found_drama

In response/acknowledgement/commemoration of Mike’s recent entry, do I submit my own admission to geekery on the RPG scale… Though it has faded into implosion, I once maintained a site dedicated to Shadowrun. These articles are all that survive. Detailed there: obsession to detail, attempts at scientific plausibility, and a focus on how the mundane can get wrapped up in your game life in ways that don’t make sense at first.

What’s missing: Oodles of N/PC data and a the details of a flexible adaptation of core 2nd ed rules that we got working so smoothly at one point that it was almost embarrassing we didn’t try to submit for 3rd edition. *ahem* Now I’m just talking out my ass.

This Salon.com Technology article goes well beyond “It’s funny because it’s true”… thank fucking god my team isn’t like that…

Mr. Davis is threatening to shoot his computer. What this will accomplish is unclear, but he seems convinced it will make him feel better. Looking over his call log, I’m sympathetic. A run of givers have sent him six monitors in the last two and a half weeks, none of which has solved his problem. It seems safe to say that whatever his problem is, it’s not with the monitor. Still, that hasn’t stopped another giver from offering to send him a seventh one earlier today. When he refused that present he was promptly punted. He’s been punted a total of four times today. Now he’s had it. He just wants me to bear audio witness as he guns down his system.

Of course… X-E is involved with this one, too … so, how could I resist the Worst Breakfast Ever?

Don’t need to get far into it for my favorite part: 64 grams of fat, 2,090 milligrams of sodium, and enough cholesterol to kill anything that’s ever lived. The ‘justification’ is that you’re supposed to eat shitty food in the morning, as it supplies you with a suitable amount of energy to get through the day. Unfortunately, Swanson’s supplying you with enough ‘energy’ to get through a week, and even if the only other thing you ate after this breakfast was oxygen, there’s still a relatively high chance that your ass will grow hands and tie your intestines in knots to prevent this shit from ever passing through. Really, really awful stuff.

In brief: Overloaded at work again (so soon) is roughly equivalent to being unavailable for comment on much of anything. It felt great this weekend to blog a little about assorted things but guilt overwhelms when I think about what’s waiting for me 1st thing Monday a.m. *le sigh*

HOWEVER (comma) renewed efforts on the XSLT front have proven quite useful. Dev’d up a simple DTD for FAQs and the related XSL for transforms is awesome. Much more mature than the last experiment. Why so proud? Two words: CONDITIONAL LOGIC. The DTD allows for 2 types of answers to a given question: a one-part answer or a multi-part answer. Each is to be displayed differently. That being said — it would be silly to for-each a one-part answer and create a one-part <ol> … but for reasons of flow, it wouldn’t be helpful to simply bullet your way through a multi-part answer. (*ahem!* at least I don’t think so) Anyway. That being said, there was a bunch more work to do (now done) on it that was really key: Proper exploitation of <[CDATA[ ... ]]> tags so that we can insert arbitrary HTML (for example). More to do on it for sure. Ultimately, don’t want to assume to much need for arbitrary HTML — but it was nice to sneak it in there. EXPERIMENT!

Back to work.

My quiz score? “70% (Dixie). A definitive Southern score!”

What’s most interesting about this quiz is that it fills you in as you go — let’s you know what nomenclature “belongs” where, that sort of thing. It’s interesting to see the memetic pollution in your brain. How much of what you say comes from where you grew up? How much came from the movies? Or your neighbors? Growing up in Maryland puts a strong Southern bent to most of my answers (for sure) — esp. w/ all the time spent in St. Mary’s and the Southern aspect of much of my family. On the other hand — MD is more mid-Atlantic … and the fact that I grew up just outside of D.C. puts me in contact w/ so many diverse linguistic sources — all transplanted b/c of politics, business or otherwise. Interesting results all around.

Sitting here listening to Chocolate & Cheese for the n^nth time in my life, it’s probably only now (after having been listening to it for almost 7? 8? years … that I’m only just now beginning to appreciate much of it’s whimsical brilliance. Now, Mr. won’t you please help my pony?

Um… I can see my house from here… Pretty sure that’s it anyway.

There it is… A notch more evidence to go along with what I was saying the other day (not here) about Bluetooth not being secure enough yet. Dread! Bluetooth keyboard… Passwords getting sniffed out of literally thin air. *ahem* Pardon the paranoia.

For Sarah: The Russian Nesting Doll of Games — SimCity for the Sims!? The recursion hurts.

Old(ish) music round-up (Top 5 edition):

1. PWEI – “Everything’s Cool” (Dos Dedos Mis Amigos – Nothing, 1994)
2. Nine Inch Nails – “Closer” (The Downward Spiral – Nothing, 1994)
3. Pig vs. KMFDM – “Fuck Me Hoghunter” (Sin, Sex, & Salvation EP – Wax Trax!, 1994)
4. The Prodigy – “Break And Enter” (Music for the Jilted Generation – Mute, 1995)
5. Chemlab – “Codeine, Glue, and You” (Burnout at the Hydrogen Bar – Fifth Colvmn, 1993)

Not necessarily a “top 5″ but you get the idea…