Maker of rules for the world-makers

“You heard about Gary Gygax?” they asked.

“Yeah,” I said. And I looked around.

I saw shelves and shelves of roleplaying games like D&D, GURPS and Vampire, card games like Magic and Munchkin, miniatures games like Warhammer, just dozens and dozens - hundreds, in fact - of games, toys, dice, gamer comic books, gamer collectibles, you name it.

“You know,” I said, to nobody in particular. “If it hadn't been for Gary and Dave (Arneson), none of this would probably be here.” - John Kovalic

Also:

Via: Steven Den Beste and Pixy.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 01:17:38 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Decline and Fall Of Just About Everything, part mxxix

Yuk.

Via C.G. Hill: “You know, the trouble with My Little Pony is, well, she isn't slutty enough.”

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 23:57:50 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Routing around censorship

Charlie gets it:

Public Service Announcement

Attention:  If, by some chance, you surf the web from an institution which has such a hair up its ass that it has wildcard-blocked all URLs containing the character string "blog" (hint: USAF Cyber Command, I'm talking about you), you can still read this particular blog bog. Just point your browser at my bog instead of my blog. That's:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/bog-static/

Got that?

As you were.

(In other news: thousands of America-hating hackers terrorists all around the world hastily insert "blog" into their domain names, to avoid the unwanted attention of the USAF Cyber Command tasked with tackling threats to national security on the highstoned cyber frontier.  Blog: it's the new Stealth!)

Hehâ„¢

(Note that b-l-o-g is nowhere to be found in the oldgrouch URL. Yet another reason why mee.nu rules!)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 22:37:44 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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California universities hook up with the Saudis

Irresistable force?

“We expect the diversity principles to be central, to be honored, in every arrangement the university makes.” - Barrie Thorne, chair of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley

Immovable object?

“When I was in Saudi Arabia a month ago, I read in a Saudi newspaper in English that it will probably be hard to forbid women to drive for much longer.”- Jean-Claude Latombe, professor of engineering, Stanford

Then there’s this:

Stanford... notes that faculty holding Israeli passports would have difficulty entering Saudi Arabia (but adds that little traveling is needed and that, if necessary, short courses can be offered via distance learning).

Looks like they’re caving already. We’ll see.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:45:50 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Icy trees in March

We didn’t get as much ice here last night as had been predicted (and it’s practically all gone now).

But I did get at chance to snap this picture of the ice on a tree (click for a larger version). With the tree backlit as it is, the effect is quite pretty (I've enlarged the area to the immediate right of the trunk and put it in the inset at the upper right). Camera shake spoiled things a bit; next time I hope to have a tripod handy.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Dear Diary... at 21:21:48 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Turn-about's...

Ryan Frank, on crossover voting (from this comment thread):

Hey, Democrats voting in the early Republican states helped give us McCain, might as well return the favor and screw with them right back.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:17:46 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Power just glitched here

Somebody’s car probably tapped a pole somewhere in the neighborhood.

The weather service says the ice on those branches is supposed to be ¼-inch thick by midnight.

Oh, and Tam, welcome to Indianapolis, again!

Posted by: Old Grouch in Dear Diary... at 23:14:02 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Monkey business

Rachel Lucas on the Limbaugh apology:

I’d understand people getting all hinky about comparing a part-black presidential candidate to a monkey if they hadn’t spent the last 7 years populating the internet with hundreds of thousands of references to the sitting president as a chimp.

But you see, for the Professionally Offended it’s not racism if (1) the target is a white man, and/or (2) it’s them doing it.

With 388,000+ Google hits on "George Bush chimp" as of this morning, you’d think this would be disarmed. You’d be wrong.

Oh, and Rachel has pictures.

UPDATE 080304 23:45:  Protein Wisdom also has a discussion.
(HT:  “N. O'Brain” in Rachel's comments.)

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 22:20:39 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Lament

LATER:  Erica has a remembrance (and prayers for Maya).

Thanks to Lar, who does a better job of keeping track of things than I do.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:46:11 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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FreeDB: Broken and irritating

Being the good citizen, and believer in co-operative action that I am, on the (infrequent) occasion when I rip a CD, if FreeDB can't find it I always try to submit its information.  Problem is, the last few times I've sent one in, I’ve gotten this error message back:

Subject: Rejected freedb submission

Your freedb submission was rejected for the following reason:
Discid collision in category ····

Please fix the problem before you resubmit it.

The problem with this error is that the submitter has nothing to do with it:  Its cause is a limitation in the FreeDB protocol.  The result is a broken, user-unfriendly experience that discourages further submissions.

A look at the bloody details below the jump.

more...

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 23:58:45 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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