freedom, we need to produce more supplements
Wizards: No can do, it messes up the schedule having too many “official” adventures out. Stick to the mags
Paizo: It’s not enough, revenue is too choppy, we’re trying to branch out; we need more freedom to build on what we've got
Wizards: Dragon and Dungeon are too important to our brand to let you have that sort of freedom; let’s talk again once you’ve helped us launch this internet thing next year. For now, stick to the mags and whatever OGL stuff you’ve got going on the side.

And Paizo jumps.

Wizards is shocked.
Paizo was supposed to be a magazine publisher… Why won’t they stick to publishing magazines?
They love Dragon/Dungeon. How could they do something that would destroy Dragon/Dungeon?
Eric Mona loves Greyhawk…. He’d never accept the loss of the ability to do Greyhawk stuff…

For Wizards it’s probably a bit like watching your friend blow of his own leg with a shotgun and then insist he’s going to “walk home by himself”.

Fallout

Wizard's Delimma
Internally nobody’s really happy with things, but nobody’s in a position to get a buy in from Hasbro to re-negotiate with Paizo in a more fluid fashion. What would they do anyway? Bring Paizo back in from the cold? That would wreck budgets and introduce massive personnel issues. They’d probably have to promise to kill Dragon and/or Dungeon to get it approved anyway.

Wizards doesn’t have a decent press response because they don’t have decent market response. [I give them points for not trying to come up with anything either. Product talks and hype walks. Controling the hype here was the best option.]

How bad does Paizo's position look?
Horrible.

• They’re producing roughly the same number of pages per month (mags are about half ads and they dropped one mag and all the adds) [this is good.]
• They have basic infrastructure for distribution [also good.]
• They have no official content
• They don’t even have their own OGL content.
• They’re at a bizarre price point. 20 bucks is about the price that people stop impulse buying and begin to start counting pages (“I’ll buy that next month, if nothing better comes out” or “for 5 or 10 bucks I could have a hardback WotC adventure” ).
• They have no branding (Pathfinder? ugh terrible movie), and no IP.

Who’re you going to convert?

• People who bought Dungeon and Dragon every month. It’s theoretically the same cost for these people, and the same number of pages... but those people were probably “variety people”, who liked lots of different things, or completeists (possibly the dreaded “official content only” completists). Having one book about giants-in-cold-mountains isn’t going to appeal.
• Adventure Path followers are, of course, your best buddies. But 240 bucks a year is, well, it’s a grotesque price to pay. If you’re counting by “campaign” it’s still more than triple the going rate.
• Nobody else (?)

How Bad is Paizo's position really?

Sometimes you have to think backwards to get where you need to be… so think about it like this. What series of supplements

• Comes out monthly?
• Is based in a single campaign setting?
• Has a theme for each monthly product?
  

Yeah, that's right. Paizo is gunning for Eberron.

If you’ve been coughing out 35 bucks a month for some hacked together retread with a few extra dollops of cream by Keith Baker or some other talented freelancer (and you’re getting a bit sick of it) Paizo’s in a position to offer you a better deal.

A new campaign setting, produced by seasoned pros, with first rate Wayne Reynolds artwork, delivered right to your door, slavishly tended by a company that is swearing to do nothing but carefully nurture the IP you’re investing emotionally in, and… it’ll be ~30% cheaper to boot.

That rushing sound you hear is Eric Mona turning every single browie-point he’s ever received for “keeping the Greyhawk flame alive”.

You’re probably saying “Varisia”? I can’t even pronounce it… to which I say…

“I couldn’t even pronounce Eberron when it started…”

Econo-war in SPAAACE

It's actually thrilling to see economics debated in public. Especially when it involves Jedi! Mankiw is right too! [you're not agreeing with him because he's quoting Star Wars are you? no. because he's part of the conservative establishment, which would make him Darth Vader. I'm not talking about that. Star wars geeks support each other? Exactly.]

MSRP

Everyone (do you mean every economics blog you read? that too) is talking about a possible rollback of the anti-trust laws. Specifically allowing manufacturers to set price floors. Even Mankiw thinks it's a good idea.

To which I can only say: Are they nuts?

The electronic stores that are the most expensive, generally speaking, have terrible service. Unlike the bored and/or indifferent help at a lower end retailer their sales help is uninformed and pushy.

Assume the producer sets a price floor, and you now can afford to spend more on sales staff. You have three options
1. Do nothing pocket the extra cash as profit
2. Hire aggressive sales staff and give them bigger commissions
3. Hire knowledgeable and polite sales staff and reward them based on the quality of service they provide

It is -possible- that retailers will choose 3. but I'm doubtful.

Mockery of Philosophy

...is funny!

(Computer) Utopia Comith

So Ubuntu 7.04 has moved to beta and Firefox 3 is stable in alpha (you've tried it for five minutes! it's been a very stable five minutes).

Of course Firefox 3 doesn't have much in the way of extensions going yet, but I'm hoping soon. (because otherwise you'll have to figure out how to revert to FF2...? I can do that...)

Seeing politics in movies

This was a very insightful post.

A mini-review of the Algernon Files

[you could call this a mini review of a roleplaying supplement that no-one's heard of. I won't, it's properly tagged as M&M and rpg! you could write a proper review and post it somewhere someone would see it. I shall do no such thing.]

I picked up the Algernon Files recently for Mutants and Masterminds. Making a role-playing product for superhero games is tricky. Most people who want to run superhero games want to write their own super hero comics. The better constructed worlds (Freedom City comes to mind) therefore, are subtly different than a normal comic.
In principal you want to have an interesting, engrossing world with dramatic events and an interesting history without actually having main characters (because those would get in the way of the player characters) or a convoluted back-story (because everybody hates how complex the published DC/Marvel worlds are).

So it's basically impossible to write a great superhero world supplement.

The Algernon Files, well spoken of on the Atomic Think Tank, makes a good effort. There are a few issues with the book. And a few lapses.

Issues
Characters are powerful. The "default" power level for NPCs seems to be around 12, villains of significance are 15+. On the plus side it allows a lot of room for characters to grow. On the negative side the few want to play in a superhero game where everyone (even characters described as "super-powered thugs") is more powerful than you are.

Characters fill roles that should go to PCs. Lots of really good characters, people who are best in class, better than the PCs good looking and loved by the public. Freedom City did a better job of handling this, the Mr. Fantastic type character (Dr. Alexander Atom) is actually just a computer program created by the deceased, by comparison "Doc Steel" is not only alive and active but immortal. And he has two immortal high powered sons...

Similar characters
A lot of characters are misunderstood outcasts with poor social skills. These kinds of characters tend to be bad NPCs. The players don't like interacting with them, their social incompetence often tends to make them the center of attention. The whole "I'm an outsider, society doesn't understand me" is irritating, but a part of solo comic book titles. It's fine for a player to have something like in their character, but it's a bit too prevalent.
There are lots of aliens . I'd have preferred to see more characters and less "I am an alien from X culture. I am defined by my being a member of X culture." Not an alien person I guess.
Lots of mages and magical groups (such as the Magi) are refereed to but never properly explained. Each time they're mentioned the Magi have to be described again, to the point that a short paragraph explaining them (somewhere in the book) would probably have been more efficient. Three of the PL16+ god characters (out of four) are magical. Since magic is really one of the weirder/weaker parts of comic book settings it seems like it would be an unusual area to emphasize.




Lapses

• Editing is poor. Some character descriptions are cut off. Some sentences are duplicated, or substantially identical sentences are strung together.
• The writing is bad [you're criticizing someone else? It is! It's serviceable but definitely below the standards of the industry, such as they are.]
• No complications. I understand the book was originally a 1st edition product, but if they went through the effort they should really have added them to the characters.

Not to say that it's a bad book. There are some strong points, mostly the characters themselves who are colorful and detailed, and several (such as the Aerie) seem like they would be interesting foils for a nacient hero group, once you adjust for power levels. As most people have mentioned Film Noir is a great character.

Active and Passive Participants in Rpging

Sometimes people make really good posts. (The thread itself is worthwhile too)

... the disconnect between me and the rest of my group .... As GM I keep wanting them to have goals -- they keep wanting me to give them assignments. As a player, I keep wanting to follow my goals -- they keep wanting me to go on their assignments. It can be extremely frustrating.

I'm probably similar to the poster in that I'd like to have a storytelling role of some sort, even as a player. Often that isn't possible. Our current Age of Worms game, for example, is linear. To a certain degree it's a puzzle game, where you're really only trying to select between various outcomes.
DnD being DnD some of the outcomes are just better than others (read: the ones that give you more magic items and xp).

A great arguement

I really like Mankiw's blog. He makes a great arguement. [this wouldn't have anything to do with you wanting to tax the **** out of air poluters would it?]

300

I read 300 years ago, in a bookstore, on a lark. I loved it, of course. It was a complete, nuanced story [nuanced? It was a comic where the good guy didn't win]. I didn't remember all the details but compairing the movie with the comic

• I felt like Leonidas was less central in the comic? Obviously he's the main character, but I felt like the other spartan warriors had more of a presence
• It would have been a terrible movie if Gerard Butler hasn't been the king. He handled a lot of little scenes well.
• It could have been a great movie if they had cast a decent actress as the queen.*
• The (mild) homo eroticism of the original comic should have been kept. It's ancient Greece... [you're delusional, they would have been lucky to have made a 10th of the money they took in the US. But it was really mild.]
• The voice-over was too much; I was able to get over it, but they needed to tone it down

*The Queen

It's actually a bit complex. If you'd felt more strongly about her as a character then one scene in particular would have been a lot more difficult for me to watch. If you've spent most of the movie watching her and going "ugh, this woman can't act" it's hard to get worked up about something happening to her character. Maybe she was selected partially to keep the movie more of a popcorn movie?
At the same time she's really the central actor in the movie. Leonidas comes to her for advice, she pushes him to make the right decision, then she hits the political trail, makes tough choices, is betrayed, overcomes it and has a powerful resolution. This was added into the movie (or emphasized) and offered a brilliant storytelling cycle, unfortunately the actress just reads her way through the part.

My wife and I had completely opposite impressions of the sex scenes/T&A factor
I thought the obligatory sex scene was too long (precisely two cuts too long; I was counting). My wife felt that it was actually fine and argued it had significance later in the story. However she didn't like how much breast the queen showed (literally). She felt it wasn't "queen-like".
Generally I'm not in favor of female actors showing lots of skin absent some sort of strong story element (i.e. it's a movie about a hooker or something); however my irritation is based mostly on the fact that guys wear around twice as much clothing as the women and take it off much later in the movie (i.e. you'll see women frolicking in bikini or just bikini bottom when the guys still got pants and a shirt on).
Having said that... this was a movie where the guys were pretty much naked the whole time. I would say that 40-50% of the shots involved multiple six packs trotting around on screen. The queen actress [she probably has a name... She's bad enough that I don't want to know who she is... you're a true progressive. I dislike her for her abilities not her gender] isn't particularly attractive by Hollywood standards so the feeling of T&A was mitigated.

A lot of people have posted that the physically unattractive people being 'bad-guys' is somehow wrong. Personally I don't really buy it in this movie.
Ephialtes is a complex character, obviously gifted (at least smart and brave and hardworking). He makes real choices that affect the environment around him. The ancient world was tough on the handicapped better to have a character struggling with it (and doing service to the story) than just rows upon rows of chisled abs.

Undiscovered HPL

Ken Hite (blog) is one of those peculiar rpg writers who's become-a-figure-of-note in the post-3rd-edition DnD phase. [This random pseudo-English means? It means the time period when the hobby as a whole accepted that system could be divorced from game-world. A sort of golden age when normal gamers began to have a shared vocabulary for breaking down system and play style. Started around 2000 when the third edition of DnD was published.] I would cite Monty Cook as the leader of this trend, with Jonathan Tweet as its little recognized grandfather and people like Baker, Baur, Mearls, and Wyatt (if he ever leaves WotC anyway) as other examples.

He's done a lot of work for a lot of different systems, mostly Call of Cthulhu and Illuminati-type-World-of-Darkness. He also says good things about GURPS, which makes him an iconoclast and deserving of our respect. [You don't suppose he says good things about GURPS because they hire him to write books?]

He's currently going through all the HP Lovecraft stories and, while I've read most since made that a project to do last year, I've been enjoying the excursion and having a structured way to fill out my reading. And I found Cool Air, which is quite fun and less Lovecraftily hard to read. Except for the bad spanish accents he gave some of the characters.

[You should insert a reference to Poe or something here, to make sure that people understand that you understand that he was drawing on different traditions. But I don't understand it.]

Incidentally Hite's also got an infrequently-updated-column; it's probably standard reading for role-playing geeks, or would be if he updated more often.

WSJ proves it has a sense of humor

[is humor the right word? It's not ironic. But it's "ha-ha" funny. I giggled. That is not a meaningful statement. You're not saying it's serious. That's not the same as saying it's humorous.]

Anyway. I thought it was great.

[any comments about the article (WSJ Subscription Required) it appeared in? Uh. Not really no.]

Wait... I have something.

Then, looming over all the campaigns, even those of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, is the most prominent noncandidate, Al Gore. The former vice president has repeatedly told people he isn't running, but prominent local Democrats are making extravagant offers in the hope he'll change his mind.
"I told him I would give him our house in Aspen if he ran," says Mrs. Resnick, the
businesswoman and philanthropist. Mr. Gore's reaction? "He laughed," she says.

This Resnick person is completely insane.

oooh shiny new Republican presidential candidates

I admit it. I don't know who Fred Thomson was. [shouldn't that be is? I don't know. You're the editor.] But the WSJ is pimping him like he's Ronald Regan reborn (WSJ Subscription Required). I liked this comment:

The challenges, he says, are numerous. On Iraq, he admits "we are left with nothing but bad choices." However, he says the "worst choice" would be to have Osama bin Laden proven right when he predicted America wouldn't have the stomach for a tough fight. The costs of Iraq have been high, but they could be even higher "if we have another stain on America like that infamous scene from Saigon 1975 in which our helicopters took off leaving those who supported us grabbing at the landing skids."

I think that's basically right. Not the part about Bin Laden particularly, but the rest of it. [Isn't Bin Laden the point of the sentence? That we're in it for our pride now? It's about commitment. Uh, anything more than that mr.-if-i-put-it-together-in-a-sentence-it-sounds-like-a-logical-thought? Not now. Talking about Thompson.]

This sentence was unintentionally hysterically funny:

Fred Thompson clearly hasn't decided whether to run for president;...

The I'm-running I'm-investigating-but-not-running I'm-not-running-but-the-people-have-chosen-me stuff is just priceless. [I have been completely distracted by your witty banter and have forgotten to follow up on your opinions on Iraq. You'll get your chance later.]

I am (not) l33t

[this is gonna be good]

Stop it.

[was the original heading going to be something else... maybe three letters long?]

I was -almost- l33t.

[And then what happened?]

I failed in my attempt to install the alpha verision of Ubuntu 7.04 and wrecked 24 hours of work.

[Why?]

Because getting sound to work on Ubuntu 6.10 was irritating.

[So you decided to move from the difficult-to-use relatively cutting-edge verision of Ubuntu directly to the alpha-verision-bleeding-edge. Because you thought it would be easier to get the sound working.]

Yeah.

[you rock!]

1/10th of all Americans' don't like to get bad news from women

Most of the time newspapers put the good stuff in the headlines. Occasionally it gets buried in an innocuous article.

More troubling for Couric (and Clinton) may be the revelation that some
television viewers have a built-in resistance to ladies in charge. Networks
regularly commission telephone polls and conduct focus-group testing. The Katie
data are carefully guarded, but insiders at CBS and its competing networks will
hint at the general trends. Apparently, several months in to Katie's tenure,
there remains a small but unmovable percentage of the American television
audience that cannot now and will not ever feel comfortable hearing serious,
scary things about the world from a woman. One can only imagine how they'll
vote. Various sources put this percentage at around one-tenth of those
polled—enough to make or break a primary.

Shouldn't this be the subject of an article or a scholarly paper? [from the same school that produces the periodic reports proving that 'water is wet'? We aren't that sexist anymore. I mean not any more though... it should still be news... right?]

Creepy Documents

Somebody went through and dug up documents about Al Sharpton's ancestors being bought and sold. Generally speaking I'm a fan of people doing primary source research and then posting it on the web [you mean posting simple summaries of the primary source material that you couldn't dig up and read yourself. I outsource. you're CEO material.]. Having said that... this is a bit too creepy.

• If he wanted to know how his parents were bought and sold he probably does. He's not poor.
• If he knew and wanted to tell people then he's more than capable of making his own press. If not, isn't it his own business. Why bring it up in such detail?
• Is this really a "hot document"? He's a black American; generally speaking most have ancestors who were slaves. If he hadn't looked it up, would you really want to open the paper and read about how your great-great...-great grand aunt was sold at age 4 to some guy to cover debts?

[aren't you creepy for thinking about it in this sort of detail. The creepy was inflicted upon me. I'm just sharing.]

Republicans fear Edwards

Look! They're linking him to homosexuals in an attempt to undermine his popularity. [The vast right-wing conspiracy comith? Exactly. Who are we talking about again? Edwards! He would have beaten Kerry in 2004 if he'd had another week. Thought I'd heard of him. He was Kerry's running mate right? Yeah! And he's done what in the last few years? Uh. I think he was waiting to run again. That's a very compelling biography. He must be polling well. Silence! He could beat Bush! Bush isn't running. He's young and compelling and likable and positive. Ok. So he's like Obama. But... but... Except Obama's also black-but-not-scary-to-white-people-black, and done things in the past few years. But... but...]

Obama is totally getting too much early press. He's the new Dean. And then we're stuck with the safe bet: Kerry/Hillary. [I love it when you make predictions.]

It's really like this

This is a (camera phone picture of) an ad from the train station. The bottom (not shown) admonishes people to let people off before getting on themselves.

The thing is... it's really like this.

Every day all day long there are really people trying to get out of the train who are blocked and pinned by the people trying to come in. As weird as I feel stating something this obvious... it is purely to the benefit of the people trying to get on the train to have the people on the train get off first.
It's sort of like everyone is being scouted for some real life version of Football (yes, the American kind).

And once people have gotten on the train. Bang. Full stop. They know that there is space in front of them (i.e. deeper in the train), that there are twelve people trying to get on right after them. But they're on the train and all is good with the world. They seem surprised and confused when everyone right behind them continues to get onto their train; and certainly don't try to get further in the train or otherwise out of the doorway.

Actually the people on the train are -zero- help too. In the face of five or ten people who are trying to get off people will just stand in the doorway. The gentle nonverbal nudging that works so well in places like Japan is met with a glance and a frown. Loud verbal admonishes that you're getting off, you're really sorry to trouble them, if they could just move a little bit you could get off and they could be on their way are met with a grunt and a quarter-step (often deeper into the train and the people who are trying to get off).

Eventually you do reach some sort of equilibrium.
A snaking congo line of people slowly and agonizingly works it's way through the train before forcing it's way through the slavering horde of boarders fighting desperately to be the first one on. Everyone's unhappy, nobody's going anywhere and you're left wondering if trains were only recently implemented and people still haven't really figured out how they work.

There's no open seats by the way. It's not like they're dashing into a car to get that last precious vacant seat. [cause if it were then that would be totally ok wouldn't it? ed. I'm just saying it would be understandable. you mean you'd be deploying the forearm shiver on grannies. ed. I like sitting down. Anyway there are no seats. That's the situation we're talking about.]

[it's a good thing you brought this crisis in public transportation to the attention of the internet community. action must be taken. ed.]

The Republican Candidacy is wide open

Wow. I think my home-town fixation blinded me to just how wide-open it is. I mean... Gingrich? He-made-me-sit-in-the-back-of-the-plane-let's-stop-government-Gingrich?

I have to admit, I was expected Bush to anoint an heir and have McCain thrash him.

I'm starting to see the parallels between now and the democrats in 1992. [you need to read your comments. ed. I did. I do. I just missed the no-anointing-an-heir thing. the internet is not for the slow, or the weak of brain. ed.]

Triumphing over SVN

The nice people at the Ubuntu forums helped me with the SVN problem. Yay open source!

Next up: Amarok 1.4.5. [you don't mean next up: studying for that huge test you have in 6 days? ed. This is my hide-from-the-real-world-place.]

The battle for tenure rages on (over crabs)

Recently I got interested in talking about tenure again.

On Friday we joined an real-live-academic for butter crabs. I postulated that

• Tenure isn't necessary to protect people from producing controversial work. Controversial work is its own reward.

I cited Levett, the Dixie Chicks, and the-lady-who-wrote-the-Nanking-Massacre as people who benefited professionally from taking controversial positions (if not immeadiately). My point was basically that people who disagree with the CW are subject to criticism, but they will profit from cutting edge work.

He argued that

• Tenure is part of an overall system for protecting people developing progressive ideas
• The majority of research isn't for popular consumption
• Iris Chang, who wrote the Rape of Nanking, wasn't a professor and didn't have tenure, but did commit suicide

He mentioned an Australian professor he knew who, during the whole 拉致問題, got the ambassidors from Japan, North Korea and South Korea into a room during a conference and told them that all three of their governments had engaged in terrorist activities.
Specifically the professor mentioned

• Japan's insistance on looking at the kidnappings in isolation without considering past actions (i.e. the invasion).
• S. Korea's suppression of student protests during the formation of the government after the Korean War (I think...)

My friend, who was fairly young at the time was very impressed by this man's courage and, they met later, asked him where he got it.

"Tenure" was the reply.

[This post needs a subheading. Something about intellectual light-weights and heavy-weights. Or maybe the value of knowing what you're talking about. ed. I looked up who Iris Chang was. Your cookie is in the mail. ed.]

I want a little computer!

I've wanted one for ages really. Something small that you can carry around and use to type. [Like a laptop? ed. But lighter... and less finiky with the batteries and always needing to be plugged in. Dick Tracy has a wrist phone. It is possible.]

Something you can tote around and type and do simple work with. Like a little computer.

So after years and years this is how far we've gotten.

I'm not happy. [you, and the guy in the photo, just aren't members of a new race of über-men with smaller hands who are destined to rule the galaxy. ed.]

Econo-war!

Mankiw takes on Levitt. ['takes on' is a synonym for 'politely discusses' now? ed. I'm exciting my readership. They want you to punch it up. you don't have any readership. ed. Thus the punching!]

But who's right? Disagreeing with Mankiw is rarely a brilliant idea, but it there could easily be other solutions than the corporate-style environment he seems to be imagining.

5 year 'terms' with standardized student evaluations* and peer review of research would address the cesspit-of-departmental-politics and rise-of-the-heirarchy arguement.

Make it the same but easier

My wife's jazz piano class died recently (lack of students). She liked the teacher so she's trying the 'pop' piano class he teaches.

Which gave her the opportunity to experience an exciting interaction. A younger male Chinese student is apparently the weakest player in the class. His biggest complaint? He wants the teacher to teach the music to them but make it use simpler chords. So if a given chord uses four fingers he wants the teacher to teach it to them using two. ['Fingers'. That's is a technical term right? ed. I'm writing to make it simpler for the layman to understand.]

I thought it was a novel version of the If-I-don't-like-something-I-can-just-negotiate/complain-and-it-will-go-away attitude. [How many fingers do you use when you play the piano? ed. I'm not taking a piano class. Leaving you with plenty of time to engage in hobbies that contribute to society. ed. I find my hobbies very fulfilling.]

Baur's at it again

Wolfgang Baur is soliciting again for his open project.

I said:

I was a patron for the first adventure (20 bucks IIRC) and thoroughly enjoyed the process. The community is good. Baur is busy but he takes input seriously.
Since it's self selected and there is a minor financial commitment there isn't a lot of noise like you have on the message boards with one or two people perpetually pulling a topic off track or insisting that something has to be done their way.

In the questions that come up he does a very good job of addressing the meta-game and design issues.

It would be attractive if you want to experience working with a group of people to make a fun DnD game without having to do any heavy lifting yourself.

It should also be attractive if you're frustrated with the current paradigm of passive consumption of roleplaying materials. If you're unhappy with WotC & co. deciding and then selling you on their ideas this model provides an alternative.

I should probably have also said:

• The 20 bucks for access to the patrons portion of the site is pretty awesome. He posts a lot and goes into great detail.
• And Livejournal with it's-obsessive-cranky-need-to-infest-your-browser-with-little-cookies is very irritating.

I would definitely vote for the Ghouls.

Ghost Rider

Everyone's panning Ghost Rider.



I loved it. I saw it before I realized there was a deafening critical roar about its terribleness. I started on the original comic book remake in the 80s. [good of you to admit the nostalgia bias up front. ed.]

I think the movie was great. There was some absolutely terrible dialog (especially after the climatic fight scene) but Cage carried a lot of it well. The wife thought he made the movie watchable.

It was a nice mixture of great visuals and funny one-liners and situations. [the textbook definition of a great movie. -ed Do I ruin your childhood?]

I liked the fire shooting shotgun a lot.

P.S. This guy is right. The new comic is so bad it's difficult to express in words. [no fire shooting shotguns. ed. Exactly.]

Technology Upsets the Social Order

In the old days when you moved offices or started a new business (at least in Asia) you got expensive flower arrangements. Then when they got old (a couple of days later) you tossed them.

Now some people give out fake flowers. They don't get old. And they sit and sit and sit and sit....

I like France

It's an imperial fact that my wife has much better taste than I do. So when she says we should go to a movie we do. And I'm inevitably much happier after the movie than before.

Case in point: Paris, je t'aime.

I hate ruining movies so I won't but I wasn't keen on anything about the movie (1. lots of short stories 2. random artists of varying fame and caliber 3. a geographic theme that had -zero- going for it from a storytelling perspective) and yet it managed to over come out and deliver.

[You haven't admitted that you liked the short with Natalie Portman the best... ed. But I didn't want to. She's almost a storytelling prop. So now you're objectifying her? ed. She's a person-prop! I was there for the cinematography!]

What is RSS?

It's one of two things.

1. A way to drive people to your blog by handing out appeitizing tidbits.
2. A way to read something you're interested in without actually having to go to someone's website.

Personally I think 1. is a fancy way of saying "ad" and 2. is a evolutionary [you wanted to say revolutionary didn't you? ed.] way of communicating with people who haven't got a lot of time but want you give you a bit of their time to hear you piece.

McCain is going to thrash Giuliani (you heard it here first)

The WSJ says that Guiliani leads McCain 55% to 34%.

I don't think McCain could be in a better position if he wanted to be. He's presented as the older more experienced war-hero politician and lagging in the polls against Giuliani. With a year to go. The US election cycle loves to crush the front runner. It's like a bowel movement. One day right around the primaries it will just get up and completely destroy the front runner for some reason like 'he made a funny noise'.
[Are you going to talk about how you were insisting a few months ago that Guiliani would never run? -ed. No.]

Guiliani is the new Dean. In 6-9 months when people are having violent physical reactions to Guiliani's over exposed mug McCain will be right there, the battered trusty old warhorse, showing the same charisma and grit that makes people go weak in the knees.

[Are you going to mention that you've never correctly called a political race in your life? -ed. No.]

Did you know that?

There are twice as many deaths by suicide as homicides (link to pdf -- see the second page). All my good links come from Freakonomics. [this is your sixth post. ed. It's a predictive statement.]

Dark Horse Democractic candidates

Freakonomics pimps Richardson. He's appealing in that he's a southern former governor. [You mean he's appealing in that he's not Hillary -ed. That too.]
Dubner doesn't mention that he's also for medical marijuana. But that may not be an asset.

The technologically impaired wish to know: What's an SVN?

So I found a bug in the otherwise awesome dvd-slideshow. Its awesome in a Linux kind of command line way, but I can do command line. [It took you days! -- ed. No Comment.]

Anyway the nice people commented on my bug telling me to look at the Subversion Repository. They even linked it on the main page. Can I figure out how to get this SVN code into my computer?

No. No I can't.

But Subversion Repository sounds really cool doesn't it. Maybe it's like that warehouse in Indian Jones, but the boxes are filled with lots of revolutionaries like Marx and Che.

Stupid arguements lead to good characters

Recently got involved in a particularly dumb argument (about resurrecting people using the a limited healing power in M&M). I was right. [Of course you were-- ed. ]

But it turned into a fun character concept. The Living Lightning staff wasn't part of my original concept; initially it was there to fulfill the 'container requirement' on the character contest. But I like him better with the staff. It makes the whole concept more interesting and complex. And it would give a DM more ways to mix up the story.

The thing people don't get about the PS3...

In case you haven't noticed some people hate the PS3's price point. There are whole blogs about it.

It's basically just price discrimination (note the second paragraph -- not talking about discrimination against people). The holy grail of the producer. Some industries -- such as private colleges in the US -- have been doing it for years.

For years people (Ok, mostly people on slashdot, but anyway) have been talking about how much you could charge "hard-core" gamers. Sony went ahead and did that.

In a classic case of marketing-people-don't-get-it Sony has been pushing it as a mainstream console. It would probably have worked better as Premium Product. Are you hard-core enough? etc. etc. Make the first line of products collectors editions. Then in a year when the next Final Fantasy comes out drop the price 100 dollars and watch the moolah come in.

I started a blog!

I've tried this before. Maybe it will take this time.

I have enough random ideas in a day, perhaps some will be interesting.

Gonna love the spelling errors (I probably shouldn't mention that I had to look up how to spell impaired)