I was up late doing some writing last night and I got to thinking about the villain of the piece I’m working on. He’s basically a con artist. The way I see it, there are two major types of con artist: those who exploit greed, and those who take advantage of pity. Both are pretty repulsive, but I think the ones who make their trade off of greed are slightly less evil.
The villain isn’t going to be one of those.
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Tagged Personal Blather
My house is making odd little sounds as it cools off for the night. There’s the occasional creak and thunk as boards shift slightly, the odd soft “bong” from the air vents as they relax. It’s sort of like being inside an enormous bread pan, listening to the sound it makes when it cools off after being in the oven.
I’ve got a timer / thermostat that helps keep the furnace from running all the time during the winter. It lets the house drop to around 60° when we’re at work or asleep, and it starts warming things back up before we have to get up in the mornings, and before we get back from work. Much easier and more comfortable than turning the temperature up and down manually all the time. Plus, given the way energy prices have climbed in the past few years, it’s also saved us a considerable chunk of change.
As a side effect, it’s spawned an odd phrase that we use on vacation days, or at other times when our actual schedule doesn’t match up with our usual schedule: “Tell the house that we’re home.”
Tagged Personal Blather
Today’s comic explains something about the origin of the villains in the book “Moojí the Onion Boy vs. the Unseelie Cheeses.” Sadly, there wasn’t any way to work either of them into the comic.
Do you remember that song, “One of these things is not like the others”? Thanks to the Register I’ve got that stuck in my head, mostly because of a news story they just ran where the exact opposite is the case.
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Tagged Personal Blather
I run a modernized Ars Magica game every other Wednesday. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s sometimes challenging to try to adapt a game system written for a Medieval setting to something set in the early 1970s.
Fortunately for me, I was able to borrow a huge chunk of the work from the house rules for a game that a friend of mine ran back in the late 90’s, but there have been several revisions of the rules since then. The last major overhaul I did was back in 2004 when I first put the Ars Moderna rules up on the web.
I’ve done some minor tweaking since then, of course. But since it went up, a couple of gaming sites have linked to it, so I figure I should probably do a better job of maintaining it. After all, every so often a player will come up with something so clever that the modern rule revisions need revising to deal with.
Like using a typewriter.
Yes, yes, it should be blindingly obvious that typing is faster than writing things out longhand. And a typed document is easier to read than a handwritten one. But how do you quantify those differences? Well, after hashing things out in e-mail, this is what we came up with.
Tagged Games & Gaming
Caught a movie over the weekend. “Ghost Rider.” And, surprisingly, it didn’t suck!
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Tagged Personal Blather
Today’s comic is a blatant attempt to win readers in the coveted computer programmer demographic.
An image from last month’s ice storm. Little teeth of ice on the tailgate of the truck…
Tagged Art
If these guys ever wind up going out of business, I bet they could sell off their domain name for a hefty chunk of change…
Tagged Personal Blather