News Archives: September 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

Still Alive, Honest

Wow, it's been some time since I've posted anything. All the pets are fit & healthy, and Claire & I are busy with gaming, parties, and far too much work. So, pretty much as usual.

A couple of websites that caught my eye recently :

A lecturer at the University of Connecticut is teaching a course in Greek Historical Writings by running a role-playing game, and writing it all up as a blog. Start with the 17th August entry. Fascinating to see the student reaction, and some intriguing game mechanics. (Earlier entries deal largely with parallels between ancient Greek writings and computer games. I don't enough about either of these subjects to make much sense of these - you may fare better...)

Long running webcomics often suffer from archive fatigue. Potential readers see the size of the archive, decide "not bloody likely" and never read any of it. John Allison has twice used the trick of "giving up and starting a new comic". A less extreme approach is Archive Binge. This provides a customisable RSS feed to one or more webcomics, from a fairly random list. You get a few delivered each day to your desktop, and catch up with your chosen comic at a sane rate. There's some good comics on the list - Goats, Schlock Mercenary, Irregular Webcomic, and more. (You will need a proper RSS reader - I don't think the Livejournal friends page will help you here - but frankly, everyone is better off with a proper RSS reader anyway...)

Posted by graham @ 08:25 pm

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Wet T-Shirt Winner

Zak's been under the weather recently, suffering from pneumonia. He's well on the way to recovery now, but at one point his temperature was 5 degrees above what it should have been. We tried a number of tricks to bring his temperature down - fans, open doors, wet towels, and - the cutest - making him wear a wet t-shirt.

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I've set up a wiki for my Monday night games, at http://grahamrobinson.com/mondaywiki/. I'm using the same software that runs wikipaedia, which may be a touch of overkill, but it seems to work, and is pretty straight-forward to use. So far, I've added some of my notes, but this set-up also allows the players (and even passing badgers) to add their ideas. (Whether any of them will is another matter entirely...)

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A few quick thoughts :

The reason for releasing a dying man from prison, whether he be convicted terrorist or train robber, is that we are better than him. This, ultimately, is the victory of our civilisation.

New laws aimed at preventing serious problems like people buying a bottle of wine before 10am or problem drinkers who aren't already covered by the laws on breach of the peace, drunk & disorderly, GBH, anti-social behaviour, etc. seem to be more an indication of the increasing puritanism of politicians than any attempt to solve a real problem.

And if there is a real problem, why no legislation to fine or pull licenses from the pubs & clubs that often actively encouraged the drunkness of these troublesome people in the first place?

Why do so many marketeers use "mature" or "grown-up" when they mean "adolescent"? Rhetorical question...

Posted by graham @ 09:21 pm

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