A cast of thousands?

My In-Laws
Well, okay, maybe not. But my niece is damn cute, and Star's Granny is fabulous, and I enjoy road trips with milady.

Lois McMaster Bujold
... a sequel to The Curse of Chalion - woohoo!

Lajos Egri
Twice!

Robert Heinlein
Previously unpublished, I think. No, silly, the specific book.

Bernard Cornwell
Grailey goodness.

Albert J. Dremel
Who pretty much explains himself.

Jeff Hawkins
Who doesn't, but you can look him up.

J.R.R. Tolkein
And Peter Jackson, among others. ROTK extended, to be specific. Num.

The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse
For NOT staying with us this year. Two feet of space, two hundred kph relative, two A.M. ... give thanks to whomever you believe in, for our sake.

Whatever genius invented Quadro
Salesman from the company gave my Mom his sales pitch, versatile, durable, etc... and she commented that yeah, the set she bought 20 years ago was still holding up fine. They asked her to write a testimonial.

... plus Kim Stanley Robinson, Nikita (la Femme), some craftsman in Costa Rica, and many more.

For all that we disdain the commercial aspect, it's GOOD to feel like a kid again. Tricky. This is a long post - Read the rest.

I really enjoy road trips, when they go well. And our girls were, all things considered, angels. We're here, and safe.

And the phbbbt noise comes from the reactions of three educated people when the following concept comes up in conversation:

Scanning Electron Phrenology.

Because, y'know, maybe it was actually a good idea - they just didn't have the resolution in the Victorian era.

On other notes, some neat Heresy structure came out of the trip, which I'll assemble for the core team. And it sounds like Iron Game Chef will be a go, sometime in the early new Year. Star and I will be working on a funky trophy, and I'm still tempted to also publish the resulting games in a small print run and actually sell a few. Tentative format will be a first round, 90 minutes, judged by the current Iron Chef (which I'll assume to be me, locally, this year). Second round, 60 minutes, face off against the Iron Chef, for the title (which will be guaranteed to move away from the incumbent).

I reiterate: if you're actually interested in competing or judging, pick up that email composer now and tell me you're interested. That's eric(AT)heresy.ca, if you didn't know already. And if you live out-of-town (Ken?) and are nonetheless interested, I can probably hook you up with a local teammate with webconferencing capabilities. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Given how well we've seen the bulk of their country react to irony, nonetheless I commend this beautiful gedankexperiment to anyone with an irony bone in their body. Yet another angle on how brutally myopic some versions of political thinking really are... This is a long post - Read the rest.

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. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Ken asked me, in a comment below, what Bush could do which would get my approval, and yet be consistent with representing the viewpoint of those who voted for him.

It's a reasonable question, but the list still overran the thousand-character comment limit considerably. My answer to his question is here, instead, as today's post.

He could cease and desist his assault on the sciences and regulatory agencies.

He could acknowledge the data when his programs fail, or report proven falsehoods - such as the "abstinence-only" sex education thing - and change what doesn't work or is proven false.

He could be honest about the effects of his programs, for instance the tax cuts, instead of persisting in a program of disingenuity about their actual effects.

He could himself take on the lack of transparency in your electoral system, treating it as an affront to good sense. He could actively condemn hate campaigning and Swiftboating tactics, even when used on his behalf.

He could give up "yee-haw as a foreign policy" in favour of some kind - any kind! - of multilateralism. He could make the American people safer by pulling out of Iraq, despite his election platform; yes, I'd approve, it would be in his voters' best interests in the long term.

He could accept the Kyoto Protocol, the International Court, the Test Ban Treaty, and any number of other sensible initiatives of the international community. Especially the ones which his supporters, by and large, thought he supported when they voted for him.

He could acknowledge the poor track record of privatization in general, and the US health care system in specific, vis-a-vis cost vs. benefit, and take action on this score as well.

He could condemn censorship in the media, uphold your Bill of Rights (even for gays), and allow - nay, encourage - civilized dissent. He could acknowledge that out-of-earshot 'Protest Zones' and the Miami Model of law enforcement are illegal, punish those responsible, and strengthen the laws against them.

He could punish war profiteering and close corporate tax loopholes. As a side benefit he might be able to kill the deficit in doing so.

He could push a progressive income tax structure which would benefit, not harm, the vast majority of those who voted for him. He could extend that progressive scale to all 'people' under the law, including corporations. [Side note, my friend Tom Cantine is working on a brilliant defense of progressive taxation from libertarian first principles; I'll post it, or a link, here when it's done.]

He could acknowledge the current risks to the US dollar and make good-faith efforts with other countries to prevent it from sliding any further, up to and including raising taxes and/or limiting fossil fuel use if that's what it takes to prevent a currency collapse. See the above about not being obliged to hurt your voters, even if they voted you into office to do it.

He could (choose one) abandon protectionism and embrace globablisation, OR abandon globalisation and embrace protectionism. Frankly I'm not picky, that's a legitimate electoral issue, but the US should bloody well stop trying to have its cake and eat it too.

He could fund his own programs and promises properly. (Yes, most if not all politicians could use to work on this.) He could put his money where his mouth is and give NASA enough money to actually push for Mars.

He could condemn torture and uphold the Geneva Conventions.

He could condemn conflicts of interest between government and industry. He could shut down the lobbying industry. He could push a countrywide Clean Elections campaign such as Maine's or Arizona's.

He could stop trying to pressure his peaceful neighbours into spending their money on his military initiatives, against the clear wishes of those countries' voters.

He could use his bully pulpit to echo a brand of Christianity which can hear the Sermon on the Mount with a straight face and a clean conscience.

He could, in short, (a) acknowledge facts, even unpleasant ones, (b) be honest and transparent about his policies, and (c) actually work toward the economic and social best interests of his constituents - those who voted for him, those who voted against him, and those who did not vote.

Abuse, hate, and prejudice are not in the best interests of those who hold them. A skyrocketing Gini coefficient of wealth disparity, a shrinking middle class, and Wal-Martization are not in the best interests of the majority of voters.

He could show them that.

But he won't.

This is a long post - Read the rest.