Forgot to mention in my other post that Human Head Studios has already demonstrated its affection for paper-game roleplaying, via the well regarded publisher Atlas Games. The Rune RPG, based on Human Head's computer game, was designed by versatile designer Robin D. Laws, whose other credits include the RPGs Feng Shui, Glorantha: The Hero Wars, and The Dying Earth. (Than which a stronger contrast to Rune would be hard to imagine.)
Longtime game designer Matt Forbeck is running Human Head's paper game studio. Matt co-founded Pinnacle Entertainment (publisher of Deadlands: The Weird West and his own superhero RPG Brave New World) and has also written tons of good stuff for a dozen other publishers. I'm confident he'll do an excellent job with this new venture. (Matt is prolific in another way, too -- he's the father of quadruplets!)
Like I said in my original post: I need page layout, not document design. I need to move the graphic on page 148 1/16" to the left to accommodate a footnote. I want to put a box around this art, but break the border to let the wizard's hand overlap the boundary and intrude amusingly into the text. I have to design the game's character sheet. For all this I need to see the stuff on the page and drag it around with the mouse.
Maybe Scribus is currently ready for high-end DTP, maybe it isn't yet. Doesn't matter -- I am genuinely no-kidding pumped to see this. Whenever it is ready, I'll be one step closer to ditching my Windows box, where to date I have been shackled by PageMaker. Linux has LaTeX, but I don't need a document design program, I need pica-precision page layout. And I hear Wine is getting better at handlingPhotoshop too. Any year now....
What's Scribus like for long-document support? I laid out a 192-page roleplaying game, and PageMaker 6.5-7.0 handled it pretty well -- not as well as FrameMaker, but better than Quark. So far as I can tell, it looks like Scribus is currently targeting a lower document range. But any year now (ohboyohboy)....
Article 3 - Sanctions. The minimum sanction for any natural entity sending emails in an illegal combination of languages shall be no less than twenty years of service in the customer service department of the European Union.....
Modded as "Informative," huh? Moderators see "Article 1-3" and their eyes glaze over. Funny, though.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D.
That's a machinima adaptation of a skit by the Milwaukee-area comedy troupe The Dead Alewives. Slashdotters who don't hate Flash can check out a new adaptation by Cybermoon Studios.
I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by.
Too true, but don't condemn the idea out of hand just because the medium seems unsuitable. One of the greatest works of Japanese drama, the Chushingura (Tale of the 47 Ronin), was written for puppet theater. An early animated feature, Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Ahmed" (1926), is told entirely through animated paper cutouts, yet it still holds up quite well as a beautiful artwork. (I know because I just saw it for the first time last week on Turner Classic Movies.) I expect a compelling story can make its impact felt even in machinima. I'd like to try it myself someday.
An invigorating article on the same topic from Jim Lobe at Oneworld.net United States:
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 4 (OneWorld) - More than 130 communities with a combined population of more than 16 million people in 26 states have passed resolutions directing local police to refrain from using racial profiling, enforcing immigration laws, or participating in federal investigations that violate civil liberties, according to a new report released on the eve of this year's Fourth of July celebrations by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The 23-page report credits Ann Arbor, Michigan, with adopting the first resolution opposing key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, thus setting off a trend that shows no sign of abating.
"In my conversations with people from across the political spectrum, I hear one refrain over and over," says Laura Murphy, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C. legislative office. "If we give up our freedoms in the name of national security, we will have lost the war on terrorism."
"As this year's Fourth of July rolls around, we hope that this report will demonstrate to the White House, the Justice Department and Congress that we must be both safe and free."
The ACLU, whose local offices played a major role in support of dozens of resolutions around the country, stressed that among the jurisdications that have taken action are a number of traditionally conservative areas of the country, such as Oklahoma City, Missoula, Montana; and Falgstaff, Arizona.
Some of the larger cities include Denver, Colorado; Oakland and San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore, Maryland. Three states have also adopted measures that call for strict respect for constitutional rights: Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont.
The report, 'Independence Day 2003: Main Street Fights the Federal Government's Insatiable Appetite for New Powers in the Post 9/11 Era,' says the burgeoning grassroots movement was launched after demands by Attorney General John Aschroft were agreed to by Congress, which, it charges, "encouraged an atmosphere of hysteria," by approving the USA PATRIOT Act in late October 2001 with little debate and few dissenting votes.
The Act included a number of controversial provisions that, in the ACLU's view, upset the balance between the citizen's privacy and political rights and the state's responsibility to ensure the security of the country.
Some of those provisions included expanding the power of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; approval of "sneak and peek" warrants which allow federal agents to enter private homes without notifying the owner until much later; weakening the standards for intelligence wiretaps by permitting them to be used for criminal invstigations under some circumstances; and making it easier for federal agents to obtain highly personal "business records," such as library loan records, of possible terrorist suspects.
The Act itself was followed up with a flurry of executive orders, regulations, policies and practices, such as denying the right to a fair trial for citizens and non-citizens labeled "enemy combatants" and establishing military commissions that fall short of minimum due process standards, which further eroded civil liberties protection, according to the ACLU.
On January 7, 2002, Ann Arbor became the first city in the country to pass a resolution in direct response to the PATRIOT Act and new federal policies. "We're very concerned about civil rights and the about the potential discrimination," City Councilwoman Heidi Herrell told ABC News at the time. "We spent a lot of time since September 11 making sure that the Muslim members of our community felt safe."
Denver became the second city to approve a resolution after the ACLU there discovered the existence of 3,400 secret files on social activists that had been collected by the Denver Police over severa
I find this whole "central indie-game hub" trend very interesting, and I was hoping to read another success story in this PomPom interview. Turns out they're on the brink of oblivion, no longer working on games, and hoping this deal pulls them back to solvency. Sigh!
Bruce Sterling talked about the India/China space race in his May 2003 Wired column. Some extracts:
"Nobody in the Western press takes much notice of India's space aspirations, because by Yankee standards it doesn't make sense for India to have any. Yet India launched its first missile in 1963 and its first cosmonaut in 1984. Nobody in the West thought the country would ever go nuclear, either. That was a blunder in judgment. [...]
"Why is Gandhi's homeland trying to reach the moon when people sleep on the streets in Calcutta and AIDS gnaws the country's flesh? For the same reason the US sloughed off poverty programs to fund Apollo in the 1960s: global prestige.
"India doesn't need long-range missiles to nuke neighbor and archrival Pakistan. For a war that intimate, bullock carts would do. The Agni III is aimed straight at world public opinion. The India-Pakistan PR skirmish is already almost over, and India is clearly winning. Every great power sweats bullets over Pakistan's bomb, but India's somehow makes that country worthy of consideration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. [...]
"Since India demonstrated its bomb in 1998, the Chinese have been increasingly uneasy. China reacted to the detonation with angry demands that the international community keep India contained. When that got nowhere, China helped Pakistan go nuclear. In retrospect, that was a scary, destabilizing misstep. But now India and China are poised to continue their rivalry on safer high ground - beyond Earth's atmosphere.
"Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation. [...]
"Who will become top dog in South Asia? That's an open question, and there aren't many good ways to answer short of a useless massacre. A space race offers a good solution. It's a symbolic tournament that tests competing political and economic systems to their limit.
"A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."
A friend of mine who has worked at several computer game companies explained why he joined a startup doing a massively multiplayer online game, Dransik. "When you do a standalone game, the publishers pay you until it's done, and then they fire you. When you do an online game, you work for free until it's done, and then they start paying you." If I had to choose, I'd do what he did.
If it's anything like his columns for Wired, it will be filled with bitterness over the 2000 elections spilling over into everything he writes about.
Can't believe I'm taking time to refute this silly and groundless statement. Sterling's first column for Wired, issue 10.12 (December 2002), covered Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index -- no mention of the 2000 elections. Subsequent issues to date:
11.01 (Jan 2003): "The Cybersecurity Industrial Complex" -- upbeat overview of various government bureaus
11.02: "Dumb Mobs" -- protests in Florence against globalism; mentions "The New Imperial Order" in passing, but basically about European protest movements
11.03: "Silent But Deadly" -- parallels between Enron and the old Lockheed aerospace skunkworks
11.04: "The Secret War Machine" -- about the Iran-Contra scandal, and how the same spirit motivates the current War on Terror; maybe you could wilfully distort this into "bitterness about the election," if you didn't mind sounding like a complete nutcase
11.05: Space race between China and India
11.06: "There's Something About Rummy" -- this is the only column that meets the "bitterness" test. Jeez, pretty sensitive, aren't you?
Bruce Sterling wrote an interesting Wired column about the budding Cold War between India and China. Sterling reminds us that India is also interested in a space program, largely for the same reasons America was: symbolism and prestige.
As Pakistan weakens, India is starting to view China as its principal rival for South Asian hegemony. "India and China are comers with a lot to prove to the world, and especially to each other," Sterling writes. "Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation.
"China has openly declared its desire to colonize the moon. The world's most populous nation is unlikely to build lunar settlements, but that's not the point. China's motive lies not in constructing a lunar Hong Kong, but rather in luring India into a loud public competition. Later this year, if all goes as planned, China will become the third country to send a citizen into space. An orbiting taikonaut will be even more impressive if American shuttles are stuck in their hangars while the misnamed International Space Station limps along with a skeleton crew."
Sterling's conclusion sent a shudder of surprising revulsion through me: "A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."
Some of the city-design ideas on this Carfree.com site echo those advanced over 25 years ago in the influential book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara, Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, and others. This book details a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," with over 250 specific advisories starting at the very high overview level ("Independent Regions" instead of our current nation-states) and moving in successive stages down through town design, becoming always more specific ("Mosaic of Subcultures," "Industrial Ribbon," "Nine Percent Parking," placement of food stands and bus stops), and then to low-level details of individual building design ("Sequence of Sitting Spaces," "Light on Two Sides of Every Room," very specific construction details, and "Paving With Cracks Between the Stones").
A Pattern Language is a remarkable book, the principal influence on Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog and used by the city designers for the upcoming STAR WARS GALAXIES online game. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that its "patterns" concept influenced the current mode of "design patterns" among coders. For other examples of the book's influence, and of the theorists' current work, see their Web site, especially the overview of patterns.
This game is really very fun, except it has a couple deep flaws that prevent it from being a classic. I played constantly for about 3 weeks, until it got repetitive and tiring.
A game you play constantly for three weeks sounds like a great game. In this statement the bar for "classic" seems to be set pretty high, and the severity that makes a flaw "deep" seems pretty low. What, did the control scheme give you carpal-tunnel syndrome?
Or do you mean that the flaws are so obscure that it requires deep understanding of the game to spot them?
Jessica Mulligan does indeed have one of the longest and most respected resumes in online games. I was distantly acquainted with her back in 1989-91 when (as Richard Mulligan) s/he was product manager for GEnie's online games, and even then her knowledge of the field was extremely comprehensive.
Now she's involved in The Themis Group, an interesting venture that basically lets online game services outsource their customer support. (Another notable figure on the Themis team is the esteemed game designer Greg Costikyan.) Given the problems some online game companies seem to have with customer support, sometimes regarding it almost as an afterthought, I wish Themis well. They're good at conveying the important message that an online game company isn't selling the game, it's selling the service.
then try to say with a straight face that they're not slowly sliding down the slippery slope towards the gaping maw of Open Source that's eating their lunch.
Wow, watch those metaphors roll! I guess that sentence makes sense if Open Source works like, say, the Sarlacc at the bottom of the Pit of Carkoon from Return of the Jedi.
In addition -- an extra-special bonus for us Berke Breathed fans -- his college predecessor, Academic Waltz, will also be run.
Pedantic correction: Breathed's original strip was called "Academia Waltz," not "Academic." It was a modest little Doonesbury ripoff that ran in THE DAILY TEXAN, the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. A few of the characters later seen in "Bloom County" debuted there, but the strip is said to be of interest for Breathed completists only.
Then again, don't trust me. I never saw much of interest in "Bloom County" itself. When it won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, that seemed to me a sad moment in the history of the Pulitzer. THE COMICS JOURNAL writer R. Fiore once commented that saying "Bloom County" was funny was like complimenting a shoplifter on her taste in clothes.
About the reviewer, Arnold Hendrick
on
A 1974 Review of D&D
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Jeez, I was the one who submitted this story to Boing Boing. I never thought Slashdot would go for it. I keep missing so many Karma opportunities....
What I said in the Boing Boing submission that Wil didn't repeat here is, the 1974 review is by a gamer named Arnold Hendrick. Hendrick went on to run Heritage Miniatures and to design some cool boardgames for Heritage's short-lived Dwarfstar game line. Later Hendrick went into computer games, working for Microprose and others; he helped design or develop many of Sid Meier's best-known titles. Hendrick's best-known work as sole designer is probably the 1992 Microprose fantasy game Darklands. Here's his MobyGames rap sheet and a Darklands FAQ.
What I learn from this: Be bold! Despite all qualms, submit to Slashdot!
NVidia shipped an engineering prototype of the forthcoming GeForce MX to an artist I know. It turned out no box in the office was sufficiently macho to run this studly MX board. You need a -- wait for it -- a 350-watt power supply. So NVidia shipped him a computer specifically butch enough to run this thing. I looked in the next day; he still hadn't got the thing running right. Some kind of driver issue. Now and then the board would unpredictably heat up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, it roars like a vacuum cleaner. It takes up two PCI slots, not that this is a big deal for most gamers. And, oh yeah, it's gonna cost something like $4-500.
Wish I'd got to see the beautiful graphics. I can only assume that they must be super-duper mega-cosmically spectacular, because if they're not, this card sounds an awful lot like "four strikes and you're out."
I played a small part in Richard Garriott's first Halloween spook house at his newly opened Britannia Manor mansion, back in 1988. I wrote a long letter to friends about that amazing experience.
Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told, you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones, no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are. You see, Bernard? The perfect balanced sample."
My wife heard about Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago and thought of OCRing and editing an English translation of Machiavelli's 1518 Italian play La Mandragola. She briefly corresponded with PG Executive Director Michael Hart, who was extremely kind and helpful. Had that been all there was to getting involved, she certainly would have put in the weekend or less of work the project required. But to avoid copyright issues with a translation that might not be public domain, Hart asked my wife to snail-mail a photocopy of the title page or copyright page of her chosen translation, so that PG could legally verify the work's availability.
Fair enough. But we were flakes, the library was waaay downtown, her work deadlines loomed.... She let the idea fade. I wonder how many other volunteers lose interest in the same way? By the way, Gutenberg still doesn't show a text of Mandragola.
Slashdot Mirror
You can almost certainly get anything United Nuclear carries cheaper at Archie McPhee.
Forgot to mention in my other post that Human Head Studios has already demonstrated its affection for paper-game roleplaying, via the well regarded publisher Atlas Games. The Rune RPG, based on Human Head's computer game, was designed by versatile designer Robin D. Laws, whose other credits include the RPGs Feng Shui, Glorantha: The Hero Wars, and The Dying Earth. (Than which a stronger contrast to Rune would be hard to imagine.)
Longtime game designer Matt Forbeck is running Human Head's paper game studio. Matt co-founded Pinnacle Entertainment (publisher of Deadlands: The Weird West and his own superhero RPG Brave New World) and has also written tons of good stuff for a dozen other publishers. I'm confident he'll do an excellent job with this new venture. (Matt is prolific in another way, too -- he's the father of quadruplets!)
There's a completely different risk imposed by another kind of electronic device: video cameras. The risk is that passengers will tape the pilot sleeping at the controls.
Somebody needs to introduce you to LaTeX.
Like I said in my original post: I need page layout, not document design. I need to move the graphic on page 148 1/16" to the left to accommodate a footnote. I want to put a box around this art, but break the border to let the wizard's hand overlap the boundary and intrude amusingly into the text. I have to design the game's character sheet. For all this I need to see the stuff on the page and drag it around with the mouse.
Maybe Scribus is currently ready for high-end DTP, maybe it isn't yet. Doesn't matter -- I am genuinely no-kidding pumped to see this. Whenever it is ready, I'll be one step closer to ditching my Windows box, where to date I have been shackled by PageMaker. Linux has LaTeX, but I don't need a document design program, I need pica-precision page layout. And I hear Wine is getting better at handlingPhotoshop too. Any year now....
What's Scribus like for long-document support? I laid out a 192-page roleplaying game, and PageMaker 6.5-7.0 handled it pretty well -- not as well as FrameMaker, but better than Quark. So far as I can tell, it looks like Scribus is currently targeting a lower document range. But any year now (ohboyohboy)....
Article 3 - Sanctions. The minimum sanction for any natural entity sending emails in an illegal combination of languages shall be no less than twenty years of service in the customer service department of the European Union. ....
Modded as "Informative," huh? Moderators see "Article 1-3" and their eyes glaze over. Funny, though.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D.
That's a machinima adaptation of a skit by the Milwaukee-area comedy troupe The Dead Alewives. Slashdotters who don't hate Flash can check out a new adaptation by Cybermoon Studios.
I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by.
Too true, but don't condemn the idea out of hand just because the medium seems unsuitable. One of the greatest works of Japanese drama, the Chushingura (Tale of the 47 Ronin), was written for puppet theater. An early animated feature, Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Ahmed" (1926), is told entirely through animated paper cutouts, yet it still holds up quite well as a beautiful artwork. (I know because I just saw it for the first time last week on Turner Classic Movies.) I expect a compelling story can make its impact felt even in machinima. I'd like to try it myself someday.
An invigorating article on the same topic from Jim Lobe at Oneworld.net United States:
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 4 (OneWorld) - More than 130 communities with a combined population of more than 16 million people in 26 states have passed resolutions directing local police to refrain from using racial profiling, enforcing immigration laws, or participating in federal investigations that violate civil liberties, according to a new report released on the eve of this year's Fourth of July celebrations by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The 23-page report credits Ann Arbor, Michigan, with adopting the first resolution opposing key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, thus setting off a trend that shows no sign of abating.
"In my conversations with people from across the political spectrum, I hear one refrain over and over," says Laura Murphy, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C. legislative office. "If we give up our freedoms in the name of national security, we will have lost the war on terrorism."
"As this year's Fourth of July rolls around, we hope that this report will demonstrate to the White House, the Justice Department and Congress that we must be both safe and free."
The ACLU, whose local offices played a major role in support of dozens of resolutions around the country, stressed that among the jurisdications that have taken action are a number of traditionally conservative areas of the country, such as Oklahoma City, Missoula, Montana; and Falgstaff, Arizona.
Some of the larger cities include Denver, Colorado; Oakland and San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore, Maryland. Three states have also adopted measures that call for strict respect for constitutional rights: Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont.
The report, 'Independence Day 2003: Main Street Fights the Federal Government's Insatiable Appetite for New Powers in the Post 9/11 Era,' says the burgeoning grassroots movement was launched after demands by Attorney General John Aschroft were agreed to by Congress, which, it charges, "encouraged an atmosphere of hysteria," by approving the USA PATRIOT Act in late October 2001 with little debate and few dissenting votes.
The Act included a number of controversial provisions that, in the ACLU's view, upset the balance between the citizen's privacy and political rights and the state's responsibility to ensure the security of the country.
Some of those provisions included expanding the power of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; approval of "sneak and peek" warrants which allow federal agents to enter private homes without notifying the owner until much later; weakening the standards for intelligence wiretaps by permitting them to be used for criminal invstigations under some circumstances; and making it easier for federal agents to obtain highly personal "business records," such as library loan records, of possible terrorist suspects.
The Act itself was followed up with a flurry of executive orders, regulations, policies and practices, such as denying the right to a fair trial for citizens and non-citizens labeled "enemy combatants" and establishing military commissions that fall short of minimum due process standards, which further eroded civil liberties protection, according to the ACLU.
On January 7, 2002, Ann Arbor became the first city in the country to pass a resolution in direct response to the PATRIOT Act and new federal policies. "We're very concerned about civil rights and the about the potential discrimination," City Councilwoman Heidi Herrell told ABC News at the time. "We spent a lot of time since September 11 making sure that the Muslim members of our community felt safe."
Denver became the second city to approve a resolution after the ACLU there discovered the existence of 3,400 secret files on social activists that had been collected by the Denver Police over severa
Corrected strands link.
I find this whole "central indie-game hub" trend very interesting, and I was hoping to read another success story in this PomPom interview. Turns out they're on the brink of oblivion, no longer working on games, and hoping this deal pulls them back to solvency. Sigh!
Bruce Sterling talked about the India/China space race in his May 2003 Wired column. Some extracts:
"Nobody in the Western press takes much notice of India's space aspirations, because by Yankee standards it doesn't make sense for India to have any. Yet India launched its first missile in 1963 and its first cosmonaut in 1984. Nobody in the West thought the country would ever go nuclear, either. That was a blunder in judgment. [...]
"Why is Gandhi's homeland trying to reach the moon when people sleep on the streets in Calcutta and AIDS gnaws the country's flesh? For the same reason the US sloughed off poverty programs to fund Apollo in the 1960s: global prestige.
"India doesn't need long-range missiles to nuke neighbor and archrival Pakistan. For a war that intimate, bullock carts would do. The Agni III is aimed straight at world public opinion. The India-Pakistan PR skirmish is already almost over, and India is clearly winning. Every great power sweats bullets over Pakistan's bomb, but India's somehow makes that country worthy of consideration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. [...]
"Since India demonstrated its bomb in 1998, the Chinese have been increasingly uneasy. China reacted to the detonation with angry demands that the international community keep India contained. When that got nowhere, China helped Pakistan go nuclear. In retrospect, that was a scary, destabilizing misstep. But now India and China are poised to continue their rivalry on safer high ground - beyond Earth's atmosphere.
"Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation. [...]
"Who will become top dog in South Asia? That's an open question, and there aren't many good ways to answer short of a useless massacre. A space race offers a good solution. It's a symbolic tournament that tests competing political and economic systems to their limit.
"A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."
A friend of mine who has worked at several computer game companies explained why he joined a startup doing a massively multiplayer online game, Dransik. "When you do a standalone game, the publishers pay you until it's done, and then they fire you. When you do an online game, you work for free until it's done, and then they start paying you." If I had to choose, I'd do what he did.
If it's anything like his columns for Wired, it will be filled with bitterness over the 2000 elections spilling over into everything he writes about.
Can't believe I'm taking time to refute this silly and groundless statement. Sterling's first column for Wired, issue 10.12 (December 2002), covered Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index -- no mention of the 2000 elections. Subsequent issues to date:
Bruce Sterling wrote an interesting Wired column about the budding Cold War between India and China. Sterling reminds us that India is also interested in a space program, largely for the same reasons America was: symbolism and prestige.
As Pakistan weakens, India is starting to view China as its principal rival for South Asian hegemony. "India and China are comers with a lot to prove to the world, and especially to each other," Sterling writes. "Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation.
"China has openly declared its desire to colonize the moon. The world's most populous nation is unlikely to build lunar settlements, but that's not the point. China's motive lies not in constructing a lunar Hong Kong, but rather in luring India into a loud public competition. Later this year, if all goes as planned, China will become the third country to send a citizen into space. An orbiting taikonaut will be even more impressive if American shuttles are stuck in their hangars while the misnamed International Space Station limps along with a skeleton crew."
Sterling's conclusion sent a shudder of surprising revulsion through me: "A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."
Some of the city-design ideas on this Carfree.com site echo those advanced over 25 years ago in the influential book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara, Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, and others. This book details a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," with over 250 specific advisories starting at the very high overview level ("Independent Regions" instead of our current nation-states) and moving in successive stages down through town design, becoming always more specific ("Mosaic of Subcultures," "Industrial Ribbon," "Nine Percent Parking," placement of food stands and bus stops), and then to low-level details of individual building design ("Sequence of Sitting Spaces," "Light on Two Sides of Every Room," very specific construction details, and "Paving With Cracks Between the Stones").
A Pattern Language is a remarkable book, the principal influence on Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog and used by the city designers for the upcoming STAR WARS GALAXIES online game. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that its "patterns" concept influenced the current mode of "design patterns" among coders. For other examples of the book's influence, and of the theorists' current work, see their Web site, especially the overview of patterns.
This game is really very fun, except it has a couple deep flaws that prevent it from being a classic. I played constantly for about 3 weeks, until it got repetitive and tiring.
A game you play constantly for three weeks sounds like a great game. In this statement the bar for "classic" seems to be set pretty high, and the severity that makes a flaw "deep" seems pretty low. What, did the control scheme give you carpal-tunnel syndrome?
Or do you mean that the flaws are so obscure that it requires deep understanding of the game to spot them?
Jessica Mulligan does indeed have one of the longest and most respected resumes in online games. I was distantly acquainted with her back in 1989-91 when (as Richard Mulligan) s/he was product manager for GEnie's online games, and even then her knowledge of the field was extremely comprehensive.
Now she's involved in The Themis Group, an interesting venture that basically lets online game services outsource their customer support. (Another notable figure on the Themis team is the esteemed game designer Greg Costikyan.) Given the problems some online game companies seem to have with customer support, sometimes regarding it almost as an afterthought, I wish Themis well. They're good at conveying the important message that an online game company isn't selling the game, it's selling the service.
then try to say with a straight face that they're not slowly sliding down the slippery slope towards the gaping maw of Open Source that's eating their lunch.
Wow, watch those metaphors roll! I guess that sentence makes sense if Open Source works like, say, the Sarlacc at the bottom of the Pit of Carkoon from Return of the Jedi.
In addition -- an extra-special bonus for us Berke Breathed fans -- his college predecessor, Academic Waltz, will also be run.
Pedantic correction: Breathed's original strip was called "Academia Waltz," not "Academic." It was a modest little Doonesbury ripoff that ran in THE DAILY TEXAN, the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. A few of the characters later seen in "Bloom County" debuted there, but the strip is said to be of interest for Breathed completists only.
Then again, don't trust me. I never saw much of interest in "Bloom County" itself. When it won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, that seemed to me a sad moment in the history of the Pulitzer. THE COMICS JOURNAL writer R. Fiore once commented that saying "Bloom County" was funny was like complimenting a shoplifter on her taste in clothes.
Jeez, I was the one who submitted this story to Boing Boing. I never thought Slashdot would go for it. I keep missing so many Karma opportunities....
What I said in the Boing Boing submission that Wil didn't repeat here is, the 1974 review is by a gamer named Arnold Hendrick. Hendrick went on to run Heritage Miniatures and to design some cool boardgames for Heritage's short-lived Dwarfstar game line. Later Hendrick went into computer games, working for Microprose and others; he helped design or develop many of Sid Meier's best-known titles. Hendrick's best-known work as sole designer is probably the 1992 Microprose fantasy game Darklands. Here's his MobyGames rap sheet and a Darklands FAQ.
What I learn from this: Be bold! Despite all qualms, submit to Slashdot!
NVidia shipped an engineering prototype of the forthcoming GeForce MX to an artist I know. It turned out no box in the office was sufficiently macho to run this studly MX board. You need a -- wait for it -- a 350-watt power supply. So NVidia shipped him a computer specifically butch enough to run this thing. I looked in the next day; he still hadn't got the thing running right. Some kind of driver issue. Now and then the board would unpredictably heat up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, it roars like a vacuum cleaner. It takes up two PCI slots, not that this is a big deal for most gamers. And, oh yeah, it's gonna cost something like $4-500.
Wish I'd got to see the beautiful graphics. I can only assume that they must be super-duper mega-cosmically spectacular, because if they're not, this card sounds an awful lot like "four strikes and you're out."
I played a small part in Richard Garriott's first Halloween spook house at his newly opened Britannia Manor mansion, back in 1988. I wrote a long letter to friends about that amazing experience.
The British TV sitcom Yes, Minister offered a brilliant precis of push-polling technique:
My wife heard about Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago and thought of OCRing and editing an English translation of Machiavelli's 1518 Italian play La Mandragola. She briefly corresponded with PG Executive Director Michael Hart, who was extremely kind and helpful. Had that been all there was to getting involved, she certainly would have put in the weekend or less of work the project required. But to avoid copyright issues with a translation that might not be public domain, Hart asked my wife to snail-mail a photocopy of the title page or copyright page of her chosen translation, so that PG could legally verify the work's availability.
Fair enough. But we were flakes, the library was waaay downtown, her work deadlines loomed.... She let the idea fade. I wonder how many other volunteers lose interest in the same way? By the way, Gutenberg still doesn't show a text of Mandragola.