Thousand-faced Moon
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The evidence

The witnesses

  • "Chiron"
    Certainly not the homepage of a modern-day Templar
  • Daniel Harms
    Gamer, scholar, Brother of the Black Pharaoh
  • Tim Carroll
    Jeek Elemental, alleged by some to be even greater than Reemul
  • Michael Tice
    LARPer, coin collector, skeptic, bon vivant
  • Jesse Walker
    Libertarian, dangerously knowledgeable on radio, pirate sympathizer
  • Laurel Halbany
    Knows more than she's letting on
  • C. Lee Graham
    Potential ultraterrestrial collaborator; extremely knowledgeable about American and Japanese pop culture
  • Bryan Alexander
    Mad Russian polymath

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December 25, 2006

Christmas Update

Christmas is my least favorite time of the year, honestly, which is why I generally try to spend it elsewhere. But I foolishly thought I could make great strides in cleaning up my apartment, so I turned down the offer to visit my parents.

SPECTRE has given us Christmas and the day after off, so I've got a four-day weekend.

Friday night: Worked till 7:30 PM, went home, worked some more on another project, finished off Call of Cthulhu-related draft and sent to the shadowy Mr. Harms, watched R.O.D. - Read or Die (thanks, Laurel!). Politely turned down offer from parents to visit, who did not seem pleased, or interested in counteroffer that they could come up to visit.

Saturday: Lazed around the house, doing nothing useful. Unless hanging out on IRC or Second Life has a higher purpose I'm unaware of. Discovered that a drink of equal part cranberry juice cocktail and Ketel One isn't entirely suckworthy. Played some with a word processor for OS X, Mellel - seems promising, once I figure out tables of contents and how to make text flow. The application and documents open much faster than Word. Found out a friend has diabetes.

Sunday: Packed up one bag of books, which I brought to the local church. Could have brought another, but decided not to. Continued lazing policy. Talked with Bryan briefly.

Monday: Packed up bag full of books again, though I'm not sure why since I can't drop them off anywhere unless Symposium Books in Hoboken is open on Tuesday. Did more work on project for SPECTRE, noted questions for researcher, tried to check work e-mail only to find I'm locked out because it's been too long since I changed my password. Or something. Again, lazed.

In ultimate sad commentary on Western civilization, watched a movie on a TV inside Second Life (Panic in the City) and picked up a free TV for the plot of land I bought. Looked for Civ IV disk, since the stupid copy protection scheme requires you to put in the disk each time you want to play, with no success. Research continues. Meanwhile, looking through various tutorials for Mellel.

Tuesday will likely be when I do everything I should have done Saturday, Sunday and Monday - pick up antidepressants, see if I can get my beard trimmed, go through clothes/do laundry, drop off box of books for acquaintance in Texas and pick up more boxes for books to ship to Lee.

December 24, 2006

Save me from old fogeydom!

So I'm going through my iTunes Library and sorting by year, and as far as I can tell I'm trapped in a time bubble which lets almost no music from 2004 or later through. I'm leaving out mashups, newly released but ancient albums, and older songs on recent albums. Here's what I've got from 2004 on:

I've checked out Arcade Fire, Franz Ferdinand, the Hives, the Killers, the Strokes and the White Stripes and as far as I can tell all the bands the kids like are engaged in a race to the bottom between neoteny and necrophilia. I reserve the right to change my mind about Metric. Are there current bands which don't suck?

December 20, 2006

Look, I'm not making the billions joke

When I was a kid, I knew that of course I was going to be a scientist. Probably a chemist, since both of my parents were chemists, but physics was neat too. I had a regular subscription to Natural History (still remember the article on the discovery of Charon), and my two "science heroes" were Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan.

I watched Cosmos, got the book, and devoured Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science and Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. He wrote a science fiction novel, Contact, which was perverted into a "can't religion and science give each other a big hug?" feel-good movie and is a major reason for my hatred of Matthew McConnaughey.

His Baloney Detection Kit is highly recommended.

Sadly, my skill (or lack of it, rather) in the lab doomed my chemistry career, even though my high school teacher praised my grasp of theory. An inability to grasp basic concepts like vectors similarly put the kibosh on physics. But I still have a love for and appreciation of science, and a lot of that I owe to Carl Sagan.

Other science writers I've enjoyed, though few of them have Sagan's range:

- Brian Greene, for The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
- Michio Kaku
- Clifford Pickover (although he does have an, um, highly idiosyncratic writing style)
- Berton Roueché
- Rudy Rucker, for his book on the fourth dimension, which blew my mind as a kid
- Lewis Thomas

December 17, 2006

A great miracle happened here

So I've missed the actual menorah lighting ceremony, but I came across a synagogue in the virtual enviroment Second Life, Temple Beth Israel. It's certainly an odd experience, waiting for your house of prayer to rez.

Several menorahs of various sizes, self-spinning dreidel animations, as well as the traditional bimah, Torahs and Eternal Flame. I lucked upon the founder, Beth Odets, who talked about the difficulties of having a synagogue in a setting where you couldn't rely on people being around for very long. There's a profile of Beth and the synagogue here.

You can have music and movies automatically playing in Second Life locations - the former was the case here, as various Hebrew songs played. There's a group for the synagogue which gets notified of events, which I signed up for.

What does religion mean in a virtual setting? One can certainly have community and ritual, but can one experience God in an online simulation?

There's a 2003 article, "The Function of Religion in Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games," available here. It focuses on the community and social mores aspects, however. This holds true for this article and this paper "The Sacred and the Virtual World: Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality. Terra Nova's Religion in MMOGs at least briefly touches on the issue.

I asked a Muslim IRC acquaintance about prayer in Second Life and he seemed to think Second Life was a worthless distraction and the question was irrelevant since people are not limited to having avatars in SL. I asked him if all spirituality was irrelevant in the context of virtual communities, and he had this to say:

it can be a place to discuss it, but your mistake is in thinking that virtual communities are truly disembodied
Spiritually speaking, SL is (in most cases) a distraction from the concerns of real spirituality

I think I shall go on a journey to understand religious worship and practices in Second Life.

December 16, 2006

No-prize to whoever gets the reference

1:42. Restate my assumptions.

  1. It would be a good thing for me to move to California.
  2. In order to move, I need to have everything in my apartment cleaned up.
  3. Everything in my apartment can be classified into stuff to sell/throw out/donate or stuff to keep/box up.

Therefore, I should be able to clean the apartment and move in a month. Evidence: I did it before when I was living in Somerville. Tim and Lee managed to do it, dealing with The Incredibly Large Apartment. So what about my lease? My hypothesis: I should be able to move, assuming movers cooperate, early February. I doubt I'd be able to get my security deposit back in any event, and I'd only be moving out one month before my lease expired end of March, so I doubt there'd be much of a penalty.

1:51. Press Save.

December 14, 2006

A new blog for me!

Thanks to Catherine Lavallée-Welch and Jill Hurst-Wahl of SLA's Information Technology Division Blogging Section, I am now an author on the Blogging Section's blog (about blogging). It's all terribly recursive, I know, but I'm grateful to Catherine and Jill for the opportunity to contribute to SLA and to the profession!

You can check out the Blogging Section's blog at http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/itbloggingsection/.

Phonogram - Buy It

I haven't been picking up comics for a while - trying to cut down on crap in case I'm able to move.

I'd noted the announcements of Phonogram with interest on The Engine, but I was nervous that I didn't know much about Britpop. I mean sure, I knew Oasis, Blur, Elastica, but I was never that into the whole Britpop scene and I was worried I wouldn't get any of the references. Sean Demory, the unheralded Axis Mundi of the blogoweb and the man who stole fire from the gods and brought it to LiveJournal, reassured me on that score, and I decided to pick up the first three issues. Sadly, by this point only the latest was available, but it's a good jumping-on point. Also, sales are strong enough that there will be a trade, though I don't know how much of the explanatory back-matter will be included. For example, the cover of #3 is apparently a riff on the cover of Oasis' Definitely Maybe, and the title of the issue is from a Manic Street Preachers single.

The premise is simple - music is literally magic. Kieron Gillen and the disturbingly-sideburned Jamie McKelvie take this premise and are looking at Britpop through that lens. David Kohl is a phonomancer and a complete bastard, someone who can tap the power of music, and someone's messing with his reality. So he goes around trying to find out who. The art's a deceptively-simple, clean-looking black-and-white with fine lines. The page layouts are interesting, from the seven panel grid driving to London to the six vertical panel grid of Emily Aster to the transformation David Kohl undergoes in a set of 8 panel grids culminating in a huge panel dominating a four-panel grid.

Note to self - re-read Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art so I can actually say something sensible about comics composition rather than sounding like a complete prat.

I have no freakin' idea who the Manic Street Preachers, Kenickie, Shed Seven, etc. are, and I wasn't that heavy a club-goer, but I can substitute bands I do know and some things are universals - David Kohl channeling the Britpop 90s reminds me of stomping around on the dance floor after Skinny Puppy at St. Andrews Hall (the Last Rites Tour, uneasily shuttling between Sarah-Marie and Sean and Bryan and Ceredwyn) or moshing to Cop Shoot Cop at the Middle East (1995? The ticket-taker looked oddly like Laurel).

For gaming people - imagine Unknown Armies if everyone obsessed over music rather than trying to live in a James Ellroy novel. If you love music at all, you have to pick up this series. And make Gillen and McKelvie do more.

December 10, 2006

Mid-December 2006 update

I haven't gotten as much done as I'd hoped this weekend, but I have dropped off a milk crate full of books at the local church, I'll be doing laundry tonight and going through clothes to see what doesn't fit anymore. Ultimately I need to get rid of a room's worth of books or so - that will let me put the computer desk and the bookshelf portion of the bookshelf/dresser combo (which I should photograph one of these days) into storage and get rid of the bed which is falling apart (which also has shelves built into the headboard).

To-dos this week:

  • Get rid of more books!
  • Get rid of more clothing!
  • Get a haircut (damn hippie!)
  • Get off my butt and send packages to Andrew Heston and Callum Petch, both of yog-sothoth.com

To clarify a point on an obstacle to my potential move: offices have salary bands, with San Francisco being the most expensive U.S. office. If my salary were to increase, that would mean I'd be costing the research group more and they'd have to raise my rate to recover costs. I'm going to follow up with HR to see if that's the case.

Tim graciously sent me Horror: The 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books - writings by famous authors on their favorite horror fiction. I still have to finish Lee's earlier gift of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: A Novel.

I've watched Pulse (Kairo), which I think succeeds more in establishing a mood than in terms of characters or plot. It seems that there's a promising premise along the lines of urban isolation blurring the lines between the living and the dead, but then there's a wacky explanation of a grad student's computer game which suggests that people getting too close die. The hell? As urban overcrowding I could see it, but Kurosawa seems to be going for more than that. Any thoughts from Brian or Bryan, both of whom I know have seen this?

Next is House of Flying Daggers, after which Netflix sends me Brick and Nine Queens.

And after being resolute for weeks, I succumbed and joined yog-sothoth.com chat again, which was busily discussing why I was absent from chat. Odd.

December 06, 2006

The bitch is dead

I decided to cheer myself up after a talk with my boss (no no no, not The Talk) by seeing Casino Royale at the theater next door after work. Conveniently, there was a show in the next 20 minutes or so.

From the opening black-and-white mission and following animated credits sequence, we know this isn't going to be Bond-as-usual. Daniel Craig plays Bond as a guided missile, content to point himself at a target and cut loose, thinking little beyond that. Nowhere is this more clear than in the virtuoso chase sequence, with the terrorist sliding, swinging and leaping gracefully as Bond barrels through obstacles, feet pounding. The re-imagining of Bond as a SAS squaddie fits in with this - he has a Rolex because special forces types always go for the best equipment. Though he's clearly comfortable in a tux, which suggests some refinement.

Credit also goes to Eva Green, the actress playing Vesper Lynd. It's clear that she does love Bond, the relationship makes sense and is one of equals, unlike other Bond women in the past. I love the banter between the two of them.

As with many others, I would have preferred the movie end with the classic line showing Bond as the smooth smart predator he's become, "The bitch is dead." The extended ending merely serves to underline to slower-witted members of the audience that yes, Vesper did genuinely love Bond and that Bond's transformation into the spy we know is complete.

Interesting bit - I think they're setting up SPECTRE or something like it as the antagonist, with the suggestion of an organization behind Le Chiffre.

December 03, 2006

Looking for Clues

Apologies to Robert Palmer haters out there. Anyway, interesting discussion on RPG.net of all places about investigation-based games, prompted by people getting their hands on The Esoterrorists at Dragonmeet, the lucky bastards.

As my PBEM game involves players and characters alike solving mysteries great and small, this is a topic of interest to me. I tend to plan my games in terms of elements and small arcs I want to include, but making up a lot of the details as I go along. This is likely less than ideal, but has the advantage of ensuring players have an effect on the game world, rather than acting out my scripts. I also tend to reduce rolls to when I think they'd benefit the game, which is probably a counter-tendency towards the 'acting out scripts' end of things. Did it make sense to potentially deny Tim's character info on faeries with red hair? No, so I just gave the info.

Basically, Esoterrorists assumes the important part of an investigative game isn't collecting clues, it's what players and characters do with them.

The meat of the book is to do with a methodology for designing and running investigative scenarios. On a first read through, it seemed quite similar to how authors typically plot whodunnits. Like, figure out who the bad guy was and what he is/was trying to do. Figure out what the PCs would need to do to stop it or solve it (ie. victory conditions). Then work backwards towards clues and note down scene by scene possible investigative locations/scenes, each with key clues. There's a well fleshed out example scenario that does this in some detail.

I'm not really explaining this brilliantly but the main point with the system is that a character doesn't really have to roll their investigative skills. If they have the skills and try to use them appropriately, they'll get the information. Up to them what they do with it. So you avoid the hassle of GM asking players to roll to see what they have discovered and having to deal with failed rolls that stall the plot/investigation (tbh, if most GMs are like me, they'll probably give out the info anyway but I like a game that plays to 'what I would want to do anyway')

Another poster adds the following:

With investigative abilities you get a basic clue if you have the ability and you can spend points to get more. Even if you spend all your Pool you still get the basic clues.

With other abilities you spend points, roll a D6 and add, trying to match or beat a target number (IIRC in the range of 4-8, defaulting to 4).

I really, really dislike the school of GMing which fudges rolls so that players never miss clues/are never endangered. Players can miss clues in my game. Players can fail. Players can even die. On the other hand, I'm giving characters some slack in the Morality department, even though it is White Wolf, because I feel it's appropriate to the espionage genre. I will give accurate information to the players, subject to PC and NPCs' agendas, of course. If something seems off in information received, there's probably a reason. There are the subplots (characters learn more about each other, individual missions) and the larger plots (what's Indigo's agenda and who are the other players out there?)

I'll be interested in discussion after the first mission to see how well things work, and I'll probably pick up The Esoterrorists as a guide to future mission and larger arc design.

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Audio surveillance

  • Jungle Love
    The Time: Ice Cream Castle
    Jerome, bring me a mirror! (****)
  • Kill Hannah - Kennedy

    Kennedy
    Kill Hannah: For Never & Ever

    Discovered this through Pandora (http://www.pandora.com) (***)

  • Lilies Dying
    Curve: Doppelganger

    I like this album a lot more than the later Come Clean, to be honest. Of course, now the world probably thinks I don't listen to any music more recent than 2002. (****)
  • Dangerous Type
    Letters To Cleo: The Craft: Music From the Motion Picture
    Who would have thought they could do justice to a Cars tune? (***)
  • Goblin - Zombi (Main Title)

    Zombi (Main Title)
    Goblin: Zombi

    Goblin is an Italian prog rock band best-known for their soundtracks to Dario Argento's horror movies. Zombi is full of waka-chikity goodness. (***)