* Zero fare public transit
* The Nation's shifting stance on public transit.

* Rolling Stone on AIG. Long and alarmed. And Salon on new populism. "A 2003 Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans believed they would become "rich" someday, including more than 20 percent of people who made under $30,000 a year." "In 2005, the top 1 percent of Americans made almost 22 percent of the nation's reported income, and the top 10 percent made half of it." "In 2007, the average S&P 500 CEO made 344 times what an average worker made. The top 50 investment fund managers made 19,000 times more than the average worker."
* The missing millionaire tax bracket. Plus household debt.
* Sweden's strong support for research, and willingness to let Saab fail. Who's the socialist country?

* Charles Schumer switched to supporting gay marriage.
* ACLU sues DA over "child porn" charges.

* An Afghan TV station was raised for not censoring "uncovered" women.
* Israel using white phosphorous in Gaza.
* Scalia's homophobia
* Morocco's crackdown on feminists, gays, Shiites

* Malnutrition in India
* Racial gap continues

* Darwin, statistics, and experimental design
* Voting rational -- if you're an altruist. My first thought was that this means most voters are altruists or out for their local benefits. Bad news for libertarians.


* Interesting links on myths about medieval Europe and the Renaissance

* Exalted sesseljae: "puppies that swim through organs".

* Homeless in Suburbia, and Toronto's disappearing middle-class.
* No news link, but I think I've linked before to Detroit evaporating. Used to be our fourth largest city, I think, and we're just abandoning all that infrastructure. Then there's New Orleans. You know, the Dark Ages didn't happen overnight. Perhaps I should re-read Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead.
* Obama's DoJ continues Bush arguments in rendition case.
* LAPD vs. animal cruelty. That sounds like a joke, but isn't.
* Indulgences are back!. Though they're not selling them.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
* Yudkowsky's Type of Singularity. For completeness, report of mine.
* Yudkowsky "shocking" first contact novella.
* RPG setting: weakly psychic cats.
* RPG setting: "hard fantasy" with Neanderthal orcs.. And my contribution.
* Haiku/Celestial Bureaucracy moderator action.

I got two new LJ friends overnight. This is unusual. Dare I ask who and why?

We played my new copy of Pandemic, the "cooperative Risk", last night at Guild. It went pretty well and matched the linked review. We barely won the first time, lost the second. Turned out we'd been playing a bit wrong, letting players hold more than 7 cards between turns after a Share Knowledge action, but they should discard down to 7 right away, so the reported "game wins" ratio of 4/5 seems roughly plausible. The players win if they find all 4 cures; the game wins if a disease gets out of hand, there are 8 Outbreaks... or the players run out of cards to draw. Budget simulation? Keeps the game length capped, but the game might be easier with some houseruling, like reshuffling the discards once, or getting to play out your hands. Conversely, if that time limit is removed, the player goal might shift to eradicating all four diseases, not just finding cures; don't know how hard that'd be.

My Lunar Exalt requires completion.

There's been minor updates to my surprising ignorance thread; feel free to chip in if you have new stories.

* Peter Watts defends Bush. Well, says they were a very successful administration, in terms of their goals. Not quite the same thing.
* Long anti-Bush rant.

Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

So, I was thinking about my ridiculous 2:1 win/loss ratio in computer Catan, and I realized something crucial. The AIs don't trade. Oh, they'll trade with me when I ask for it on my turn, and I see messages about their using 4:1 trade or ports. But I never *get* trade requests and I don't think they're secretly trading with each other. That's why the games end in 15 minutes; they're not just faster decision-makers, they're skipping a key part of the game, and not benefitting from trade when it would be most useful to them.

So much for having evidence that I'm an awesome Catan player.

What have I been up to? Sometimes, too much game playing. Not immediately recently, actually, but a bit ago. Ubuntu Linux makes it easy to install and try out lots of free games.

( Bunch of semi-coherent ejaculations of experiences not worth polishing )
A Eurogamer's take on Go is a funny review of the game, even if you don't know the rules. This is less hilarious but still amusing, and says "Chess has been described as being a knifefight in a telephone booth", which seems apropos.

Which leads us to, hey, Go. I'd been playing Go on my laptop, losing at 3 stones to gnugo, and getting tired and annoyed. Well,one nice thing about computers/robots is that you can completely abuse them: I gave myself 9 stone handicaps and beat it a lot, for the sheer visceral pleasure of going stompy-stompy. Also to see how much I could win by, with a score difference ranging from under 100 (huge, for Go) to 300 a couple of times (ridiculous.) And once I made it resign early on, which shocked me as I hadn't known it could do that. The game was nowhere near to being conventionally done, but gnugo is apparently able to recognize when it's totally screwed, as it was, with a handful of dead stones, maybe one sort-of live group, and no room left anywhere to plausibly get life.

Well, after bullying the poor emotionless program for a while, I started easing up. 7 stones, 5 stones, 3 stones... and know what? The experience of ruthlessly exploiting advantage apparently paid off, because I found myself soaring past the prior point of frustration and being able to play evenly. In fact, a couple of days ago I switched to playing as white, and so far I've won more often than not. So I've learned something, and I think it is a generic something about denying eyespace, guaranteeing my own, cutting enemy grroups and connecting my own, building and using walls more effectively, rather than just exploiting the computer's quirks, which I'm actually not aware of.
( More randomness )

I'd like to play the Buffy game again. Haven't in a while. Hey, I gave a copy to Fanw, and I'm going to Boston!

Huh, I just found that the farmer's market has been open from 8-1pm this year, not 7-noon. Effect of Indiana going onto DST, I assume. The Oct/Nov market is open 9-1 instead of 9-noon. Produce is mostly squash, some boxy tomatoes, and greens I don't eat. My usual grass-fed beef sources weren't there, but a new one was, Padgett Farms. Lots of egg sources but I've got over a dozen in the fridge. Honey, elk. Also a soup tasting on the side, with samples from various restaurants or inns (like the Grant Street Inn; can you go in there to dine?) I didn't see any locals I recognized, though a girl at the tasting looked a lot like mrs_feltner back in her brunette days.

Last night I finally went to Baked. I feel my cookies weren't as good as Insomnia's, but it's not a controlled test -- perhaps butterscotch chips weren't such a great idea. Insomnia doesn't let you specify your own cookie types or get nuts. It does let you buy *one cookie* as opposed to a meal's worth.

( Boring board game gloating )

Because it's awesome. If your screen is short enough to make you scroll, do so slowly, savoring the panels until you get to the end.

( Teh Awesome )

Probably of interest to maybe two of my readers: http://www.fudgefactor.org/2003/04/01/lord_of_the_dice.html
an article on ways of handling bonuses or penalties in Fudge/Fate other than simply adding modifiers. Virtual plus or minus (virtual plus is applied if you roll below zero), setting dice (some of the 4dF are set to a value, so you roll fewer -- constraining the random factors represented by the dice), *dF (just read that one.) It doesn't even mention bonus dice, where you roll more than 4dF and take the best four.

Some of these are hacks around the granular nation of the Fudge scale, but others are of real interest in changing the shape of the probability distribution, not just shifting the mean. You can do similar things with dice pools, of course. Not with a simple 1d20.

Long thread, which I'm reading, but message #15 may stand on its own:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=328794&page=2

As for the message about the shark in Jaws, my first thought was to Spirit of the Century, and a shark with lots of Aspects and fate points.

How's Guild doing, anyway?

OMG there's a Black Company Campaign Setting. d20. Sounds like the writers took the books seriously; they mention all re-reading the books, and taking notes, with a product which is a good guide to details in the original books. The outlines of the magic system (because Black Company is a setting classically inappropriate for D&D magic) sound decent: a bit like RuneQuest (in my experience) or Ars Magica spontaneous magic where you have a limited base effect, and the ability to augment it on the fly in range, duration, etc. at the cost of difficulty. Also magnitudes, to reflect differences in wizardly strength, and no level limits -- the Dominator is mentioned as a 75th level wizard (presumably top magnitude, as well.) Lady has 57 character level. At the same time, they try to handle in-book combats like a couple of mid-level fighters successfully ambushing demi-god level wizards and subduing them.

OTOH one reviewer mentions "page @@" references.

Bruce Baugh, writer for the game Adventure!, will be writing New Horizons, a supplement for Spirit of the Century, looking at the socialists and feminists and civil rights workers.

Each chapter addresses a marginalized group from the pulps, kept outside by their sex, their race, their lifestyle, or their beliefs. In New Horizons you’ll find information about real-life heroic individuals and teams, the challenges they face and some of the solutions they find to the problems of dealing with 1920s society. You’ll also find heroes and villains ready for use, plot hooks, and ties to the mysteries around the Century Club. The life of heroes outside the mainstream may seem as strange as the secret language of Atlantis, but can be as exciting and powerful in play as a zeppelin armada.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=314479

I've been obsessed with RPGs recently. Spirit of the Century, Qin: The Warring States, Bunnies and Burrows, rpg.net threads, including discussions of Basic Fantasy and how 6th level spells are as high as one needs in D&D, and today's discovery, Mazes and Minotaurs -- a parodic but also real game look at D&D if influenced by Homer instead of Tolkien. With revised rules in the works (Player's Guide, and Maze Master's Guide).

I've somehow avoiding reading the NAGS Society Worldbook, even though it's based on Fudge.

I've discoverd rpg.net forums. Some discussions are cool. Especially this one:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=261519

I wonder if James has seen much of White Wolf games. It's a setting where "nightmarish future of peace and prosperity" isn't meant ironically.

Probably I'm too tired to be writing this but what the hell. Here at IU there's been a huge (50 player) Changeling LARP (live action role playing game). I was in it a while back but didn't stick around, though I played in a couple of special games. But now it's the End of the World and they're in special widescreen mode and open to non-Changelings and tons of my fellow gamers joined it so I did to. As a Technocrat! I'd been wandering my own path toward being a friendly Technocrat, then talked to the head Storyteller and was told they were having one of the STs lead a faction of Void Engineers away from the Technocracy to help Save The World, and did I want to be a part of that? Did I want to basically play my concept while being mentored by an actual assistant ST? Hell yeah.

So we played today, second widescreen game, first I was in. I was present for the Interlude scene last week where a bunch of fae and mages and other freaks went to check up on the Anchor of Reality, and found a bunch of Void Engineers already there, taking measurements. That led to friendly relations ("hey, these Technocrats aren't trying to kill us") and an invitation to join the various fae (returned from Arcadia at probably risk of their own lives, to help Save The World) and mages, and so we entered today, with me playing a theorist who's still trying to explain all the reality deviants in a grand framework and thus is less likely that most Technocrats to blurt out "you shouldn't exist!" to the people we meet; I'll be the faction liason once our leader moves on to other roles.

So it was lots of fun, me in my tweedy professorial jacket recycled from the Nigel Rogers costume, mostly following my leader around and throwing in comments and observing (and creating) what we're actually about, or sometimes going off to talk to others, arguing with science-oriented fae about the nature of reality and desirable eschatology (some nuts want to reboot the universe), and arguing alongside my leader to clear the Technocracy's name. Sure, there's some crime and corruption now, but the ideals were good, as was much of the execution over the last 600 years. Smallpox? Gone. Infant mortality? Down. Stuff like that.

Which led to the subject line. People kept asking what we were for, or whether we favored stasis, and we'd argue that we were for stability and safety and billions of people existing without fear and having the freedom to explore their potential and how setting the clock back 600 years to when things were good for the fae was kind of alarming to us, and how limiting some possibilities is a good thing, like the possibility your blood will spontaneously turn into cold iron, or that you'll get smallpox, and somehow that line got cobbled together, and my leader really liked it. My second contribution to the faction; I already named our flagship, but I won't say what it is in case he wants to reveal it for dramatic effect.

Independent of anything we've done, a tentacled sea monster aka a Green Fomorian is attacking the North Pole craftshop of the Dougal Sidhe (or is he a nocker?) Lord Nicholas. Or as we Void Engineers put it to each other, Cthulhu is attacking Santa Claus. I think our characters still haven't stopped snickering.

Costumes rocked, as usual, especially Empress Talynthia and Princess Alana and Commander Graves (nothing like seeing German iron crosses on latex to freak out the visiting Technocrats).

We got through the whole game without any hint that there was a Changer Council, and given what I heard out of character afterwards, that's just as well for smooth gameplay, because they eat babies and we're kind of against that.

Now to wait and see whether the controlled delivery of the first asteroid of "meteoritic iron" to Ireland suffices to arm the opponents of the Red Fomori, or if we get to hit the Maw with the second asteroid, as I suggested for a backup plan. Come to think of it, my first reaction to Vampire was "rocket launcher" and that was years before Buffy came out. Something about World of Darkness makes me want to blow up most of the PCs.

Some thoughts on the ease of good roleplaying indirectly provoked by discussion here on cross-gender roleplay:



I don't know what my final point is. Just that roleplaying is a lot less easy for me than it seems for others. As for playing female characters, I've got old rasfw discussions on whether male authors could write female characters in the back of my head. Anyone want to imagine Heinlein or Doc Smith doing female roleplay?

UPDATE: Obviously, I'm not the only one to think about such things.

Bought the game at Gen Con. Brought it to Guild tonight. It was played. It was enjoyed. Woo! Also, I won, with higher scores than I'd seen in a game before, though not by a big margin, considering my somewhat superior experience. Though I was giving advice as we played.

(Yes lyceum, we actually did start playing games at some point. :)

anima has another Horrifying Food Story, which she told as we stood in line at Chipotle.