Things have been pretty darn busy around here, but it's mostly good news. In no particular order:

Home Life

New furnaces are much toastier. Switching to a lower mortgage rate (and consolidating our other debts therein) is a go, pending a lawyer's costly signature on the paperwork. (Anybody have a pro bono friend, out there? Tom, hurry up and graduate already < grin >< /grin >.) We start looking for a more reliable vehicle tonight. The new Alberta child-welfare legislation means that we qualify for some financial support with 'Sana, which helps make our lives a little smoother. Liz and Dan have been saints; thanks largely to them, Star and I have started to reclaim our relationship - the one that involves just her and me, spending time not parenting or recovering from same.

The kids are, as usual, driving Star nuts... but some of her reading has suggested approaches and points of view which may help in the long term. Hard to say yet whether those are having an effect. Most of Aria's behaviour is fantastic, above and beyond expectations; she's an angel. One puzzling behaviour is that she's becoming extremely oversensitive to pain... a stubbed toe is cause for storms of tears and hours of complaint, or so it seems, and grievous injuries occur an average of a dozen times a day. I'm pretty sure it's an attention-getting device, but it's definitely operating on the unconscious level, and we don't yet have a working strategy for managing it. I'm confident we'll get there, though.

Life is good.

Politics

Things are definitely starting to heat up, south of the border. Monday's hearing brought forth some serious, actionable, illegal, perjurious, and by-legal-definition fraudulent actions on the part of Blackwell and his staff. At least one voice has made the point that voter suppression can't be dealt with by a simple recount. John Kerry and his lawyers are starting to come further into the fight. People are speaking out legally with the evidence, and lawsuits are underway. I personally find it unfortunate that so much focus is on just Ohio, when there are irregularities all over the map, but I do see some signs that on the local level efforts do continue elsewhere as well.

I am personally convinced, at this point, that there was substantial fraud in this election and that its results are simply invalid.

Never mind a recount. I would hold that a re-vote is the only entirely ethical response at this time, after setting aside the results of this election, after recusing all the suspected perpetrators pending a criminal investigation, and after formally acknowledging Jesse Jackson's point that the right to vote must be made more fundamental than the right to own a gun. It won't happen, because of the expense... yet all such expenses pale beside the Pentagon's budget, and I can think of no more efficient way for the U.S. to defend itself than to go back to being an exemplar instead of a bully. So it's a false economy, like so much else, NOT to literally redo the whole fucking mess, and do it properly this time.

In terms of the DemosFire project, what I would like to do with it moving forward is to (a) locate someone with enough database skills to help me put together a prototype of the trust-scheme and voting mechanisms - the rest can be done by email. And then (b) do an alpha test of it in a simulated country, done up basically as a PBEM RPG. Brezmodvia shakes off its previous government and adopts direct democracy; get ten people to play politicians, ten as investigative reporters, ten simple citizens, five special interest groups, and so on and so forth. Then let it grow or decay accordingly, with the DemosFire engine providing the decision-making engine. Anyone interested in helping with (a), please contact me by email.

Game Design

What began as a mental picture has developed into a small rules supplement for Attack Vector, to be published next Origins as an insert in the (name not yet fixed) Ten Worlds Journal. The Regatta. Half the Americas Cup, half NASCAR. Rich individuals from any or all of the Ten Worlds setting will be racing tiny fusion-torch ships through a gradually-revealed racecourse of beacons, jostling each other with the threat of radiation poisoning and showing off their 3-D piloting skills. The alpha rules have been completed and I'll be trying to compile them into a single text file sometime this week. I'll be looking for a time to do playtesting in the next month or so, presumably on a Wednesday although the next three or so are likely to be tricky or impossible. Anyone who wishes to be contacted about playtesting AV:T yacht racing, please email me. No previous experience with AV:T required - one of the draws is that this module incorporates a fairly simple subset of the AV:T rules, with no guns, railguns, firing arcs, warship-slow maneuvering, or explosions.

In addition, a subject which came up on the Forge a year ago (almost to the day) looks like it may start to see the light of day. I've contacted the current owners of Driftwood Publishing, who put out the wildly successful RPG The Riddle of Steel, with the outline for a space opera game with heavy Arthurian influences and a quirky romance element. They seem interested, and are reading over it now; we'll be deciding where to proceed at that point. I like the guys at Driftwood, they're good people, and I would really love to write the first sister game to TROS... and it might yet happen. To put it mildly, this makes me happy.

Lastly, I was discussing with James Brown the possibility of running an Iron Game Chef contest here sometime, for our local crowd. For the unitiated, Iron Game Chef is an event where the participants are given an extremely limited time - the ones I've participated in at Origins have been an hour, the Forge runs 'em occasionally and uses 24h - to come up with an original RPG which incorporates the 'secret ingredient', supplied as they begin. Setting, rules, character roles, character generation, campaign seeds... whatever you can get down in that time. The results are seldom polished, but they're always fascinating. My trouble here is twofold... one, I'm not sure who-all actually have the game design bug strongly enough to want to participate. I know I've got it (down in the bone), and James has caught it, but I've never had a chance to find out who else. If you would enjoy participating, please email me or leave a comment to that effect. The earliest it could happen would be in the time between Christmas and New Year's, but that might also be a good time for it... so let me know. The second gotcha, of course, is that I would be terribly torn between participating, and adjudicating. I'm inclined to make myself stay out, to keep the field more level, but I'm pretty sure I could convince a coterie of sexy babes to adjudicate instead, if people would rather face a real challenge. Mwa ha ha.