2012 in review

This is an annual tradition.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Leprecon 39 Game Master Rules

What’s new? I’ll tell ya:

I am the Gaming Director for LepreCon 39, the annual science fiction and fantasy convention with a special emphasis on SF/F Art.  Below are my various collected information blurbs on this subject, so that you, dear reader, may know the truth – and that I have a site I can direct people too when posting all or part of the blurb seems too unwieldy.

LepreCon 39 will take place May 9-12, 2013 at the Marriot hotel in downtown Mesa. There is a full badge and a gaming only badge. You’ll have to refer to the website for current pricing.

http://www.leprecon.org/lep39

The theme is Warriors of the Rainbow. Really.

A Gaming Only pass provides access to the gaming area, the Dealers Room, the Art Display and the Con Suite (where the snacks are!). It does not allow access to panels or other non-gaming events. It is only good for the weekend (May 11 & 12) as that is when organized game activity begins.

Our dedicated gaming area will have several tables available for running role-playing games, miniature simulations, board games, or as a central point for LARPing. Some tables can be reserved, others will be just there for the taking.

We will have a library of board games and a stockpile of props and miniatures available to check out. There will be sign-up sheets for scheduled games.

We are particularly interested in hosting LARPs, tournament games (RPG or otherwise) and demos of games no one has played before (perhaps because you just wrote the rules). Anyone willing to organize something along those lines would find in us a receptive and enthusiastic host.

Gaming inquiries can come to me directly, through any of the means listed below. Vendor or general convention inquiries are best directed at the directed to the Co-Chairs by contacting Patti Hultstrand at lepreconprogramming@yahoo.com.

PROPOSED RULES FOR GAME MASTERS – PARTICIPANTS

(These aren’t final, but they will be very close).

LepreCon wants and needs game masters to run games at the convention, and to that end we offer Participant badges. There are some rules.

A GM must sign up in advance to run at least three sessions of a published game (or a scenario based on published rules). We expect these games to go 2-4 hours, but this a default, not a requirement. We do need a fairly realistic estimate of time required when signing up so that we may schedule accordingly.

Participation in a panel or workshop counts the same a game session.

Published means that it is available for sale commercially from someplace other than the hands of the author. If it is for sale in the Dealer’s Room, we will count that.

A GM may run a game with unpublished rules and qualify for a participant badge provided that GM joins the Game Designers Collective detailed below.

Game Designer’s Collective

While we would like to provide a place to incubate and play-test home-brew and unpublished systems and scenarios, they are notoriously poor draws for participation. To mitigate the problem of Game Designers sitting at their empty tables looking sad, we have some special rules – er incentives for GMs of unpublished games:

You will qualify for a participant pass if you join the Lep39 Game Designer’s Collective. This club exists only for the Leprecon 39, but you will meet some folks, and get feedback on your game. Who knows what could happen afterwards.

The requirements are as follows:

•  Members must provide at least four readable, playable copies of the rules to their game (and any other required elements needed for the game). (This is a guideline - the bottom line is that we need to be able to learn and play the game from materials available at the table.)
•  Members must agree to run/demo at least two scheduled sessions of that game.
• Each Member must agree to play every other member’s game at least once.
• Give feedback to each other as if you were grown-ups.

Of course, you are always free to buy a badge, and then run whatever game you want whenever you want it, so long as there is an open table.

TRANS-DIMENSIONAL  TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS

Can a 18th level paladin take on a space marine? Let’s find out!

In the Gaming Room, I want to put together the Trans-Dimensional Tournament of Champions. Bring your baddest-ass character, and we will convert him/her/it to a common rule system (Likely GURPS – but I am open to suggestions), make a bracket and battle it out.

Prizes for the winner!

(So … that means I’m fishing for a sponsor as well.)

Now you know.

A return to Thursday night writer’s group notes

In the distant past, when this was a more regular blog, I used to note things I learned at my weekly writer’s group. Currently, we meet on Thursday night at Armadillo Grill at 7pm. We’re supposed to go about two hours, but we’ve been going 2.5 hours. I choose to interpret that as a good sign.

The group is organized through MeetUp.com, but we welcome any interested writer.

First though, from IO9, and Tumblr, my new favorite blog: “Things I learned as a Field Biologist“

Ok, last night we learned - in no particular order:

In China, red envelopes traditionally contain good news (or what the sender supposes to be good news). Red is lucky.

Mexico has 68+ separate languages. Purepechan isn’t related to any of them. But their culture still exists – after a fashion, throughout Michoacan. More from the Mexican Guru.

It’s nearly impossible to research Japanese actors on the interweb if you don’t have the correct spelling of their name.  If Toshiro Wantanabe (how I wrote it down) is an actual Japanese actor, he has been totally eclipsed by a physics professor of a similar name.  So here’s a good summary of Japanese movies about WWII - the reason we cared about this actor at all.

The Wright Brothers have an official website.  So does the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

The trouble in researching the Druids of ancient history is that they didn’t write much down, and they didn’t feel like explaining themselves to outsiders. Any useful common knowledge about the religion was essentially wiped out by the Christianization process. This is what Father Oak says about human sacrifice

There is far enough evidence to substantiate the claim that the ancient Celts practiced and performed some form of human sacrifice. There is a great deal of evidence that these sacrifices were, however, voluntary in nature and that the sacrificed served as intermediaries, who took the petitions of their people directly before the God(s) of their clan.

There. We’re moving on now. (That’s an inside joke)

Pope Pius XI would have been the See through most of the 1920′s and 1930′s. As much as I hate to violate my wikipedia rule, they have a fairly balanced and thorough account of his life. All the other bio’s I found were either from the church, or from its sworn enemies.

You can still find druids in Florida.

 

Everything you would want to know about Epsilon Eridani.

 

Tesseracts are a real thing and will hurt your head.

 

Perhaps Carl Sagan can help you out with that.

 

Now you know

A few thoughts about politics

A quick disclaimer: I am a resident of Arizona’s 4th Congressional district, which is comprised of just about every democratic neighborhood in Phoenix, so that three other majority Republican districts could be formed from the suburbs. Congressman Ed Pastor is effectively unopposed here, and Obama will likely carry this precinct by double digits.

But, while Pastor goes back to Congress (where he is among the most liberal) Mitt Romney will still carry Arizona by a good seven points. Mormons vote reliably. Hispanics do not. There are not enough non-Hispanic Democrats left in this state to make up the difference.

Richard Carmona has an outside chance of upsetting Jeff Flake for Senate. Good for him. And I keep hope alive that some reasonably competent individual will step up and oust Joe Arpaio as sheriff. The trouble is that while it’s easy to find better police administrators than Arpaio (you would actually struggle to find worse at this budget level), few of those guys are good politicians. And while I have always believed that Nickel-bag Joe is a menace as sheriff, there is no denying that he is a competent politician.

So I am voting out of a sense of civic duty more than any real hope of affecting the outcome.

I am a recovering liberal in that I am a reflexive liberal trying to become more moderate. (In AZ – moderate is still liberal. Not kidding.) I’m going to vote for President Obama because I think he did the best he could with a bad situation.

“It could have been worse” is not a resounding re-election slogan, but there we are.

You’ll have to trust me that this is not a partisan position: if you are moderate, you really have no alternative but the Democrats. This is not because the Dem’s have moderated their views to any substantial degree, but because the Republicans have allowed the Tea Party and the evangelicals to drag them so far to the right that they only speak to their own base now.

Jeff Flake’s ads decry that Carmona supports Obamacare as if this were akin to supporting puppy murder. No follow-up reasoning. Obamacare = bad – that’s all you need to know.

Of course he supports Obamacare. He’s a Democrat (despite the fact that he was W’s Surgeon General). That’s what they do. Why should this bother me? Flake can’t be bothered to explain that. I’m not part of his base.

This is why Carmona is in the hunt when he really should be ten points down.

This is also why Mitt Romney can’t pull ahead of a mediocre President sitting on 8.3% unemployment – his party has dragged him so far from center he can’t find his way back.

Mitt Romney used to be centrist. It’s true. He was the governor of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts – as a Republican. I remember in early 2007 watching him talk on C-span about how he was able to work with Democrats to solve problems. This was early in the GOP primaries, before some campaign pollster convinced him he could not win unless he prostrated himself to the evangelicals. So he did, competing for that vote with 6 other candidates. Meanwhile, after Gulianni collapsed, McCain was able to run off with all the business Republicans, who were still a deciding force back then, and win the nomination.

When McCain lost the general election, the GOP’s response was to purge itself of all of the moderates. Their reasoning for this escapes me. But they won some seats in 2010 – and so they doubled down on this approach.

If Romney had been able to run as a centrist leaning, problem-solving business Republican,  he’s be five points up. He could distance himself from the abortion freaks, he could talk about correcting Obamacare instead of just repealing it, he could talk about global warming as if it were a real problem, he could be making the argument that budget deficits are not the end of the world, if the money goes to create jobs, he could say all kinds of things that moderates like me would at least listen to.

These were more-or-less his positions when he governed Massachusetts. But the GOP has gone so far to the right since then that he can’t even run on his own record without alienating his base.

And here’s the real trouble: the hard-right GOP base is a dwindling resource. They are old and white in a  country that is growing younger and browner. This may be the last presidential election with a caucasion majority. (So much for their dreams of repealing the 14th amendment. Seriously – they talk about this like it’s a real plan.)

More importantly, he can’t rely on his own instincts. His instincts are to move the line and get to a deal. The Tea Party sees political activity the opposite way. Romney has been pretending to be someone he’s really not, and this may be the source of all these unforced errors. But even without these errors – he can’t win. Presidential elections are decided in the middle. He can’t get there from where he’s had to go.

Not Dead Notice with Links

I’m think I’m going to have to face the fact that I am not a natural blogger. At least, not this year. 

It’s been so long that WordPress has changed some format on me.

But I’m keeping up with Silly Penguin. So there’s that.

Links:

Obanacare or the PPACA patiently explained to those who only get their news from the news:

http://www.reddit.com/tb/vbkfm

 

And a Ted Talk about the Encyclopedia Game, a notion not far removed from the supposed premise of this blog:

Now you know.

 

Not dead notofication

This blog is not dead – I just had to go dig myself out of some things.

Complexities of concrete and paper and making a living in the 21st century

Concrete traffic barricades come standard in 6′ or 12′  lengths, which is a problem when you need them less than 5′ in any direction, and still weighing at least 3000#. This is the sort of thing I do at work. Tomorrow, I’m in a harness, in a swingstage, changing lightbulbs in a scoreboard.

There are hundreds of different grades of cement and concrete, including a variety that floats. Engineering students make canoes out of this stuff and race them.

Yes they do:

 

There also exists about a hundred different grades of paper, and keeping track of those is a job skill unto itself. Owning a printer doesn;t make you a publisher.

Writing a book, though, makes you a marketer – and paper is only one format. More on that in Writing Made Visible

(updated after some neglect.)

And Fossil Springs Road is closed for the summer. More on that in Are We Lost Yet?

 

Now you know.

 

 

Writing down goals about writing

What follows is mostly for my reference, though you are welcome to read it, of course.

 

They say the first step to meeting goals is to write them down. In an ideal world, I’d have 200-500 words of blogging every night. This would do a few things:

q      More blogs = more exposure. Regular blogs have higher readership.

q      Cross referencing = cross marketing.

q      Writing regular blogs makes you better at … writing blogs.

 

So I’m going to start doing that. There. I wrote it down, thus doubling my chance of success (from 7% to 14%!)

I’m not proposing this is the key to success and happiness here. In the final accounting a blog is still just a blog – somewhere between a newspaper column and a diary entry. There’s a limit to the audience interested in the details of my life and how that colors my perceptions.

This is the schedule I have in my head:

 

Monday: Fiction marketing or WHWL. There may come a day – ideally by the end of the year, when there is a blog or two relevant to my published fiction. Right now I have no product ready to go – so this day is still open.

Tuesday:  Non-fiction proposal day. That means query letters – so on that day my regular readers can take a break.

Wednesday: Are We Lost Yet?

Thursday: Writing Made Visible

Friday: Who the hell reads a blog on a Friday night? I’m taking that night off.

Weekend: Silly Penguin

 

My day job still comes first. If I work more than 10 hours in a day – I ain’t likely to blog when I get home. So it goes.

The goal for this blog, then, is shorter and more frequent posts – daily, but at least 3x/week.

That’s the goal.

 

 

Now you know.

Silly Penguin is up

I have started a web comic. ‘ll explain why later – perhaps.
It’s about a silly penguin with a magic hat – though it has no actual story line.
sillypenguin.com

Moving forward is hard enough without looking back (with maps included)

I don’t apologize for long droughts of posts. If you don’t like it, here’s yer money back.

Due to the lock-out shortened-no camp-compressed nature of this NBA season*, we could see a record in 20+ point victories per game played. While that’s better than no basketball,t should not be confused with good basketball.

*It’s not a real season.

Don’t spend money when you’re drunk. What I’mabout to describe are not bad decisions, but I still kinda wish I was sober.

I’m going to Darkcon - which is the pirate/party con of the now 4 major Spec Fic cons in the Valley. And the one I would normally be least tempted to spend money on. But we were at a party at CopperCon, and a bit drunk, and I had cash in my pocket and I got a really good rate – but yeah. We shall see. Spent the money. I’m going.

I also own the domain sillypenguin.com. Don’t bother checking it out today – there’s just a GoDaddy placeholder. My wife wants to make and sell custom greeting cards. I’ve fancied the notion of doing a webcomic of some sort, just to force myself to get back into drawing.So the Plan is to post comics about a silly penguin as a lead in to the greeting card page.

Silly Penguin was a whim. I searched the term and saw that ti was open. I was a few beers down and didn’t want this “unique domain opportunity” to be lost. As if random gibberish is somehow challenging for me to come up with.

Now we need a webhost. My front-runner is Fat Cow, but I’m open to input if any of my IT buddies has a strong opinion.

And I signed up for Code Year - because I’m tired of having no clue about things that are becoming more and more important to my work.

Now some links (we have a few backed up here):

A Slate case study on how Second Life failed the milk-shake test, and how this informs the theory of marketing.

“Neuroscience is still unable to provide a clear and direct explanation as to how the microcircuitry of the brain actually functions,” says Hugo De Garis, a cognitive science professor and director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen University in China. “We know that the basic circuitry is the same all over the human cortex, but just how the circuitry works is still largely unknown.”

This from an article in Sloan Science and Film about the frustrating future of artificial intelligence. The authors go on:

One main sticking point for AI research is the idea of consciousness or emotion—vague concepts that aren’t easily quantifiable or scientifically proven but are essential for creating a supermachine because, many scientists claim, feelings are integral to handling our thoughts.

 

Coincidentally, among the four books I’m currently reading is The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. Within, DL asserts that western sience will never satisfactorily explain how consciousness works because objective measurements miss what is an inherently and unavoidably subjective experience. He argues that we must also consider the “rigorous, focused and disciplined use of introspection and mindfulness to probe deeply into the nature of a chosen subject.”

To put it another way, although the experience of happiness may coincide with certain chemical reactions in the brain, such as an increase in serotonin, no amount of biochemical and neurobiological description of this brain change can explain what happiness is.

[pg145]

For some people (myself included) true happiness can come from a really well-crafted map

And tying is all together, you can find this map of Scientific Exploration here.

Now you know.