Friends
Jul. 24th, 2008
11:25 pm - Day Seven: At Sea
At least this time the boat was supposed to be at sea. Less miserable than hanging out off Plymouth in a storm, but still not good.
I met a friendly passenger who shared her stock of crystallized ginger, which either helped some or took my mind off it a bit.
![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/sick.gif){kind=small}
ill11:18 pm - Day Six: Greenock/Gourock/Glasgow
( Actually fairly short, but there's a photo )
![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/smile.gif){kind=small}
calm09:38 pm - Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington DC
The hotel is pretty luxurious, but as a conference site, it has shown some problems:
* Internet is flaky
* microphones are flaky
12:07 pm - Why did it have to be Legos?
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
10:55 am
Two adventures in plumbing! The theme is: plumbing supplies have a love/hate relationship with modularity.
Adventure #1
Lately my shower has been acting kind of wonky, supplying only really hot or really cold water depending on how I fiddle the knob. Even more recently, the knob up and fell off, and irreparably chipped the plastic holding it onto the rotating protrusion sticking out of the wall. So I call the landlady's fix-it dude over and ask him whether the handle can be replaced in isolation; he says no, they're usually proprietary and you have to replace the whole "diverter". That is, the entire piece of machinery that contains the handle and pipes and so on that allows diverting (ideally) continuously varying amounts of hot and cold water into the shower. He drives over to home depot to get a new one and the appropriate miscellaneous copper pipe bits, and comes back and solders them all together.
Here depicted is the old one, before he went to town on it with some pipe cutters and installed valves and what-not.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
_tove was around and talked with him (far more knowledgeably than me obviously) about the finer points of soldering.Conclusion: The new diverter fixed both the "have to bring a pair of pliers into the shower to use it at all" problem and also the "binary water temperature" problem. -10 modularity points for not being able to just replace the handle, but +10 modularity points for lovely little bits of copper pipe, arbitrarily solderable to one another.
Adventure #2
The other problem was that the back of the toilet was leaking water, for unknown reasons at first. The site of the leak was a little white plastic widget, (hereafter LWPW) which I tried loosening a little. Heard a CRACK, faint but clearly of great significance, and water started spurting out more enthusiastically. Turned the valve off. Wondered how the hell to get the (now clearly cracked, where once it presumably had a small but still leak-causing defect) LWPW off.
_tove tried epoxying over the hole, which seemed like it was going to work, but didn't; maybe we just didn't wait long enough for it to set. Now that I read the back of the package it says "sets in 5 min, full strength in 24 hours". But no matter: it seemed easy enough to just go to Home Depot and buy another LWPW, whatever it was properly called.Trouble was, even after I completely removed the segment of pipe connecting the water supply to the toilet, the LWPW still seemed to be firmly set on staying on the pipe. Its largest hole was still too small to cajole it off the smaller end of the connector.
So I went to Home Depot sort of dejectedly, pipe thingy in hand, expecting the worst, that perhaps even the hex-nut end of the connector required some kind of adhesive and not just friction, but left with the pleasant discovery that not only was this not the case, but also that what they had for sale (for just $4) was the entire apparatus of (flexible) pipe plus hex nut plus LWPW.
Conclusion: Installed it with little fuss, and now my toilet works great. -10 modularity points for making it difficult or impossible to replace just the LWPW, but +10 modularity points for inventing flexible pipe segments so I didn't have to worry about getting the exact right length.
Maybe after all is said and done neither of these stories features unmodular design - it's just that the abstraction boundaries were higher up than I expected.
Thanks to
_tove for helping out, and escargonaut for telling me that there was a Home Depot in East Liberty on the 500 route!11:59 pm
Went to the beginning of the Alexander Berkman Memorial Music & Labor Festival, organized by LOSER. Somehow I didn't realize how political it was going to be. Nonetheless I got to see William Cohen pull out some fireworks on the blues guitar, which is always a pleasure.
10:33 am - Contemporize!
"Whoa, sounds like somebody's living in the past. Contemporize, man!"
P.S. I'm aware there's something sorta kinda sad about posting pages of text on a five year old roleplay campaign. Of course, I do live in the past, in more ways than one. But in the spirit of living in the now, I should note that I am still playing in that ridonkulous 30-year OD&D campaign I mentioned before and I've also hooked up with a promising bunch of local gamers whose style might be closer to what we had in Boston. I'm hoping to run a 4-5 session Cold City or PTA game with them. The beast, as always, is scheduling.
10:03 am - Let Me Tell You About Somebody Else's Character!
A few months ago I mentioned the film student who was interested in trying to turn Unknown USA into a screenplay. He and I have bounced a couple of emails back and forth since then with him asking for clarifications and elaborations of various things on the wiki. All y'all who have GM'ed before know how fun and rare and self-indulgent that is, somebody actually asking you to yammer on at length about some old game of yours. So that's fun.
The first question he hit me with was "what's the deal with Danny Greer?" and my answer turned into a frickin novel, which, among other things explains what the hell I thought was going on in that session with the Hollow Earth and the Silver Age Knights of the Road and the Oneiros. Which you sure didn't ask to read, but ( that's what LJ-cuts and the vertical scroll bar are for. )
07:53 am - Things I Made
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
Jul. 23rd, 2008
09:33 pm - Extreme Mellowness
I am doing much better this evening, with plans for some more good time the next couple days. I'll be on a diet of restricted real-time access but expect to continue posting and e-mailing and such.
11:59 pm
My mom's birthday today. While chatting with her on the phone, she pointed out that my dad'll be turning 60 in a couple months. That sure feels weird.
11:59 pm
Finished "The Neverending Story", which I never actually read in the first place as a kid. Wish I had! It's rather good.
07:46 am - Offlinishness update
On reflection, realizing how much of my current malaise is the result of the body-deformation nightmares I'm prone to, I'm going to be mostly offline until I stop seeing that one damn picture of Heath Ledger so much. Since, yes, it is nightmare-inducing for me, thanks to one of my particular hang-ups.
I really want something new to top box-office receipts and discussion soon.
(Yes, this means I am in fact planning never to see The Dark Knight. No, it is not up for negotiation with anyone who can't fix my neurochemistry first.)
05:16 pm - on a bus, with WiFi
They have a password, as if someone would steal bandwidth from a moving bus. I'm being forced to watch The Bourne Ultimatum again.
Scheduled to arrive at my DC stop around 2pm.
03:51 am - Offline Day, Wednesday
I need it really badly, thanks to an unexpected barrage of things that have me feeling very diminished. I'm gonna get some things done in the rest of the apartment and then see how things look.
Jul. 22nd, 2008
06:56 pm - Greenland
My Helsinki->Boston flight flew about 1000km over of the coast of Greenland, a significant Northwards deviation from the geodesic (we reached 70N). This was at about ~2pm Greenland time. The date was July 21, i.e. middle of summer.
These light blue blobs intrigued me. What are they?
09:03 am - RPGs: Torg Redux
Andy has thoughts not very far from mine.
What I'd do...
1. Let Torg itself lapse. The new game of tyrants versus the multiverse would be a fresh start with its own rules and look.
2. No firm ideas what I'd do for rules. For the sake of example here I'm getting FATE-ish, but that's just because it's mentally handy for me. Cosm ratings get attributes on the same scale as PCs, plus aspects for the customizing role of cosm laws. Mechanics for the high end include changing the laws, which is hard if you don't have cosmological-scale resources, but is definitely there to be done. (Rules that can be easily handled in a game run via phone messaging would be nice.)
3. There is no fixed world map of which invader goes where. There's maybe four or five fully fleshed-out invaders and their home cosms, and a toolkit for building more.
4. There is a three-phase standard campaign framework: survival in the face of invasion, reaching out to other strongholds, and then globe (and cosm)-hopping in search of bigger better trouble. Phase 1 advice draws on games like Aftermath and d20 Gamma World, to help GMs and players work out fun terrible things to do to their starting community. Phase 2 has a scale of hundreds to a thousand or few miles across. In Phase 3, the sky is not the limit. Advice also covers sensible alternatives like starting right off with access to securable transportation, ramping the curve of rising threat up and down, and like that.
5. There's some kind of support framework for player journals, swapping campaign bits, and (via micro-portals that operate within the probability swarm of diverging and reconverging timelines that is a cosm) even crossover-between-group adventures.
6. The game needs a variety of endgame McGuffins. (I'm thinking here of how Talisman play got more interesting when they went from having just the Crown of Command as a final goodie to a randomized mysterious one out of six.) Different would-be High Lords should be up to different kinds of things.
And that's it for the moment.
08:44 am - Do You Feel Lucky, Steampunk?
The Kinematrix Has You.
Speaking of Victorian internets… (Raise your hand if you figure I wrote all that just to give context to this.) It should go without saying, but these are not supposed to be nice alternate histories. The second one is particularly unpleasant–it’s like the photo negative of Gernsblack. Much as I love the steampunk aesthetic, a world combining 19th century ideas and prejudices with 21st century technology could in practice be pretty dire…
Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.03:01 pm - GMail problem
Times are wrong, but timezone is right...
Someone posted this in May, nobody gave a good answer, and I'm having the exact same problem right now. I'm trying to get a Google person to look at this.
Jul. 21st, 2008
09:33 pm - RPGs: Don't be cruel
So this evening I was talking with friends about West End's troubles. If I had power over it, I'd make Torg a much more toolkit-y sort of game, which I can write up if anyone cares. In the meantime...
The Nile Empire invades, with Memphis, TN, as its target. The Pharaoh versus the King.
Navigate: (Previous 20 Friends)