Bibnew

Got the new (and much improved) lyrics to 'Birthday in Black' from Damon in the email last night. Simply put, they're great. They fit the melody better than mine did, and capture the dark and moody feel of the instrumental track much better as well. Whee! So, there will be a new version of that tune up at some time in the not-so-distan future.

thewizard

New developments in the 'there's only seven/nine/eleven/whatever real plots in the whole world concept. BioWare, makers of the Neverwinter Nights online D&D game, have produced a 'Plot Wizard' which apparently allows DMs to create adventures by filling in their own details on a pre-existing plot scaffold. The first release included three of the basic high fantasy plots:

Q: How many plot templates will be included with the 1.27 patch?

A: The 1.27 update will include 3 plot blueprints: Fetch and Retrieve, Deliver, and Assassination.

So, about half of Western fantasy lit is now covered. As the blueprints are hard-coded, maybe we can have some logic tests done to see which are truly different, and we can at last get to the bottom of this whole debate. Then maybe we can pass the resulting algorithms off to Hollywood. Oh, wait, maybe that's already been done. Ah well, another bit of pointless speculation drained away.

iPodactive

Wow. Turns out you can carry all your tunes around with all of your DNA on an iPOD. Now we can really test if Page and Rodgers are truly radioactive.

mule

Apparently, the whole political lawn sign issue is not restricted to Buffalo. One mobile correspondent reports:

"I was visiting Mom & Dad in Louisville a couple weekends ago and was struck by
the huge number of yard signs calling for not invading Iraq - it seemed like
every political yard sign from the past few years and then some had been
recycled for this purpose. Maybe it was just their part of town, but I've
never seen anything like it before. Is this happening in other parts of the
country?"

Ouch. Getting struck by all those signs must really hurt. ZSBrian responds from the upstate NY area:

"I haven't seen a huge number of protest signs, but the sign of choice seems to be "Drop Bush, not bombs." You'd think with Syracuse U. being so close, they'd all be bandwagonning. (Yes, it's a word. Anyone? Bueller?)"

Drop on, you crazy corn-fed mule.

beer

Whee! Bottled the beer tonight. Then, I went out and stuck a stick (nice ring to it) in the undisturbed snow on the back porch, which came up to the 5.5 inch mark. Yikes! I hope nobody around here figures out that the snow followed us from Buffalo to Tennessee; they might run us right out of town.

pepys

My current websession is the online diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys is thought to be one of the first true bureaucrats. His quasi-secret diary has long been a source of information about the Restoration years for historians, and some smart fellow realized that in these blog-crazed days, it made great sense to convert Mr. Pepys' famous diaries, one day at a time, into a blog. Annotations by readers (which, by the way, are a large part of the fun so don't miss them), discussion of what different kinds of 16th century meat products were, and everything. Neat!

donkdonk

You know, every time I hear 'Tainted Love' come on the regular radio, I grit my teeth. Every time I hear it come on Perkigoth or college radio, I smile. Why? The 'Where Did our Love Go?' coverlet in the extended version is so sublime as to be worth the ordeal, of course. Sometimes it's the little things.

mlp

A bit of cheerful MLP:
Greg Costikyan has a blog about game design going on here. Might be interesting, as he's (at least in part) responsible for both some of my favorite and some of the worst games I've seen: such classics as Paranoia, and Toon, but also DeathMaze. Of course, the latter gets points for being an 'intersesting concept' for the time it was made, so maybe that's the running theme in his work. Did you know what a Ludography is? I didn't.

boiling

Whew. I'm back. Almost two weeks of vacation, backed up to a few days' worth of the nastiest cold I've had in years, sure can slow you down. There is a new tune today, though.

This afternoon, I finally started making the beer for RileyCon. The first day of beermaking, for those of you who haven't tried it, involves a couple of hours of puttering around in the kitchen. During that time, if you're anything like me (which, oddly enough, I am), you find it difficult to step away from the precious boiling mass o' stuff. So, you sit in the kitchen, do email on the wireless, and listen to music. We'll see if a little of the Pogues seeped into the mix.