Showing posts with label partial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label partial. Show all posts

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Thou wast not born for death ...


[This post contains light spoilers for all three campaigns of Critial Role.  Well, not “light” in the sense that they’re not very meaningful, but light in the sense that they’re almost definitely facts that have already been spoiled for you by now.  Still, read on at your own risk.]


One day I hope to live long enough to see Liam O’Brien play a D&D character who actually cares whether they live or die.

If you’re not familiar with Critical Role, you have no idea what I’m on about, and you can probably just check out now.  If you are familiar with CR, then no doubt you know exactly what I’m talking about.  In Campaign 1 (Vox Machina), there was Vax, who almost eagerly promised his life to the Raven Queen to bring back his twin sister from the realm of the dead.  It took years (and dozens of episodes) for that promise to be reaped, but it did eventually happen, and Liam has staunchly refused to consider resurrection for Vax.  In Campaign 2 (the Mighty Nein), Caleb’s crushing guilt at what he had done in his past often made him feel his life was worthless, and that it wasn’t worth living unless he could find a way to turn back time.  Liam has spoken of Caleb’s willingness to sacrifice himself to defeat his archenemy Trent.  And now here we are in Campaign 3 (Bell’s Hells), and Orym—who at first seems like a bright, sunny character, but eventually reveals a classically tragic backstory—has now offered to give up the remainder of his life in service to a powerful archfey in exchange for the tools to keep his companions safe.

It isn’t limited to just D&D either: Liam’s character for his run (as a player) on Candela Obscura was Cosmo Grimm, a 97-year-old occultist who, due to his advanced age, had a built-in reason for being willing to sacrifice himself at every turn.  Even several (though admittedly not all) of his one-shot characters seem to have a bit of a death wish ... and even the ones who don’t often end up dead anyway.

To some extent this makes sense.  O’Brien started out as a stage actor doing, among other things, a lot of Shakespeare.  When asked once what books he would keep with him at all times if he had a real-life version of Caleb’s “book holsters,” Liam replied Hellboy and Hamlet.  There is absolutely no doubt that Liam has a strong affinity to tragedies, and tragic characters in particular.  And, don’t get me wrong: he’s excellent at playing these characters.  He’s a brilliant actor, and his talent for the dark, brooding hero with the tragic backstory can’t be overstated.

But, just once, I’d love to see him play a character with some joie de vivre, with no tragic circumstances either before or behind, someone who really lives life to the fullest and is in no hurry to die any time soon.  I mean, I think he’d be really good at that too.  And I think it’d be fun to watch.

But I’m getting old enough nowadays that I ain’t holdin’ my breath.









Sunday, February 25, 2024

The Return of Stew-beef


I have, to my knowledge, seen nearly every episode of The Daily Show, since the very beginning.  That means I’ve not only seen what I believe to be every single episode hosted by Jon Stewart and every single episode hosted by Trevor Noah, but every episode in between and since, and even the majority of the episodes hosted by Craig Kilborn, who preceded Stewart.  It was a very different show back then, but I watched ’em all.  There’s been a lot of individual bits of various shows that I’ve disliked, but I don’t think there’s been a single show in these past 28 years that hasn’t made me laugh at least once, and most of them far more often than that.

So obviously I was pretty happy to see Stewart come back to the show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought his first show back was pretty awesome: as his Apple+ show (The Problem with Jon Stewart) proved, he really hasn’t lost a step since his “retirement.” He’s still got the rhythm, and the biting commentary that’s perfectly happy to skewer public figures on both sides of the aisle.  I laughed plenty.

Both not everyone appreciated his homecoming as much as I.  There was, in fact, quite a bit of criticism, perhaps most emblematically summed up by Keith Olbermann, who tweeted:

Well after nine years away, there’s nothing else to say to the bothsidesist fraud Jon Stewart bashing Biden, except: Please make it another nine years

Of course, Olbermann has been a critic of Stewart for years, going back to saying that he’d “jumped the shark” back when Stewart (along with co-host Colbert) put on the “Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear)” (which I quite enjoyed, personally).  So it shouldn’t have been news.  But, somehow it was ... perhaps boosted by similar criticism from Mary Trump, the hosts of The View, and a bunch of people described as “liberal media figures” whose names I’ve never heard in my life.  Basically, they accused him of “both-sides-ism.” Well, fair enough: as I noted above, Stewart is fond of not letting anyone off the hook, regardless of “sides.” But what did he actually say, actually?

Well, he said this:*

What’s crazy is thinking that we are the ones as voters who must silence concerns and criticisms.  It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voter’s job not to mention them.

and this:

Look, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump.  He hasn’t been indicted as many times, hasn’t had as many fraudulent businesses, or been convicted in a civil trial for sexual assault, or been ordered to pay defamation, had his charities disbanded, or stiffed a shit-ton of blue-collar tradesmen he’d hired.  Should we even get to the grab the pussy stuff?  Probably not.

But the stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny.  It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny.

Which ... sounds pretty reasonable to me.  I’m not sure what Olbermann and friends expected Stewart to do—was he supposed to pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that no one realizes he’s old?  I mean, The Nation expresses it better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote them:

Stewart’s segment was fundamentally pro-Biden, a shrewd use of comedy to address unease while also, as Stewart at his best always does, keeping the big political picture in mind. It’s a way to address the age issue on pro-Biden terms but still maintain the trust of independents and nonpartisan Democrats, who are the swing voters in danger of abandoning Biden or staying home.

Yep, that’s what I thought too.



__________

* If you want to follow along at home, you can watch his monologue on YouTube; my first quote starts at 15:53, and the second starts at 17:30.











Sunday, January 28, 2024

TIL: Vibecession

Many years (and a couple of jobs) ago, I was part of a weird corporate experiment that was referred to as “swim teams.” I’m not sure this was a thing except at my one company, but there is a business concept called “swimlanes” that I think might be related.  But, anyhow, what it was, was this: All the employees who were considered “squeaky wheels” were gathered up in a single room (and let me tell you, we were all looking around like, uh-oh), and were told that we were going to get assigned to one or two “swim teams,” and each team was going to work on one thing to make the business better.  That is, don’t just complain about the problems: participate in coming up with solutions.  And this was lovely, and a nice idea, and obviously it didn’t work at all.

You can probably guess why, but I’ll drill down a bit further.  One of my “swim teams” (I really can’t even type that without the air quotes) was called “employee engagement,” and it was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—where our actual CEO was on the team.  And, as she put it, the point of the team was to figure out how to get employees to treat the company as if it were their own, and not just a paycheck.  Our team came up with a number of good ideas, none of which were ever implemented.  One example: I proposed implementing financial transparency (long-time readers will recall this as cornerstone #1 of the Barefoot Philosophy).  The CEO was scandalized: let all the employees have all that sensitive financial data?  They can’t be trusted with that!  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was forced to listen to her rant on about how “employees these days” feel like they’re entitled to a job but they don’t want to work very hard for it.  And I thought to myself—very quietly, because there was no point in getting fired over a zinger—wait, you think you deserve employee engagement, but you won’t take any action that would earn that?  Who exactly is the party feeling entitled here?

But I tell you that story so I can tell you this one: I recently learned what ”vibecession” means.  It’s a topic of great interest in this political climate, with many high-level Democrats seeming to complain that people just aren’t understanding how good they’ve got it.  Unemployment is low! wages are up! the stock market is booming! interest rates on things like savings accounts are higher than they’ve been in most people’s entire lifetimes!  So why are people still complaining?  These silly consumers just need to understand what’s really going on so that they can understand how awesome the Biden presidency has been.  Hopefully they all wake up by the time the election rolls around.

But, you see, this attitude is exactly like my old CEO.  Faced with two contradictory situations—the status quo of economic indicators vs the attitudes of the common people—then obviously the status quo must be right and the people must be wrong (and also ungrateful).  I keep hearing so-called experts trying to work out how to spin the economic numbers so people will finally “get it.” What I don’t hear is anyone questioning whether it makes sense to keep using the same old numbers when they obviously don’t reflect how ordinary, non-academics are being impacted in the current economy.

They should maybe try that.  I don’t think they will, but they should probably try.  Just one man’s opinion.









Sunday, January 14, 2024

GPT FTW

This week I’ve been fighting my computer curse again.  Still, despite the fact that the computer gods still really hate me, I’ve managed to accomplish a few things.  I’ve managed to get the version history from my Syncthing replicating to my Backblaze B2 account, I’ve updated the OS and a bunch of packages on my Synology NAS, fixed a long-standing annoyance with my use of NoMachine, and I started building my first custom GPT.  And all that was made much easier with the use of ChatGPT.

Perhaps this deserves a longer post—and perhaps that’ll be what I put up next week—but I’m still seeing a lot of AI skepticism out there.  Last night I saw an interview with a tech reporter who agreed that, yeah, AI might be useful for helping developers with their coding, but beyond it wasn’t good for much.  And, hey: it’s true that trying to make it useful for searching the Internet is tough (though not impossible), and trying to make it work for handling things like customer service is just a horrifyingly bad idea.  But that doesn’t make it useless.  In point of fact, for things like helping you integrate different software packages together, configure your hardware, or design a solution to an ongoing problem, things like ChatGPT are actually pretty useful.  And I think it’s only going to get more useful as time goes on.  Once they figure out how to integrate ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) into something like Alexa or “Hey Google” (as it’s called in our house), the utility of “smart devices” is going to go way up.  Because our smart devices are actually kinda stupid right now, so they could really use that AI boost.

Anyhow, I don’t think I want to turn this blog into an AI evangelism vehicle or anything, but ... damn, ChatGPT shore is useful.

That’s all I really wanted to say.









Sunday, December 24, 2023

Here's My Beard ... Ain't It Weird?

I grew my first beard at 17 or 18.  I told people that I did it to look old enough to buy beer, but the truth is, I just wanted to look older.  The combination of being a short kid—my “growth spurt” between 7th and 8th grade consisted of going from 4’1” to 4’6½”—and having an extreme babyface meant that I always felt like my outside wasn’t reflecting the maturity I felt on the inside.  Not that anyone is actually mature at that age, but it’s the age when you really want people to stop treating you like a “kid.”

By the time I turned 21, I’d been repeating the “it’s just so I can buy beer” line so much that I had managed to convince even myself, so I shaved it off on my 21st birthday: I didn’t need to look older any more, I said, because now I am older.  Except ... it really felt wrong somehow.  I didn’t really care for the way my face looked in the mirror, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Must be that babyface, I thought.  For a few months I tried just a moustache, but that was disastrous.  Soon I was back to the full beard.

Now, many people say that, the first time they try to grow a beard, it itches too much.  Some give up entirely at this phase; others just perservere and eventually the itching goes away.  But I’m a freak of nature, I guess, because my beard never itches when it starts coming in.

But, for some insane reason, once I’ve had it for about 10 years or so, then it starts to itch.

The first time this happened, I suffered for a couple of days, and then I knew that I just had to shave my chin and start over.  But I was still scared of the babyface.  So I decided to go for a “General Burnside” cut.  (This is the fellow for whom “sideburns” are named.)

And this was when I realized: I have no chin.  I come by this honest—it’s my mother’s chin.  To call it a “weak chin” is being overly generous: in order for a chin to be “weak,” it must first exist, and mine ... doesn’t.  Once I had the full sideburns but a clean-shaven chin, I could see it instantly.  The beard was defining my jawline, and, without it, I just looked like a complete goober.  But it is what it is: every 8 – 15 years, the itching starts, and the shaving must be borne, despite the visual horror it produces.  The second time I went with the Burnside again; the third time, I did more of a Ben-Stiller-in-Dodgeball sort of cut.  Now we’ve come to the fourth time around, and I’ve done that again (mostly due to lack of imagination); of course, being older now, my facial hair is mostly white, so it’s not nearly as cool as Ben’s was.  My youngest child had never even seen my chin before (or at least not that she’d remember), so it came as a bit of a shock.  And pretty much all my friends and coworkers have had the experience of being able to say to me, at least once in my lifetime, “oh, hey, you’re right ... you really don’t have a chin.”

So that’s why I look the way I do this week.  Luckily, my facial hair—unlike the head hair—grows very fast, so it won’t take long before I’m back to looking like an itinerant hobo riding the rails.  Until then, I remain a stubbled, chinless wonder.  But not an itchy one.



[Our title comes from an old George Carlin routine that I used to know by heart.  If you haven’t heard it, you really should.]









Sunday, December 10, 2023

Call and response

Have you ever been listening to a podcast (or watching a show, or reading a book), and someone in the podcast/show/book says something so crazy, so outrageous, that you just respond out loud?  You know they can’t hear you, but it doesn’t matter: you just feel the need to correct, or clarify, or just answer.

This happens to me all the time.  And I often really do respond out loud.  This week, since it’s an off-week, I thought I’d just a quick rundown of my responses-to-the-air for this week.


There’s probably somebody in your life who you, you feel maybe you’re disconnected from.  ...  Maybe ... send them a letter, write ’em a handwritten letter and send it to ’em. They would really appreciate it.

Cody Johnston on Even More News, “Santos’ Little Cameos, New House Resolutions, And EVEN MORE GTA VI Reactions”

No, they wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t be able to read it.

[Context: Even More News is the “in between weeks” podcast that goes along with Some More News, and every week they start with some wacky holidays that are listed on the various wacky-holiday-calendars around the Internet and comment on them.  This helps inject a bit of levity before they have to descend into the actual news, which is often hard to be humorous about.  In this case, it was National Letter Writing Day, and this was an easy response: my handwriting is terrible.]


And for Prosperity to be built, there is only one way only, Prosperity can be built.  Prosperity is built by entrepreneurs.

Magatte Wade on Drilled, “Messy Conversations: Magatte Wade, Atlas Network’s Center for African Prosperity”

To quote Wikipedia, according to whom?

[Context: The Atlas Network is a web of “think tank” organizations with one goal: funded by the oil and gas industry (as well as the coal industry, lumber industry, mining industry, etc), they produce intellectual-sounding opinion pieces and “studies” that they then pass off to media outlets in order to spread the word that fighting climate change is bad.  Magatte Wade is an African native (she was born in Senegal) and she pushes the idea that it’s unfair to try to curtail oil and gas production in Africa, because that just keeps Africans locked into poverty.  Obviously what they need is for people to come in and help them exploit their natural resources, and that way they’ll develop their economies.  As you can imagine, this makes her a darling of right-wing talking heads (the first time Drilled used a clip of her rhetoric, it was from an appearance on Jordan Peterson’s show).  The sad part is, she actually has some valid points buried in there.  But, in this episode, where she challenges climate journalist Amy Westervelt to a “debaite,” you can see that she’s far more focussed on running roughshod over the arguments of the other side and “winning” the debate than in any sort of honest exchange of ideas.  She certainly isn’t afraid to play the “I’m from Africa and you’re not, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t” card, nor is she (as you can see from the quote above) afraid to just state very shaky premises as “facts” upon which she then builds entirely unsound arguments.  What I found the most infuriating, though, was her tendency to just talk faster and more forcefully and just ... more ... than Amy.  This quote is from the first ten minutes, during which Amy lets her go on until she finally winds down; at the end of that, she lets Amy talk for about two minutes before trying to interrupt her.  She’s clearly from the “whoever talks the most wins” school of debate.)


[affecting nasal voice] And I would sing like this, which I never sang like before.

Fred Schneider on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, “Fred Schneider”

Give it up Fred: we have ears.

[Context: Fred, talk-singer of the B-52’s and utterer of such iconic lines as “it wasn’t a rock ... it was a rock lobster!” and “love shack, baby!!”, was responding to a description of the improv game “Hey Fred Schneider, what are you doing?” He apparently doesn’t think he sounds like that.  This is reminiscent of Kurt Cobain adamantly insisting that Nirvana wasn’t a grunge band, or George Bush Sr’s response to Dana Carvey’s spot-on impression of him, wherein he claimed he’d never said anything like that in his life.  The problem with such denials is, you’ve been recorded.  We can hear you.  Yes, Nirvana, you are grunge (in no small part because the word was coined to mean “music that sounds like Nirvana”), and, yes, Mr. Bush, when you try to say “not gonna do it,” it quite often sounds like Carvey’s “na ga da,” and, yes, Fred Schneider, when you call out “hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail!” ... you sound kinda nasally.  You just do.  Own it, man.]



And that’s all for this week.  I thought you might enjoy hearing my (normally solitary) mini-rants.  If you didn’t, you can just wait around till next week, I suppose.









Sunday, November 26, 2023

Thanks were given

We’ve survived another Thanksgiving, and we’re all pretty much still thankful for the same things: family, friends, job, health, fuzzy children and videogames and having enough disposable income to spend on the things we enjoy doing.  If you happen to celebrate this holiday, we hope you had a lovely one, and, if you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate it, or celebrates it on a different day, or if you just believe that people shouldn’t celebrate taking advantage of our indigenous population, we hope you had a lovely week in any event.  Till next time.









Sunday, November 5, 2023

Post-Halloween recap

Another Halloween put to bed, another birthday weekend upcoming.  Nothing overly exciting to report so far: the smallies went out for what is likely their last trick-or-treating ever, while I stayed home to pass out candy to any children who knocked on our door, of which, it turns out, there were exactly zero.  Then we all met back at the television for our annual viewing of Trick ‘r Treat, which is surely the greatest Halloween movie of all time (even counting the actual Halloween).  Our youngest managed to stay awake until the last 5 minutes of the movie, then we all went to bed and, presumably, had lovely dreams.

Until next year!









Sunday, October 22, 2023

Rumble in the Jungle

After a break of a little over a year, we’re finally back to the Family Campaign (which is what I call the D&D campaign that I’ve built around my children’s characters, who happen to be all animal-based).  Why so long?  Well, a big reason was the return of my eldest child and their partner.  You’d think that would make it easier to do a thing called “the Family Campaign,” but not so much, as it turned out.  But another reason was that this was the first really big battle that I’d planned for the campaign.  Now, if you watch actual play games like Dimension 20 or Critical Role, you might recognize that this is very light in terms of combat: D20 typically has a major (as in, episode-long) combat every other episode; CR is usually a bit less often, but not by much.  However, I’m a much more combat-light (and therefore story-heavy) GM.  While I pepper in short combats, done using theater of the mind, I save big set-piece combats utilizing fancy battle maps for special occasions that come along maybe once a level.

So, with the arrival of the party in Maztica (a jungle-dominated continent with cultures influenced by Aztec, Incan, and other Mesoamerican cultures), I figured it was time to pull out all the stops.  You can see the array of enemies I put up (with apologies for my limited Phtoshop skills); there’s a few evil cultists (always fun to battle, with no pesky moral quandaries to worry about) and then a number of creatures taken straight from Legendary Games’ Latin American Monsters, which I purchased specifically for this purpose.  There’s a jaguar in the right foreground, with a werejaguar right behind it, a couple of pumas, and a werecaiman.  That red furry thing with the horns is a timbo; the scary horse-headed woman is a sihuanaba, and the big snake with antlers is a mazacoatl.

And, yes, I built a full map for it.  Here’s some pics we took to mark our place when we had to pause this mega-combat:

As you can see, I had to use a number of proxy figures: my jaguar is here represented by the tiger (and the werejaguar is a weretiger figure), the timbo is the wrong color (but otherwise surprisingly accurate), the werecaiman is really just a lizardfolk, that “wolf” is actually supposed to be a black panther (one of the good guys), etc etc.  But the overall scene—a bar on a beach with a jungle right behind it—is actually pretty accurate for what I had in my mind.  The kids seemed to have a good time with it anyhow.  (Fun fact: the legs you can see in one of the pictures belong to my middle child, who was taking their own pictures of the battle.)

Oh, and you might wonder: what the heck is up with the Bazooka Joe wrapper?  Well, I asked my youngest to find a way to mark that space, and that’s what she came up with.  We had to mark the space because one of the powers of the timbo is called “Gravedigger”: in a single turn, it digs a grave, pushes you into it, and covers you up so you start suffocating.  So that bubble gum wrapper is actually a grave marker, and there’s someone in there buried alive.  So that’s fun.

We’ll pick it up here next week, if we can wait that long.  It’s a tough battle, but I provided a few allies to help them out, and I think they’ll prevail in the end.  I’m anxious to find out how it all comes out!









Sunday, October 8, 2023

Trying not to ruin the apology



There should be something longer here.

But there isn’t.

I should have found the time to write it ...

But I didn’t.

The vagaries of life have struck me down, the minutiæ causing me to drown, hopefully I won’t have a breakdown ...

I’m feeling insufficient.

Perhaps next week will be much better.

Then again, perhaps it won’t.

I typically strive to produce some content.

But then sometimes I don’t.

Not that you should pity me (I’m not asking you for sympathy), I’m just sayin’, that’s all I have for thee: ’cause this is all I wrote.









Sunday, September 3, 2023

A small recommendation

You know, when I first got over my rather silly belief that I couldn’t enjoy watching other people play D&D, I started looking for really entertaining examples of people streaming the game.  (I talked a bit about this in my “D&D and Me” series.)  And I found some great examples ... but a lot of not-so-great ones as well.  If I had to put my finger on what elevates the good from the meh, it would have to be this: streaming D&D can be a whole new form of media, a whole new way to tell a story ... or it can be just watching people play a game.  The latter is entertaining ... ish.  Watching people play sports, or poker, or things of that nature can be entertaining too.  But I wouldn’t call those sorts of things a new storytelling medium.  D&D, on the other hand, if done well, can really tell a story in a fresh new way that you just can’t experience in any other medium.  That’s the magic of it.

And I’ve tried a lot of D&D shows: video and podcast, edited and unedited, zero production values and over-the-top gimmicks.  A few really stand out.  But I may have found a new pinnacle.

The first chapter of World Beyond Number’s first ongoing campaign (“The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One”) just concluded, and I am really blown away.  This is the D&D streaming equivalent of a rock supergroup: Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM of Dimension 20 and guest DM on Critical Role (and veteran CollegeHumor performer); Aabria Iyengar, DM on Saving Throw and guest DM and player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Erika Ishii, voice actor, player on LA By Night, and guest player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Lou Wilson, actor and comedian, player on Dimension 20, guest player on Critical Role (and announcer for Jimmy Kimmel); and Taylor Moore, producer, composer and sound-designer, co-creator of Rude Tales of Magic and Fun City.  These guys have a lot of mileage under their belts, and they’ve come together to produce a podcast, with premium sound design that makes it sound like an old-style radio broadcast.  The D&D elements are still there, but they’re not the focus; primarily they just serve to remind the audience that one of the things that make streaming D&D unlike any other form of storytelling is that random chance plays a factor.  Brennan is the GM for this campaign, and he has beaucoup experience and a flair for the dramatic.  Aabria, Erika, and Lou all have a great deal of experience committing to a textured, flawed, but lovable character, and they make you fall in love with these three unlikely companions.  Together they’ve built a new fantasy world, Umora, which is every bit as fascinating as Middle Earth, Narnia, or Oz.  And the story ... is just magnificent.

You can check out their website to get started listening, or just search for “Worlds Beyond Number” in your podcast app.  If you really want an amazing experience, go give them $5 at their Patreon and listen to “The Children’s Adventure,” which is a prequel series that explains how the 3 protagonists met as children and started to develop their powers (and their personalities).  You can easily get through it in a month, but honestly you should keep giving them money even after that, because it’s worth every penny.  But you can also listen for free if you’d prefer.

I’m not usually one to plug things this hard, but, really: even if you have zero interest in D&D, I think you’ll be seduced by this show.  It’s something really unique.  Check it out.









Sunday, August 20, 2023

Don´t know why ... there´s no sun up in the sky ...

Today, we are getting a visit from Tropical Storm Hilary, which is just lovely.  I figured I’d traded all my hurricanes for earthquakes when I moved from the East Coast here to sunny Southern California.  But, if you can believe this shit, we actually had an earthquake during the tropical storm.  It was a 5.1, which is a decent-sized quake, as SoCal earthquakes go, but it was also only about 28 miles away from our house.  The house swayed like a North Carolina beach house in a tropical storm—for a few seconds I thought it actually was the tropical storm, but of course houses built on a foundation don’t really do that.

So, the earthquake was a minor bit of excitement in the midst of the ongoing torrential downpour, which is already starting to come through our garage roof.  Gotta look into getting that fixed at some point.  When you live in the desert, leaky roofs are not usually a priority.  But this year has been a bit of an exception in the rainfall department.

So the rain beats a loud tattoo on the patio outside the open window behind my head, and I continue to wait for the power to go out, though hopefully the solar battery will kick in.  And the encroaching night blankets us all.

Next week, something longer.









Sunday, July 23, 2023

CollabGPT

This week I’ve been concentrating on setting up my file synchronization and versioning system.  For this, I’ve mainly been consulting with ChatGPT.  I originally wanted to hire an actual person to help me design and set this up, but I couldn’t find anyone who was both willing to work on my home system—what with me not being a business—and who seemed trustworthy (no shortage of shady characters, of course, but working on your network necessarily involves giving out your password, which is probably a Bad Thing to do in the case of randos on the Internet).  So I eventually decided to just ask ChatGPT and do whatever it said.

Well, perhaps not whatever it said, but, if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort to chastise it when it says something stupid and challenge it when it says something unlikely, you can actually get quite a lot out of it.  And it’s useful both in the design phase as well as the implementation phase.  Just about the only downside is that you have to start every chat fresh from ground zero (though there’s a new experimental feature which helps with that, a little).  And you can’t get around that by just staying in the same chat forever, because ChatGPT has a limited number of “tokens” (roughly equivalent to words) that it can remember before it starts forgetting the earliest parts of the conversation.

Still, you can get quite a lot accomplished even so.  Thanks to ChatGPT, I now have a system whereby I use Syncthing to handle synchronization across computers, and also provide versioning so that I can go back to the previous version of any file.  Now I’m working on getting that backed up to the cloud.

One of the fun things about ChatGPT’s limited memory is that sometimes you have to explain to it what it already figured out.  Today I started a new chat on this topic, as the old one was getting pretty full.  I told it:

I’ve designed a file synchronization and versioning system that works like this:
* There are seven shares, each of which is a filesystem with gigabytes of files.
* Haven and Avalir each have copies of six of the seven shares (there is one share that is not needed on each of those machines).
* Files are bidirectionally synchronized between Haven and Avalir using Syncthing.  No file versioning is used for these two servers.
* Zadash has a copy of all seven shares, with full file versioning (by which I mean keeping a copy of all versions forever).
* Editing of the files is done on Haven or Avalir only.  Since Syncthing only stores versions for remote edits, not local edits, if I edited files on Zadash, it would keep the previous version.  I do mount the shares from Haven to Zadash JIC I need to edit on Zadash, but the Syncthing copy is for archival purposes only.

To which ChatGPT responded:

You’ve outlined quite an advanced file synchronization system, ...

And I’m like, bitch, this was all your idea!

Anyways, that’s how my week went.  Next week, a longer topic, hopefully.









Sunday, July 2, 2023

Springs Eternal

Several months ago, my work machine started flaking out, so I got the folks at work to order me a new one.  It came, and I was able to use it to work around my immediate problems, but I never got the chance to completely switch over to using it—too much work shit going on.  Well, a few weeks ago, my laptop started flaking out.  And, as of Friday, my new laptop has arrived, and now I have two machines to set up and get configured and transfer hundreds of thousands of files to.  Lucky me.

So, even if I had planned to do a full post this week (which I had not), I simply wouldn’t have the time: I’ve got a laptop to configure, a desktop to configure, gigabytes to copy, filesystems to share, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it—I’m swamped.  Still, there’s some hope that, after this process (as difficult as it may be), things will be better.  Honestly, I’d be happy if they were just not worse than they were before all this madness started, but I suppose I can’t help but hope for better.  Call me foolish if you must: I won’t deny it.  We’ll see how it goes.









Sunday, June 18, 2023

Dinner and a Show

Today was Father’s Day, and we took the whole family out for a teppan yaki lupper.  If you don’t know what “lupper” is, it’s a meal about halfway between lunch and supper, in the same way that “brunch” is halfway between breakfast and lunch.  Of course, according to the terminology I was raised with, “lupper” is still dinner, despite the odd timing, because “dinner” means “the biggest meal of the day, no matter what time you eat it.” But that’s a technicality.

If you don’t know what “teppan yaki” is, it’s the Japanese cuisine where they cook on the table (which is apparently called a “teppan,” although most of us Americans just say “hibachi”).  Where I’m from (the DC-VA-NC East Coast corridor), we typically just called it ”Benihana,” because that was the only such place there was.  Well, at least that’s the way it was when I was growing up, which admittedly was a long time ago.

But, here in Southern California (and/or here in the aftertimes), we had a whole bunch of options, of which Benihana was only one (and not even the best one, apparently).  We went with a place called Musashi, which, going by their website, used to have 3 locations, but is now down to just one (the pandemic was not kind to most restaurants, but for teppanyaki restaurants in particular—where more than half the point is the showmanship of the meal preparation, so take-out isn’t as enticing—I’m guessing it was devastating).  Anyway, Musashi has been around since 1981, which is one of those years that seems ancient to my children but doesn’t seem that long ago to me.  But, it was 42 years ago, which is at least long ago enough that it seems like these folks know what they’re doing.  So, I don’t really want to tell you how much it cost us, but the food was excellent, and the kids seemed to enjoy the show (and, honestly, that was the main reason I wanted to go).  So I call it a success.

Next time, a longer post, assuming all goes well.









Sunday, June 4, 2023

Puzzle Progress

Well, I finally kicked off my baby girl’s birthday campaign, and I think it started off pretty well.  She (and my eldest’s partner) seemed to enjoy it at any rate.  The other two kids ... well, let’s just say that they more of the “I don’t have patience with anything I can’t kill” school of D&D.  Still, they’re contributing, and I think they may come around.  And, if they don’t ... welll, it isn’t their birthday game.

Longer post next time, most likely.









Sunday, May 21, 2023

How Doth Fare Thee, M'Lord?

Today we took a trip to the Renn Faire (or the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, as it’s more properly known).  Our youngest had never been, and the pandemic is totally over (right?), and our eldest is back in town (with their partner), so it seemed like a good year to do it.  I have to say, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have in the past.  But perhaps I’m just too old for this shit, as Danny Glover is wont to say.  Here are my observations:

  • It’s very dusty, and very hot.  I’m sure this was true in past years as well, but I was definitely in better shape back in those days.
  • There are way more vendors.  I wondered if maybe I was just misremembering how many there used to be, but Christy agreed with me that this was far more than last time (which was, to be fair, probably around 10 years ago, if not more).  Essentially, we had to hunt for non-stores in between all the stores—it was crazy.  There were 3 shows, 1 one which was terrible, and the joust, which was so packed we had no hope of getting in.  And a few games (archery, throwing axes, that sort of thing).  Other than that, just rows and rows (and rows) of shops, overpriced food stalls, and sellers of of $7 water bottles.
  • Our middle child (that would be the one with the heart condition) really does not handle heat well.  I think they might be done with Renn Faires and amusement parks and that sort of thing.
  • I could be wrong, but I swear I walked right past Amy Dallen (late of Geek & Sundry, currently at D&D Beyond).  I would have stopped to say “hey,” but people were moving along so fast, I barely registered it was her before she was out of sight.  Perhaps not a major celebrity sighting, but still worth sharing.
  • Other than food and drinks and parking, we bought some fancy honey, and the youngest got a pretty nicely carved wand for only $20.  Other than that, everything was just too pricey for us.
  • The youngest claims to have enjoyed herself, so I suppose it was all worthwhile in the end.
So, I’m not sorry we went, but man am I exhausted.  Until next week.









Sunday, May 7, 2023

Puzzle Plotting

This week I’ve been working on a D&D one-shot (that is, an adventure that should ideally only take a single session to complete) for my youngest child’s birthday.  Which has, technically, come and gone, but we’re running a bit behind on such things, not to mention that I didn’t even realize that I was supposed to be doing it for a while there.  But now I know, and I’m trying to put together something that she’ll like.  Which is a tiny bit tricky, because she’s a bit different from my other children: she likes roleplaying more than combat, and she’d rather solve a puzzle or talk to an NPC than go slay a dragon.  So it takes a bit more finesse to make her happy.

In fact, designing puzzles for D&D is notoriously difficult, for two reasons.  The first is that it’s easy to make the puzzle too easy, and your players just blast through it.  It’s also, weirdly, easy to make it too hard, and then it takes forever.  So it can be basically impossible to predict how long it’ll take, which means you can’t necessarily guarantee that your one-shot will get done in one shot.

The second potential problem is that it’s easy to put your players in a situation where they just get stuck.  If they miss a clue, or they just have a mental block and can’t figure out a clue, all of a sudden your game grinds to a halt and there’s not much to do other than just tell the players what to do, which sort of defeats the point.  So it can be tricky to design something that is challenging without being impossible.

I’ve attacked this problem in a few different ways.  (And I’m going to keep it a bit vague just in case my kids actually do read this blog, which I find particularly unlikely, but better safe than sorry.)  First, I’ve designed a set of interlocking puzzles that can be done in any order, and it’s highly randomized.  So, at the first sign of getting stuck, I’m calling for some dice to be rolled, and everything will change.  Secondly, I’ve built in a bunch of “back doors” (basically, hinting structures) that will get revealed over time, so that the game will get easier as it goes on.  If it needs to.  And, if I’ve made it too easy, it won’t.  But then I can also use the randomization to change everything if the players start getting too close too fast.

Now, overall, this is a bit tricky to do in a natural fashion.  But, happily, D&D is a fantasy setting where anything goes, so I can make it work fairly easily—worse come to worst, I can always wave my hands a claim “a wizard did it.” But I’ve also come up with a theme that should make it make sense, even when it doesn’t make sense.  I can’t be more specific than that just yet; maybe I’ll post again once I’ve revealed things to my players.

I’m actually a bit excited for this.  It’s taking me a fair bit of work—inevitably, it takes more time to design a puzzle game than it does to play one—but I think it’s going to work out pretty well, and I’m pretty sure my kids won’t have too much trouble figuring it all out.  We’ll see how it goes.









Sunday, April 9, 2023

Gothic Gaming

This weekend we’re going to try finish up the many-times-postponed birthday game of D&D that my eldest prepared for my middle child.  And, yes, it’s nearly a month late, but ... well, shit happens.  After getting postponed due to sickness, unpreparedness, and all around general grumpiness, I ended up having to postpone due to fallout from my big work project, which I finally pushed to production on Monday.  So we started on Friday, but we started late, and now we’re finishing today, so, TL;DR: you get no proper post again this week.

But, in order to have something to put up, I thought perhaps I’d tell you about some of characters for this game.  We’re doing a sort of Gothic horror game, though it seems so far like it’s less Ravenloft and more Castle Amber (if you speak D&D, you’ll get what I mean).  My middle child opted for a flesh golem moster hunter barbarian—think Frankenstein’s monster, one of the intelligent but reticent versions, weilding a combination sword-shotgun (I, Frankenstein might work, or any number of videogame characters).  I can’t give you too many more details than that, because I wasn’t responsible for helping build that character.

My youngest, on the other hand, came to play with a creepy-as-fuck concept.  Silvin is a young man with no eyes (he wears bandages over where they should be) who wears dark, baggy, nondescript clothes ... including gloves, which cover the fact that he has eyeballs in his palms.  So he has to take his gloves off if he wants to see, but on the other hand he can move through the world just fine as a blind person.  He can’t speak, but he can communicate telepathically.  He is a bard of the college of whispers, which gives him access to powers like Psychic Blades, Words of Terror, and Mantle of Whispers.  As if that weren’t enough, he’s a feat machine, having taken Telepathic, Telekinetic, Shadow-Touched, and Gift of the Gem Dragon, which latter is just more ways to push people around with your mind.  Aside from Words of Terror, he can cast cause fear, fear, danse macabre, dissonant whispers, phantasmal force, and phantasmal killer, which is a hell of a lot of ways to be a scary dude; when it comes to “look into my eyes” type shit, there’s the aforementioned Mantle of Whispers, plus even more spells: enthrall, confusion, unearthly chorus, Tasha’s hideous laughter, mental prison, crown of stars, and synaptic static.  And I haven’t even listed all the spells he knows ... did I mention we’re 14th level for this one-shot?  It’s crazy.

For myself, I resurrected an old character of mine that I had for a previous one-shot (also Gothic horror, and possible also for a birhday game).  She was only 7th level, but it was easy enough to bring her up to 14th.  She’s a rogue inquisitive and also a warlock of the Raven Queen (pact of the blade).  I built her to be a mystery-solver who can also hold her own in a fight.  She’s a lavender-skinned tiefling; I found this image on the Internet drawn by Bright Bird Art:

So she looks pretty much like that, except that her staff is actually illusory, so she can stab you with it (she summons her pact weapon, a scimitar, so that it’s inside the illusion of the staff), and she has a raven on her shoulder which doesn’t look quite real.  In terms of feats, she is Perceptive and Mobile; in terms of eldritch invocations, she wears her Armor of Shadows, and can summon a Cloak of Flies when she needs to be really scary; in terms of spells, she can also mess with your mind too: via puppet, ego whip, or Raulothim’s psychic lance.  Her expertises are in acrobatics, stealth, investigation, and perception; in battle she likes to cast spiritual weapon in the form of a person-sized raven and then either eldritch blast from afar, or get into the mix using Mobile, her improved pact weapon, and sneak attack.  In social situations, she’s pretty darn good at persuasion and deception, but she’s not afraid to break out that cloak of flies, which can do poison damage if you stand too close, and, if you don’t, there’s always infestation to send those little buggers out up to 30 feet away.

So that’s our primary party (my eldest’s partner is playing a helpful druid, but he’s really closer to an NPC), and we’re exploring a vampire’s castle and seeking out and destroying various loose, undead organs.  We got the stomach and the liver so far, but I’ve a feeling there’s a lot more to go.  Wish us luck!









Sunday, April 2, 2023

Infinite Birthday Season

This weekend, my youngest is having her birthday weekend.  She almost made it to the end before the curse of the Holiday Sickness came for her as well.  So we may very well be doing more make-up time next weekend, just as we had to do for the middle child—this is starting to turn into the never-ending month of birthday celebrations, and it’s already next month.  But we shall see if everyone recovers and is satisfied with their birthday experiences.  Hopefully it’ll all work out.