The only website that is "done" is obsolete... but our work for the last year is in beta and will be released soon. Not "Soon" as our customers have come to recognize GMs' estimates of release dates, but soon really.

It feels good. We've been getting a lot of positive feedback, and the kind of constructive suggestions that indicate a very positive reception, even though some people have minor gripes. The old website was bad enough that it wasn't even worth complaining about -- some bad design choices that just led to neglect because nobody wanted to look at the damn thing. :)

Would I rather have spent the year doing GM stuff or programming than working on the site? Probably. But at least I can be proud of what I did do, and much of it is immediately visible and easily appreciated. It appears that the "Kobolds Landing" sign I slapped together (with some art that Tracy did for a different purpose a year ago) was about a 7958% better use of time than the retrofit of DR spells to work underwater. ;)

Alas, no Neverwinter Nights for another 6 months or more. I don't mind, as long as it's worth the wait. :)

But Bubba reserved 8 copies of Pool of Radiance at the local Babbages' for office folks and we bought them all. Most of our expectations were high (though David assumed it was going to suck, which statistically speaking is usually a safe bet). Were they met?

Well... I played the game for about 4 hours Friday night, and about 13 hours Saturday. I will be playing today after I write this and take a shower. I've had more fun with it than I have anything since... Alpha Centauri? You don't want to stop playing, you want to see just a little bit more. But its flaws are many:

• A broken installer that always uses the default directory (meaning you have to edit the Windows registry if you want it on another drive) and reportedly blows away required Windows DLLs when it uninstalls.
  
  
• On some computers (including my home machine), the sound challenges the boundaries of the definition of the word "choppy." It sounds like somebody is modulating the volume with a square wave LFO. (On other machines, the sound is just fine, the ambient sounds are great, though the character grunts and such could have been better.)
  
  
• Interface flaws. There is no indicator for some things that affect your character, such as temporary ability damage (and there are a lot of undead that dish that out). It's all too easy to move the wrong character, accidentally skip a character's turn, walk up to a creature when you really wanted to fire at it, or waste a potion by drinking it instead of using it on someone. You can't tell when you're lined up perfectly to flank someone, or whether you're in the threatened area of an opponent and subject to attacks of opportunity. Even if you realize your mistake in time, you can't stop a character once they start moving.
  
  
• The side stories and atmosphere are very well presented, and will intrigue you and creep you out. But the main storyline is weakly presented, and you'll be barely aware of why you're there in the first place.
  
  
• Being a computer game, one expects a certain amount of simplification of the D&D 3rd Edition rules. But a lot of options seem to be taken away without reason -- you can't choose your character's feats or skills, for example; they are assigned to you. That detracts from a lot of the potential enjoyment of planning a character.
  
  
• While the game does seem balanced to provide the right challenge level overall, it isn't consistent with tabletop gaming. You'll find more magic items than any sane DM would permit, but your characters will start off with crappy stats -- unless you use one of the pregenerated characters with stats unattainable by a custom character. It uses a 25 point buy system, and the pregenerated Paladin is a 44 point character whose name you can't change. Argh. My Rogue/Sorcerer is wearing "Boots of Withering Beauty" that raise her Charisma by 4, bringing it to a total of 10... so she can't cast level 1 spells.
  
  
• There are no female monks. There are also no female Dwarves, Halflings or Half-Orcs. Where do baby Dwarves come from?
  
  
• A Cleric in chainmail looks just like a Fighter in chainmail, unless they're drastically different races. You will confuse them.
  
  
• Attacks of opportunity will kill your characters again and again, but there's no Tumble skill. There's Mobility, but you can't choose your own feats so it's anybody's guess when you'll get that.
  
  
• You will find doors and chests that are not pickable, and simply cannot be opened without a specific key from some other place on the map. You will find lots of them. You will also find chests that you know are trapped but cannot be disarmed under any circumstances. You will find traps that, not only can you not disarm them, but your party has to be within a certain distance before you are allowed to set it off. You will find other doors and chests that you can simply smash open. Once in a while you'll actually be given options.
  
  
• There's an automap feature. It looks pretty nice, and has a good system for marking it with notes. But it's impossible to tell, in places, whether a particular hall is barricaded or whether there's a perfectly normal door in what looks (on the map) like a solid wall.

I have more gripes. But if it sounds like the game is too flawed to live, it's not. Stack up all the bugs, flaws and limitations next to the actual fun of playing the game and they're not that significant. There are a lot of strategic and tactical options, fairly nice (if not state of the art) graphics, great atmosphere, the feeling of being in a really huge environment. This is going to be my game of choice for a while... though I'm hoping for some patches soon. :)

No deep thoughts this time.

Steph picked up the Gorillaz CD, and I went for They Might Be Giants' Mink Car. She got the better deal. While there are a handful of wacky, catchy tracks that are on my playlist and in my brain now ("I've got a fang...."), over half of Mink Car just doesn't sound like TMBG anymore and isn't worth my eartime. "Mr. Excitement", however, sounds exactly like Soul Coughing and is just fine, thanks.

Been putting finishing touches on play.net 2.0. (Porridge is the answer. Porridge will protect you from the terrible secret of space.)

Stayed up way too late last night to do that, and to deal with a scheduled UUnet router outage. I got about a half hour nap in there somewhere. By the time I went to bed, I was hallucinating funky multicolored trails behind everything... definitely time to sleep. (It freaked me out... I have no idea why people would actively go looking for an experience like that.)

Been playing the Return to Castle Wolfenstein beta a bit. Like most multiplayer games, the fun level depends on the players. When everyone in the game is actually making a concerted effort to meet their team's objectives, it's an absolute blast. When everyone is off doing his own thing, it can still be kinda fun. When there's some nimrod intentionally killing members of his own team, it's as much fun as shoving splinters under your fingernails. Thankfully, most people quit playing that way as soon as their teammates figure it out and start shooting back. If not... there are other servers out there.

Also been playing Collapse. I love goofy little action-puzzle games like this. ;)

In a week or so, both Dungeon Siege and Pool of Radiance will be out. It's time to put away Diablo. :)

I can still say that none of my machines have ever been infected with a virus... not that this new thing, NIMDA, hasn't tried.

This is a nasty one. It infects IIS web servers that are behind on security patches. On every page it serves up, it includes a .eml attachment, which (thanks to an Internet Explorer bug) is opened automatically. The attachment includes a readme.exe which is disguised as a WAV file, which automatically executes in some cases.

The virus also distributes itself via email to any addresses it finds on the server, spoofing the mail as being sent by one of the addresses. gasa.net happened to choose my email address. I checked my mail and found one message from myself that tried to open readme.exe, and three "returned mail: user unknown" bounces. What fun. Luckily, in the message "from me" to me, the header pointed at the real source of the message.

Today, I found that favoritesanywhere.com (a site that stores your bookmarks, which I found useful) is infected. McAfee killed the virus as it tried to auto-execute.

Some hackers out there have found that an attempted NIMDA attack is a great sign that the attacking server is vulnerable to other things.

Moral of the story: if you run a webserver, keep up with security patches. No matter what, run some kind of anti-virus software, and if you keep your computer online for any length of time, something like Black Ice to monitor port probes and stop anything suspicious.

There are some days when I really don't like being an HTML jockey -- but I'm always glad I'm not a sysadmin.

That thing I said yesterday about not talking about it for a while? Didn't last long.

This afternoon the office had a briefing of sorts by a member of our Board of Directors... a former USAF intel guy who knew Afghanistan and many of its present leaders (and opposition) from back when we were trying to help them fight off the Soviet Union. He has a clear idea of what it will take to shut down bin Laden and Al-Qaeda... and frankly, we may be looking at an ugly next several years.

He also commented on post-traumatic stress syndrome -- and it seems clear that many if not all of us are going through those phases. I'm not sure I'd call it a syndrome, so much as the price of having a human heart.

Afterwards, some of us chimed in with our own questions and opinions. I like to think the onsite staff at Simutronics is smarter than the average bear, and a little more compassionate due to its ties to a great big community... and yet there are still a small minority here who would consider exporting or detaining Arab-Americans "as a precaution." I had to restrain myself. I don't want to get angry at my coworkers when it's really the terrorists that my anger is meant for.

The thing I still fear and dread is that our country will respond to this horror by being more horrible. Or that we will make more enemies than we destroy, and future generations will have to cope with even worse than we suffered last week.

And then this page made me cry.

On a lighter note... I logged in to DragonRealms the other day with my GM Shalnhh character who some of my readers might know. Looking through my pockets, I found:

• a beard
  
• a blackened greatsword
  
• a bronze Trailblazer badge
  
• a dark hooded cloak
  
• a dyrachis quill
  
• a fresh Loki tart
  
• a howling black stuffed sluagh
  
• a jar of flea powder
  
• a jester's head hobbyhorse
  
• a kirmhiro draught
  
• a left-handed boomerang
  
• a little something
  
• a pale pink envelope
  
• a penguin
  
• a prosthetic forehead
  
• a puce towel
  
• a puzzle
  
• a shining cambrinth medallion
  
• a small bone
  
• a small brown ticket
  
• a snifter of Elothean windhaze
  
• a stone mortar
  
• a tiny crystal vial
  
• a triskele medallion
  
• a vial of naphtha
  
• an arcane tome
  
• an engraved platinum disc
  
• an engraved tail band
  
• an exquisite angel mask
  
• an idea
  
• an ostrich waxer
  
• fnord
  
• his fool head
  
• his third eye
  
• some face paint
  
• some fuzzy dice
  
• some gooey samatak
  
• some keismin-studded gauntlets
  
• some oravir slivers
  
• some prize rings

I don't know where some of that stuff came from... but many of those items hold memories. Silly memories, in most cases, but fond ones.

I don't know about tommorow, but for now I'm not going to say more about September 11 or the reaction to it. I have not run out of things to say, but sometimes silence is better.

And I do need to get my mind on other things again.

I'm up to page 152 in Die Göttin Seschat; about 80 pages left until I hit the massive glut of appendices. I've not been translating every sentence -- some of the issues are not of as much interest, and many of the sections include endless citations of slight variations or embellishments on the same formulaic scene. And of course 1/3 of those pages are footnotes, which I have only bothered to translate in a couple of cases.

I am considering changing gears on this project for a bit before I plow on ahead. If nothing else, putting some thoughts together, weighing the ramifications of what I've learned, and deciding how that affects me. Perhaps even writing part of the new article.

I'm pleased that, while this book overturns some of the assumptions and interpretations of older studies, it supports some of my own speculations and doesn't invalidate anything I've used in my personal practices. But there are still some things I could do differently... still a few big things to mull over.

Hand in hand with the brain work, there's the mindlessness of Diablo II. My Assassin is really starting to be challenged in Nightmare Act IV. I gave up on my ice-sorcerer hireling 'cause he no longer contribute enough to justify the increasingly frequent expense of resurrection. The half a million gold I once had in the bank has dwindled to 30K under the onslaught of my character's own death penalties and the purchase of many a health potion. I may backtrack a little and gain some levels so I can at least finish Nightmare, but I will definitely start a new character anyway. Perhaps a Druid or a lightning Sorc, or a throwing barbarian, or javelin-tossing Amazon... ah, the possibilities. :)

It's true that I'm somewhat bored with the game. Too bad there's no people out there writing lots of new content... no team of GMs, no player-created creatures or maps. That may be Diablo's biggest lack, if you can accept that it's just a good hack-and-slash game and not a really weak RPG.

"We ask for wisdom from the grace of God that we not become the evil we deplore."
- Rev. Nathan Baxter, dean of the National Cathedral

"Repel the evil with the good. Give us comfort. Help us in our distress."
- Imam Muzammil H. Siddiqi

The news channels are now calling it "America's New War." But we can't declare war until we know who to fight.

My biggest fear right now is not that we will be attacked again -- it's that we will become terrorists. The majority of public opinion right now seems to be that we should go after Osama bin Laden with all our resources, and bomb any nation that doesn't cooperate. How many women and children, how many innocent people, how many brave and heroic and decent people, would die in such a counterattack? What have they done to deserve it? How would it be more constructive than what was done to us?

Osama bin Laden is Islam's version of Jerry Falwell -- a subhuman lunatic with no conscience, who in no way represents the people of his faith, his nation or his ethnicity.

But bigots have already begun insulting, threatening, abusing, and shooting at Muslims, Arabs and anyone who "looks like" an Arab, here in the US. That makes me almost as angry, and just as disappointed in humanity, as the original attack did.

I ask whether bombing Kabul in a temper tantrum is any better.

This may be shocking, but I actually agree with one of G.W. Bush's statements. :) He said this morning that we have a responsibility to "rid the world of evil." I'm all for taking drastic measures to stop terrorists and terrorism. But we must remember that the people of Afghanistan are not really much different than the people of New York.

Especially now that we know firsthand what that kind of suffering is like, we should know better than to inflict more of it.

I have tried several times in the past two days to let it go -- to cry it out or to work up a good cathartic fit of rage or something. I haven't been able to.

We want somebody to blame because we want them to pay. But if the perpetrators could die a thousand times, that would not be enough. There is no way to right this kind of wrong. Ever.

We will never be completely safe from this kind of evil -- and we never have been. We just convince ourselves that Big Bad America, at a remove from the "troubled" areas of the world, is somehow immune. We let ourselves forget about incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing. It doesn't take scary foreigners or religions we don't understand, it just takes a certain kind of madness.

I have been pondering the similarities and differences between terrorism and war. There have been many comparisons between Tuesday's attack and Pearl Harbor -- but one was a clear act of war by one country against another, with a military target. There is something about human nature that says there is a crucial difference between the act of a nation and the act of a terrorist. What stands out in my mind is that nobody has stepped forward to claim responsibility, and no one pressed the attack and tried to take advantage of it.

Somebody woke up the sleeping giant, and then ran away and hid. Why? There is no gain from this. It's the act of a madman.

David blames religion in general and Islam in particular. I wanted to respond to a couple of things, and then maybe some of the rest of it later.

Timothy McVeigh's act of terrorism was not motivated by religion. Adolf Hitler's atrocities were not motivated by religion. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was not motivated by religion. Our own use of the A-bomb was not motivated by religion. The Civil War was not motivated by religion. The Cold War -- which could have destroyed all or nearly all human civilization had it been carried too far -- was not motivated by religion.

Blaming terrorism on religion is like blaming violent crime on video games, movies, music, books, or the like. There is always the lunatic who uses whatever he is exposed to as the launching point for his harmful idiocy.

Islam actually preaches tolerance as much or more than Christianity does. Whether it practices it or not is another matter... but the Quran says specifically that religion cannot be forced onto people, and the Sunnah says that Muslims who kill non-Muslims are the enemies of Allah and "will not even smell the fragrance of Paradise."

I do agree with David that prayer is not the best weapon America has -- but it's really all that most individual Americans have. Giving blood and donating to disaster relief are helpful to the surviving victims, but they do not bring down terrorists or protect us from this kind of thing happening again. *NOTHING* I can do will help with that, and that's so frustrating I cannot put it into words. And so I make the one gesture I can, whether it's futile or not -- I pray for justice. I pray for it to be swift, certain, effective and deadly.

I have faith both in our armed forces and in divine forces.

I woke up this morning hearing two things: the civil defense alarm, and the muffled-by-the-door sounds of Jeff telling Steph about the terorrist attack on the World Trade Center. The first I just assumed was the monthly test that they used to perform, though it was not as loud as usual. The second, I assumed he was describing a dream or something that happened in Majestic.

I wish.

I cannot imagine a human mind that hates so much as to set this sort of thing in motion. Nothing at all constructive will come out of this -- it's a wasteful, pointless, evil destruction. None of the victims in any way deserved what happened; this is something that should never have happened. This is exactly what my religion means by "isfet."

I hope I never understand why someone would do this, because I don't want to see into those kinds of depths.

I don't know what else to say. I feel less anger than I do confusion and sadness. I hope the Palestinians who are celebrating this horror come to their senses. I hope the terrorists responsible for it, whoever they are, recognize the evil of the thing they have done and know that no kind of God in any religion would condone or appreciate it.

To those terrorists: you have killed people -- men, women, and children who just wanted to live their lives in peace. Not enemies of your cause or your God. Most of them probably couldn't have found your country on a map and none of them could ever understand why you hated them so much.

How was your week?

I'm glad mine is over. This week was the beta release of eScape (the new browser-based front end software for our games) and the usual flurry of last-minute things that that entails, and we are fast approaching the intended beta date for the new website.

We had Monday off (recovering from the float trip).

Tuesday was occupied entirely by meetings. We came to the office, went to the weekly staff meeting, immediately into an eScape meeting, went to lunch and to pay the rent, came back and spent the rest of the workday in a play.net 2.0 meeting (in which there was much agonizing over the home page design, arguably the most important page of the site where it comes to convincing potential new players that we don't suck).

Wednesday there was more than a little friction and stress between other people (which always makes the rest of us uncomfortable, since they're friends) and some technical barricades that slowed me down.

Thursday was decent, but still a lot of work followed by a major D&D session that went long (our evil-leaning party finished The Sunless Citadel) and we went home worn out.

Today I ran into what should have been minor frustration, but I let it get to me more than I should. Not quite as bad as it's been in the past though, and I'm over it now. Something about happy Finnish music helped with that I think. :)

All week, my computer at work has been trying to download a critical update package that refuses to actually install. I apparently can't upgrade to Win2K Service Pack 2 without this thing. Feh.

Anyway, the weekend is almost here and I'm ready to decompress... well, except for some priest training stuff Saturday, but I'm looking forward to that. :)

There has been much discussion on 3rdedition.org and boards.wizards.com recently about the issue of roleplaying a character not of one's own gender.

The idea makes some people uncomfortable. Others think it implies something about the player's sexuality, or that they are just doing it for some kind of dirty cheap thrill. Others claim they just don't think it can be pulled off realistically. Some say that a male DM covering a female NPC is vastly different from a male player who plays a female PC.

I'm a straight guy and I play about 50/50 myself. Personally, I find alignment and personality far more difficult to roleplay than gender. Men and women are different, but they are not completely alien to each other. If you can roleplay an evil, 150-year-old half-vampire elf with the ability to produce 30-foot-wide fireballs on cue, what's so difficult and mysterious about emulating half the people you've met in the real world?

Being male does not hamper my roleplaying. Being quiet, introspective and generally passive does sometimes. (Ironically, some people would say those are female traits... they just don't know some of the women that I do, heh.) The character I've had the most difficulty playing is Few, because of the expectation that Paladins take charge. I don't mind being the first one to draw fire, but I don't like playing sergeant or speaking for the party. Melissa's psionicist/monk is the de facto leader of that party, because she had trouble trying to play a passive character. :) Perhaps this is why I've decided to have Few strive to become closer to his goddess rather than an increasingly heroic knight type -- nobody likes an aloof Paladin. He's going to become the fantasy version of what I want to be (and oddly enough, some of my dreams have been a strange overlapping of his future and mine). But right now, he's a challenge. The main differences between him and me are that he will throw himself in danger to save others whereas I don't think I'm that virtuous, and he is probably more bewildered by the world than I am.

In contrast with my attitude a couple months ago, the character I have the most affinity for now is Livia. It might be because she is too much like me that I had so much trouble figuring her out. Am I that inscrutable and aloof?

Why play this way though? Aside from the obvious retort "why not?", I guess I do have some kind of fascination with it. I can't say I value my female characters more than my male characters overall, but the emotional attachment is different. Hmm.

What's kind of funny though... I don't just decide "this character is going to be female" -- I either leave it up to an odd/even die roll, or just choose male. When I do roll, it always comes up female though.

Overall, I think people make too much of a big deal out of it. Alignment and race have a larger effect on personality than gender. Gender does affect how others treat you in a lot of cases though. Interestingly, my two female characters are in a position to take advantage of being underestimated, while my two male characters would prefer to be intimidating. Livia is going to be changing her attitude though when she starts sprouting scales, claws and fangs. ;)

It affects play somewhat too. It's a bit awkward sitting at the table, obviously one thing while RPing something else. The PC's race does not affect which pronouns you use, but gender does. It feels weird for "me" to be referred to as "she" even though it's not me, but the PC being referenced. Similarly, calling Melissa's gnome "he" is difficult when she's sitting there at the table. That aspect is much easier to handle in an online game. :)

One caveat -- I wouldn't create a female GM character in an online game, simply because that's less of a fictional character with its own personality than it is an avatar representing the actual GM. My own identity is not in question. :)

Progress through the Budde book continues. It was gratifying to see this scholar, working with sources I had not been aware of, conclude a chapter with the exact same thought that my spiritual leader expressed 3 years ago when I was divined. At this point, I expect the final conclusion of the book to be the same one that I've been coming to in the past several months myself. After reading this though, I have a lot of thoughts to get together as to the implications of things.

Whatever it means for my future, I do know there's a total redesign and rewrite of the Seshat article. :)

FFX characters, eh?

Yuna is obviously the one that people are supposed to love. The same role as Aeris, Rinoa, and that ilk -- the love interest and major cute one. So naturally, while I think she's cute, she's not the one that really catches my eye.

Rikku looks startlingly like Quistis, one of my favorites... but younger, dresses funny and is clearly supposed to be the Yuffie/Selphie-like character. Which means I won't like her at all.

That leaves the unfortunately named, but exquisite, Lulu. Good thing the characters can be renamed, because to me Lulu was a nice old woman with a poodle that lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid. This fine specimen is clearly not her. :)

And as you can see here, the new look for Shiva is pretty amazing too. :)

Oh, I suppose there are male characters in this game too. Tossup between Auron and Kimahri for badassness I think.

We went on a float trip yesterday -- Matt, Melissa, Johnny, Gary, Star, Greg, Steph, Jeff and I -- which was a nice change and a reminder of the Peace River trips I used to take with my Dad. (Coincidentally, that was in or near Arcadia, FL, while yesterday's trip was near Arcadia Valley, MO.)

Being Labor Day weekend, there were a lot of people, and many collisions between our rafts and various canoes and inner tubes. A road runs alongside the river and there were a few spots where trucks had parked on the big pile of small rocks aka "beach" and radios were blaring. By comparison, on a busy day on the Peace River we might have seen three or four other boats. However, there were a few quiet moments and it definitely served to get us away from the routine.

The river was low, and there were far too many places where our raft dragged bottom and we had to get out and pull it along. Combine that with a rocky riverbed, inadequate footwear (Matt had gone completely barefoot, most of us had shoes with a built-in rock collection function), and having no ropes to ease the awkwardness of hauling a heavy raft around, and we were in for some toil.

But we had enough fun that we want to do it again... maybe in the spring or after heavy rains, and definitely better prepared. This morning I just ache a bit and have a few sunburned spots where I missed with the otherwise super-effective, waterproof spray sunscreen I used, but it's nothing compared to the days after some of the trips with my Dad. Those rafts were far easier to paddle and more nimble than the Gheenoe or the bass boat we used to deal with, though they don't compare with a sea kayak. We didn't have to paddle upriver, or too much against the wind, and the current was quite strong. Sometimes a little too strong, as we found ourselves ramming rocks and fending off tree branches -- it's pretty clear why some of the paddles we were issued were all busted up.

That Quicktionary pen arrived Thursday, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it's very cool and should have been extremely useful; with most text I'll believe the claim of 97% accuracy. On the other hand, it can't deal with the font that Die Göttin Seschat is printed in (grrr). The kerning is too close on some letter combinations, and unlike most good OCR software, you can't train it. You can scan a word beginning with "Frü" ten times and get ten different, wrong, results. It's far faster to just transcribe it into Babelfish. :/

Miniatures are coming along. Livia-as-a-half-dragon is looking better now that I've acquired a brighter gold for the skin, went with a slightly coppery red hair, and painted the leather stuff black rather than white. Few is looking pretty spiffy with the scale parts of his armor washed in turqoise and drybrushed in silver, but the dark green doesn't work for the dangly cloth thing and the helmet plume, and there are still some touchups and details. Melissa's character Lissana is done but for touchups and whatever I'm going to do with the face. Once I finish those three I'll probably be painting stuff just for looks, though one of the ridiculously heavily armored dudes might work for Skippy's character Rico.

Halfway through Act V in D2X. They missed a golden opportunity to make the mysterious Natasha from Act III an actual part of the story... here she is assigned to watch for suspicious mages like Ormus, and she's completely oblivious of Nihlathak. And I guess Blizzard decided that, after all the wonderful things people had to say about those annoying blowgun-wielding Fetishes from Act III, the only way to top it would be with quick, firebolt-throwing, teleporting (!) Demon Imps in Act V. Thankfully Cloak of Shadows stops most of that nonsense. Overall I'm enjoying the new stuff, I just think there should have been more of it for the price. Ah well.