8 - 2003 | ***Dave Does the Blog

The sound of silence

I really dislike using the telephone. I really do. I am visually oriented, and long phone conversations tend to give me a headache as I try to focus just on…

I really dislike using the telephone. I really do. I am visually oriented, and long phone conversations tend to give me a headache as I try to focus just on the sound of the voice, and not be distracted by other stuff around me. Which is why phone calls from me tend to be short, sweet, and to the point.

Nonetheless, I’m making it a point to call each of my staff at least once a week to touch bases as to what’s going on, give them a chance to vent in a way that e-mail won’t support, discuss careers stuff and the weather and what about those Dodgers and all that jazz.

I have 30 minutes scheduled, and expect it will run 15.

I dislike doing it, but it’s one reason they pay me the big bucks.

One problem: I just discovered that one of my staff evidently hates using the phone, and is less communicative over it, than I am.

So … maybe just 5 minutes for that call.

Perhaps we can all fly naked

Following information from interrogation of al Qa’eda operatives and evidence gathered at captured al Qa’eda camps, DHS is warning airlines to pay closer attention to portable elecronics as carry-ons. The…

The concern follows the discovery of apparent prototype weapons in al-Qaida safe houses overseas and interrogation of a captured, high-ranking al-Qaida operative. Officials say al-Qaida terrorists considered trying to hide explosives in particular models of cell phones, cameras and simple electronic devices, such as radio boom boxes.
Intelligence officials tell NBC News the advisory will inform airport security officers to give extra scrutiny to some types of common carry-on items, to see if they might be concealing weapons. Senior U.S. officials told NBC News that recent raids of an al-Qaida safe house uncovered a camera flash unit modified for use as a stun gun and cameras modified to hold explosives. In addition, there have been intercepted discussions on using other materials to defeat security measures at U.S. airports.
The official would not identify the time or the place of the raid other than to say it was “in the last couple of months” and that it was not in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the same official said that interrogations have revealed that al-Qaida has discussed using “improvised weapons in electronic devices” in attacks on aircraft. The information is “recently obtained, but how recent the planning is remains unclear.” There is also, from interrogations, a concern about toys, specifically “stuffed animal toys.”

As someone who carries a cell phone, a Palm Pilot, and whose briefcase full of adapters and transformers and the like already gets close scrutiny, I’m less than enthused.

On the other hand, it makes certain sense — certainly more than some of the other TSA security frenzies.

Right under your nose

Sometimes, like Tracy, you never realize what you’re burdened with, until the burden is lifted. That’s particularly true for physical impairment. How was I diagnosed as being near-sighted? Did I…

Sometimes, like Tracy, you never realize what you’re burdened with, until the burden is lifted.

That’s particularly true for physical impairment.

How was I diagnosed as being near-sighted? Did I complain to my parents about how my vision was all blurry? Of course not. That’s all I knew.

It was my Mom constantly nagging me to get away from the TV (radiation poisoning, don’t you know), and my continuing to scoot back up next to it. And she finally asked the key question, “Why are you always sitting so close to the TV?”

“Because I can’t see from back there.”

It was perfectly natural. I had no idea that I should be able to see from back there, or that there was something wrong with me. I was coping, without realizing it.

There are a lot of folks who don’t go to the doctor for regular checkups. “I’m not sick,” they say. “Nothing’s wrong with me. Why go to the doctor?”

Because you never know when the status quo is sick, or impaired, or below where it should be.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

A rather damning article in the Boston Globe about how inaccurate polygraph machines are — especially for security screening. Though long on anecdote, the story mentions a couple of scientific…

A rather damning article in the Boston Globe about how inaccurate polygraph machines are — especially for security screening. Though long on anecdote, the story mentions a couple of scientific studies, too:

That was where matters stood until 1999, when Congress began looking closely at security at the Los Alamos and Sandia labs in the midst of the Wen Ho Lee fiasco. The uproar was immediate and loud. After a series of stormy public meetings in New Mexico, Congress mandated the testing of the 20,000 employees at both labs. But New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman, for whom this was a constituent matter, forced into the bill the funding for the National Academy of Sciences report on the reliability of the polygraph when used for security screening. When it was released late last year, the study proved the most significant critique of the polygraph since the Frye decision.
The study determined that not only was the polygraph useless for security screening but that its use might actually be detrimental to the work of keeping the labs secure. It argued that the test was so vague that, to catch one spy, nearly 100 other employees might have to have their security clearances lifted. “Polygraph testing,” the report concluded, “yields an unacceptable choice . . . between too many loyal employees falsely judged deceptive and too many . . . threats left undetected.”
This put the Department of Energy in a bind. However, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham declined either to abandon the polygraph or to fully support it. Instead, he briefly delayed the testing, citing the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Later, however, it quietly began again, and the Department of Energy issued a statement saying that the “issues” raised by the National Academy of Sciences were not sufficient to abandon the polygraph.

Note that Congress in 1998 forbade polygraphs from being used by private employers, and they remain, since 1923, inadmissable in court. And yet Congress — which declines to let any of the beasties near itself or its staff — expressly allows other governmental agencies to use polygraphs, and regularly responds to their requests for more funding for broader polygraph programs.

Not surprisingly, polygraphers (who have no sort of federal licensing or guidelines), and polygraph companies are among the biggest touts of the machines, alongside government types who want to prove they’re doing something, dammit. That, and people raised on TV portrayals of “lie detectors” and their unerring pointing at The Guilty Party.

Feh.

(via InstaPundit, who calls it “trial by ordeal, with fancy printouts, and about as accurate”)

Breaking news

I hate to link to breaking news here, because inevitably something pops up almost immediately to take the story beyond whatever analysis I can give it. Still, the 11th-hour accusations…

I hate to link to breaking news here, because inevitably something pops up almost immediately to take the story beyond whatever analysis I can give it.

Still, the 11th-hour accusations against the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal bishop-elect of New Hampshire, are disturbing on a number of levels.

First off, there’s the disturbance of the substance of the allegations, if true. It would be more than a bit scandalous, and it would, because of the controversial nature of Robinson’s election, have inevitable, if unfair, ramifications beyond just himself.

But just as disturbing — and discrediting — is how and when these two accusations came out: after the House of Deputies had approved the election by a surprisingly wide margin, and just before the House of Bishops was about to take up the vote. The timing is, to say the least, a bit suspect.

The church is investigating the allegations. The big question is whether a reasonable investigation can be held before the convention wraps up on Friday, or, if not, whether there is some mechanism that would allow Robinson’s election to be confirmed (or at least voted upon) afterwards.

Every indication is that Robinson underwent extensive background checks prior to his election in New Hampshire in June (if they are anything like what we did here in Colorado, that would be multiple levels of such checks). The election was a sixteen month, very public process, as has been the time between it and the ECUSA convention in Minneapolis. All the debate over Robinson himself, and the idea of an openly gay bishop, has been impossible to avoid.

So why is it that something like this comes out only at the very last second?

A claim that Robinson inappropriately touched a man was e-mailed Sunday to Bishop Thomas Ely of Vermont, who was asked in the message not to consent to Robinson’s election. Other bishops received the e-mail as well and “some of the bishops have talked to the accuser” about his claims, Solheim said.
In the message, a man who identified himself as David Lewis from Manchester, Vt., said Robinson “does not maintain appropriate boundaries with men.” Lewis wrote in the e-mail that he met Robinson at a church event “a couple of years ago” and “he put his hands on me inappropriately every time I engaged him in conversation.” Lewis described himself as a “straight man reporting homosexual harassment.”

Lewis has a couple of good character references in the AP story, but you still have to wonder where he’s been this whole time. Was it only when Robinson’s election was seen as inevitable that Lewis felt he had to come forward? Does Lewis’ apparent status as being in training to become an Episcopal priest play into this?

That allegation is the more serious of the two, though barring anyone else coming forward, it remains the sort of he-said/he-said claim that cannot be resolved one way or another. More of a tempest-in-a-teapot, to my mind (which makes its 11th-hour revelation even more suspect) has to do with a web site.

Theuner said in a statement that the church’s investigation would also include scrutiny of separate concerns raised about Robinson’s “relationship to a Web site of outright.org,” a secular outreach program for gay and bisexual youth that Robinson helped found.
Bishops learned of the porn link claim from David Virtue, a conservative Anglican activist and writer who has been among the harshest critics of Robinson and of Episcopal gay activists. Virtue said a bishop whom he would not identify alerted him to the link.
Mo Baxley, a member of Concord, N.H., Outright’s board of directors, said Robinson hasn’t been involved with the group for several years and had no role in developing its Web page.
The link is on an unaffiliated site that had resources for gay youth, Baxley said. That page provided resources for bisexuals that, a few links away, provided access to porn.
Outright issued a statement Monday saying the organization was not aware of the link and objected to it.

And, according to an NPR story yesterday, that link has been removed from the Outright site.

I almost guarantee (without checking) that you could probably find in my linklist a site that “a few links away, provides access to porn.” I mean, something three (or more) links away is nearly meaningless. It’s like the shocking discovery that my friend’s neighbor’s sister is a drug dealer — it’s nothing that would properly bring scandal upon my life — especially if it was a friend who I hadn’t really talked to for “several years.”

Again, this whole thing, to me, smacks of a last-moment attempt at character assassination by folks who, presumably, feel that any means is fair to prevent a spiritual wrong from occuring. Which philosophy, I suspect, their Savior would not agree with.

We’ll see.

Poncy elf

Yet another variation on the theme — though, yeah, it feels about right. I am a: Neutral Good Elf Ranger Bard Alignment:Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good…

Yet another variation on the theme — though, yeah, it feels about right.

I am a: Neutral Good Elf Ranger Bard

Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’.

Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.

Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki’s symbol is a unicorn head.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?

Looking at the detailed results, it really was a NG, with slightly lower (but tied) numbers for LG and CG. Race it was either Elf or Half-Elf, a tie (I would probably swing the Half-Elf way), with Gnome the only other contender. Ranger and Bard were by far the top picks for class.

So … does this mean I should play a character like this next time out? Or is it better or more enjoyable to play (to some degree) against type?

(via SfAD)

The Mentos Conspiracy

Remember all those zany, kitschy TV ads for Mentos, complete with that awkward jingle and those odd, off-culture story lines — clearly the effort of someone to save money by…

Remember all those zany, kitschy TV ads for Mentos, complete with that awkward jingle and those odd, off-culture story lines — clearly the effort of someone to save money by just transplanting the European commercials for the Dutch candy to America?

Well, the truth is a bit more interesting.

For reasons I won’t go into at the moment, I was having a email conversation with co-workers that wandered into the topic of Mentos commercials. Most people assume that these commercials, which practically define the term kitsch, are filmed in Germany or the Netherlands–the (fresh)maker, Van Melle, is a Dutch company–and poorly adapted for an American audience. Not so, wrote a coworker, claiming that it is a little-known fact that the commercials are actually filmed with struggling actors in Los Angeles backlots.

(via InstaPundit)

Art imitates, er, art

Back in June, I was reviewing the comic strips I read and I mentioned how Tom Batiuk’s work on “Funky Winkerbean” “recently changed to a much more polished and realistic…

Back in June, I was reviewing the comic strips I read and I mentioned how Tom Batiuk’s work on “Funky Winkerbean” “recently changed to a much more polished and realistic art style (reminiscent of John Byrne).”

Well, that’s because it was Byrne. Though Batiuk and Ayers are going to be keeping a more realistic style than they’ve used in the past.

Nice to know I can still spot comic artist styles — even when I don’t really spot them.

(via PVP)

Left-winging it

According to your answers, your political philosophy is Left-Liberal. Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.
Your Personal Self-Government Score is 80%.
Your Economic Self-Government Score is 30%.
Take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz

Hmmm. Compared to the previous quiz, this has me further left “freedom-wise,” but also further left “economy-wise.”

Yawn

Yawning seems to be more contagious among kind people — or, at least, people who can empathize with others (abstract). Platek and his colleagues at the State University of New…

Yawning seems to be more contagious among kind people — or, at least, people who can empathize with others (abstract).

Platek and his colleagues at the State University of New York in Albany sat subjects in front of videos of others yawning and tallied their responses to find out why people are susceptible or immune to contracting yawns.
Those impervious to the infection also struggle to put themselves in other people’s shoes, psychological tests showed. For example, they might be less likely to recognize that a social faux pas or insult could cause someone else offence.
Identifying with another’s state of mind while they yawn may trigger an unconscious impersonation, the team suggests. The findings might also explain why schizophrenics, who have particular difficulty in doing this, rarely catch yawns.

I would add to that I’ve heard it said that small children tend not to catch yawns, and I’ve observed that in the past with Katherine. While small children are aware of others moods, and react to them, they have problems empathizing with how others might feel — hence the idiosyncracy of what “fairness” means.

I’ve lately noticed Katherine beginning to catch yawns, which, I now suppose, is a good thing.

(via BoingBoing)

Only the gods are real

A fine site with both annotations of all the gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and pictures of the carousel at the House on the Rock. Fun. (via Gaiman)…

A fine site with both annotations of all the gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and pictures of the carousel at the House on the Rock. Fun.

(via Gaiman)

Growing pains

Interesting article on my city and its various financial problems. All that having been said, I still think incorporation was the right solution, especially in the face of Greenwood Village’s…

Interesting article on my city and its various financial problems.

All that having been said, I still think incorporation was the right solution, especially in the face of Greenwood Village’s cherry-picking of retail property.

Does anybody know what time it is?

Well, no, actually they don’t. I get really annoyed by the 3-5 minute difference between my computer and the time display on my office phone. But that’s just annoyance. The…

Well, no, actually they don’t.

I get really annoyed by the 3-5 minute difference between my computer and the time display on my office phone. But that’s just annoyance.

The real trouble comes between trying to impose digital accuracy on an analog world — or trying to make a constant (vibrational frequency of atoms, the foundation for atomic clocks) match up to a variable (the rotation of the Earth). We use atomic clocks instead of the rotation because it is a variable — over time it’s slowing down, and not even at a constant rate — but as atomic timekeeping is becoming more widespread, that discrepency is becoming more of a problem.

The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world’s official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up.
The first of these “leap seconds” was introduced in 1972, mainly as a favour to astronomers and others who still relied on the old-style celestial time. A further 31 leap seconds have been added since, most recently on December 31 1998.
And that would be that, were it not for the fact that the precise timekeeping offered by atomic clocks is now becoming widely available – most commonly through the satellite global positioning system used for navigation. To add to the confusion, GPS uses yet another timescale.
It includes the leap seconds added until the GPS clock was set in 1980, but has ignored those added since. This means GPS time is now running 13 seconds ahead of coordinated universal time – which includes all added leap seconds and to which most clocks on Earth are set – but is some 19 seconds behind international atomic time, which is based on atomic clocks and ignores leap seconds.

If you consider how far a jet aircraft can move in 13-19 seconds, you can catch a glimpse of some of the problems.

And, of course, the Europeans are (unilaterally) going to have a different system/benchmark when they launch their own GPS system.

Naturally, the real threat is the lawyers getting involved.

“We face possible problems in the timestamping of electronic documents,” [Dennis McCarthy of the US Naval Observatory] says. This is because a leap second is usually added at the end of the day, by asking clocks to change from 23:59,59 to 23:59,60 before going on to 00:00,00. But as most clocks don’t permit the number 60, they show 23:59,59 for two seconds instead.
“I suspect it will happen eventually that someone says their 23:59,59 refers to a different 23:59,59 and lawyers will become involved,” Mr McCarthy says. This could be important for legal or financial documents detailing the sale of bonds and securities at a specific time.

The techies are looking at a simple answer — banning leap seconds. Then everything is nice and neat and simple — except for trivial matters like the real world. Not only would it throw astronomical observations for a loop, but eventually you’d have a discrepency between when the sun rises and when the almancs say it should rise. Ultimately, day and night on the clock would fail to correlate with the sun in the sky.

To stop this happening, we would need to introduce a leap hour every 700 years or so, in a similar way to how we change our clocks to account for summertime.

I suspect that worrying about what folks 700 years from now will have to do will be a non-starter for the wonks who figure this out.

(via BoingBoing)

Time passages

It seems longer than that, but it was only a couple of months ago that we were sweating the requirement that Katherine be potty trained to attend rec center classes…

It seems longer than that, but it was only a couple of months ago that we were sweating the requirement that Katherine be potty trained to attend rec center classes and preschool.

And now she (more or less) is, and starts attending a new set of art and music classes this week, for the month of August (three days a week, 1:30 long each, I think).

Let’s keep our fingers crossed. It’s a big leap forward for her, and a lot of potential for being a real socialization benefit to her.

Tradition

Keeping the holy in holy matrimony — that’s the important thing, right?…

Keeping the holy in holy matrimony — that’s the important thing, right?

Well, isn’t that interesting?

Coming in this morning, I fired up my e-mail, etc., etc. And there’s a message from the CIO (or, as it turns out, send under his name). Interesting. You are…

Coming in this morning, I fired up my e-mail, etc., etc.

And there’s a message from the CIO (or, as it turns out, send under his name). Interesting.

You are amongh a group of affected users to an event that occured over the weekend. The was a government security issue with our mail server in [snip], and hence the server has been brought down. All data had to be removed from the server. Using backup tapes, we have been able to restore the mail up to, and including, last Monday. At the moment it is not possible to restore more of the mail. Once we have received permission from the relevant government agencies, we will restore the remaining data to the extent that it is possible. It is important to note that this was not caused by an internal problem within [our company], nor is it due to a hardware failure.

Which makes me wonder what (classified stuff?) slipped into our mail system, and how. We do a lot of Federal work; some of it is classified, though mostly in other business units and mail systems.

And, yes, a cursory examination indicates that all my e-mail, back to last Tuesday, is gone. (Which is intersting, because I’d have thought that it would sync back to my offline message store. Evidently not.)

Hmmm. There was some moderately important e-mail in there. And moreover, possibly some responses to things I sent out on Friday morning.

But that would explain why I was getting overdue reminders for To-Do things and apponitments that had already passed. Hmmm.

Weekend Roundup

All the news that’s fit to bore you with: Friday Margie was off at D&D for the evening, so I celebrated my freedom by doing my Nobilis journal before Saturday’s…

All the news that’s fit to bore you with:

Friday
Margie was off at D&D for the evening, so I celebrated my freedom by doing my Nobilis journal before Saturday’s game, then watching a copy of the premiere episode of Alias, which show I’ve managed to avoid for a couple of seasons because I just knew it would suck me in. And so it has. And, no, I don’t want to hear about all the cool things in episodes I’ve not seen yet, because I’ve not seen them yet, dagnabbit.

Read a bunch of Spycraft modern firearms stuff, all of which simply serves to complicate things. As I lurch toward my Spycraft game, I’m trying to not get hung up in all the rules details — just what I need to make use of (and at least skimming familiarity with the rest, so that when someone says, “But when I do X, I get a +12 on Y,” I’m not completely flabbergasted, at least not visibly).

Saturday
Not sure what we did the first half of the day. Since Margie was up gaming, she got to sleep in, and did; Katherine, alas, decided that 7a was a better wakeup time than 8:30a, so I was down and — well, not sure what I was doing. E-mail, maybe, or other stuff.

Katherine has taken to moving all the chairs and end tables around on the deck and doing “Eliza on the ice flows” with them. I’m sure she’s going to someday fall and get hurt, but I don’t think she can hurt herself too badly, so why interfere?

When she starts to try to climb over the rail, that’s when I object.

Later in the day, I was working on getting my character (Hanthor, the anthropomporphic elephant barbarian) finished up for Jackie’s upcoming Necropolis game. I’m pretty happy with him, and he should be a lot of fun (my intended voice for him sounds, I am told, a lot like John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah. Not the character I had in mind, but it gives me a vocal anchor to hang off of).

Afternoon and evening were taken up with Nobilis, more about which before. Had a good time, even though I started nodding off around 11p. (The nodding off had nothing to do with the game, everything to do with not enough sleep.)

I have a couple of dozen Spycraft modules downloaded and printed out, and I’m slowly going through them to develop an order in whih to play them. I have enough material for at least a year, if not more, of play before I have to make up things from whole cloth (or move onto something else). Anyway, I did some reading through those during off periods in Nobilis. That was probably a little rude, but since Margie was working on her character for Jackie’s game, and Jackie was reviewing her intro module for it, I didn’t feel too far out of the mainstream.

Sunday
Usual morning church-and-brunch stuff. Went and picked up some deck screws at Home Depot. Some of the boards on the deck, all of which were simply nailed in, need to be dogged down better, hence the long deck screws. I’m going to do some of them now, and I’ll replace a couple of others when we paint.

Also picked up a couple of books to get ideas of the steps we want up the front slope to the house. Another project I’m overdue working on.

Swung past the Testerfolk on the way back from errands to pick up the lemonade we left behind in our usual zombie-like dash from the house after the game. Ended up chewing the gaming fat for an hour-plus. Jackie noted that she could be ready for her game next weekend, which means I could run a Spycraft module starting the following weekend. Eep! I tentatively agreed, pending further consideration. I should probably just go ahead and do it (I think I know the module I want to run).

Came home, emptied laundery baskets while Margie did laundery.

Opened up the home-theater-in-a-box. Discovered two things:

1. There is no give on the speaker wire on the left side of the fireplace. Which means I can’t run a second line over there, then run them both up to to the beam and across to behind the sofa, for rear speakers for surround sound. Annoying.

2. I needed to get some mounting brackets for the L/R speakers by the TV. Simply flush mounting them will not provide a good angle. (I’m going to hate to drill through the paneling we put up by the entertainment corner, but that’s really the only solution for the speakers; I think it will be worth it.)

So I bundled up Kitten and we headed off to SoundTrak. I figured, hey, they’re the hoity-toity entertainment toys store, they almost certainly have some nice-looking speaker mounting equipment.

And they did, and I picked it up — and picked up some inexpensive wireless speakers for the rear sound. No idea how well they’ll work, but it’s worth a try.

Ran home again, only to discover that the speaker mounts didn’t work with the kind of holes I had in the back of the speakers in question. *sigh*

Ran back again, also with Kitten in tow (I was gratified that she would rather go with me than stay home with Mommy — and so was Mommy), returned the speaker stands, swung past Home Depot, discovered they had some cheap ones, bought them, swung past Best Buy, found some nicer ones, picked those up.

While at BB, and since Kitten was being so good, I offered to buy her a CD holder that could replace the rather shoddy cardboard one (it came with the computer, to hold system restore disks) that has all her games.

*Sigh* She wants one in pink. The ones in blue and yellow and (ubiquitously) black are “cool,” which has turned into a boys-only dirty word for her. I don’t know why or how, and it’s vaguely troublesome and irritating. But, at any rate, she didn’t get a CD holder. She did get a book.

After all that peregrination, it was 5:30p by the time we got home, so I played on the computer while Kitten ate dinner and we got her put away in bed. Slapped Octopussy into the DVD player, as part of the 2003 Hill/Kleerup Bond-a-thon.

Oh, I managed to actually get 2.5 graphic novels read over the weekend. I’ve been seriously wrapped up in reading Spycraft stuff, which has put a crimp into everything else on my reading plate.

A new phase

After brunch today, Katherine and I were up at the counter paying, when Katherine pointed at the price label (25 cents) and asked, “What does that say?” She recognizes that…

After brunch today, Katherine and I were up at the counter paying, when Katherine pointed at the price label (25 cents) and asked, “What does that say?”

She recognizes that all that scribbling around her means something. And that she can ask and get explanations for it (as inexplicable as that may seem). It’s one thing to recognize that there’s writing in books that relates to the story being said, it’s quite another to start picking it out of the environment around her.

Well, it seems like a big deal to me.

Later on today, Kitten and I were driving around (shopping for speaker mounts, if you must know).

“He needs a helmet! Daddy, he needs a helmet!”

She was pointing at a motorcyclist beside us who was auditioning to be an organ donor. Glad to know all that nattering about her having to wear her helmet whilst triking is paying off.

“Yeah, he’s really stupid,” I agreed with her, just to drive home the lesson.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think would happen if he fell off his motorcycle?”

“That would be really bad.”

Yeah, well, it seemed like a good conversation to me.

Home, sweet home

Doyce gets The Dreaded Knock On the Door in the Middle of the Night — or, more properly, The Dreaded Letter from the Homeowner’s Association in the Middle of the…

Doyce gets The Dreaded Knock On the Door in the Middle of the Night — or, more properly, The Dreaded Letter from the Homeowner’s Association in the Middle of the Summer. Jerks.

(Be patient with the page load — Doyce went picture-crazy yesterday.)

I keep waiting for one to arrive at our doorstep, too. And with equal lack of justification. When the Testerfolk have the most bedraggled house on the street, or the block, then the HOA can bitch. When water is plentiful and their lawn is an oasis of brown in a sea of green, then they can complain. And when they drop their “you must have X% of your yard as lawn, and no buffalo grass allowed,” then they can have the moral justification to suggest xeriscaping for any imagined slights on the local property values.

Until then, they can stifle.

Don’t Rush the Ending

In case you missed the title, I’m going to be repeating it several times here. As in, don’t rush the ending. We ended the first arc of our Nobilis campaign….

In case you missed the title, I’m going to be repeating it several times here. As in, don’t rush the ending.

We ended the first arc of our Nobilis campaign. That arc, and the game, have been quite enjoyable. Doyce has done a hell of a successful job both in adopting the incredibly complex mythology of the Nobilis realm with his own particular characters and spin.

And then we rushed the ending. Don’t rush the ending.

I understand all the reasons it happened. Hell, I’ve done exactly the same thing, more times than I can count. I’ve got a time limit in my mind, I’ve got an expectation of how far I’m going to get, I’ve got people beginning to look at the clock, or get antsy, or fall asleep …

And I rush it. Don’t rush the ending.

Any time the GM ends an encounter with, “Okay, here’s what happened …” then the ending has been rushed. The story is, after all, nearly paramount (the overarching story is only trumped by individual player character stories — sometimes). To turn the climactic battle into a photomontage, then into a crawl of text up the screen explaining the outcome … well, if it happened in a movie, we’d assume the budget ran out, or the writer and director couldn’t figure out how to end it, or the exec arbitrarily lopped off X number of minutes. We’ve seen it happen, and no matter what the reason, it sucks.

Don’t rush the ending.

Another example, which has happened to me a couple of times. Rushing through the end of a book, just to get to the end because of some perceived time limit. It almost always ruins the sense of the ending. I remember returning from a long business trip, during which I had almost finished The Mists of Avalon. I had about fifteen minutes of reading to finish the book as the plane was hitting the tarmac. I compressed it into about five minutes instead, skimming, pushing, blowing through whatever mood and message MZB wanted to wrap things up with.

I ruined the book. It tainted my whole experience with it.

I understand the reasons why that happened last night (just as I’ve understood the reasons from all the times I’ve done it). We were running later and later after midnight. To have truly done justice to everything would have meant cutting things off around 10p, and then wrapping it up in another session — which would have meant (given schedules) September, which would been its own distruptive/timing/momentum problem.

A thousand good reasons, just like I’ve had, and it all gets shoaled on the mantra Don’t rush the ending. But it’s true, because after all of the journey and mysteries and battle and the like — the story started to ratchet down into a photo montage around 11:30, and the final, big, massive battle between Friendship and everyone else, the death of the Bronze Man, and the judgment of Lord Entropy, and the shuffling around of chancels and inquisitorial houses and the like … got summarized in a few conclusing paragraphs.

Summarized nicely, mind you, but it still felt like reading a final novel by a writer, with the penultimate chapter followed by a page-long description of the author’s notes, found after her death. You smack the table and shake your head and say, “Gee, I wish I could have read the real thing.”

A thousand good reasons. Meaning a thousand reasons I agree with, a thousand reasons I would have done it the same way. It would have been another hour or two, easily, see? And to wait until September would be an awful mess. A thousand good reasons. I’d have followed them.

And I’d have been wrong, too.

Not a slam at Doyce (I hope is clear). A cautionary note for myself, as I head toward my own renascent GMing career. Don’t rush the ending. If I can’t do it right in the time alloted, I should cut things short and put it off until later. Acknowledge the problems that will cause, and suck ’em up.

Because if I rush the ending, the story suffers. And that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Don’t rush the ending. I’m going to put it in big bold print on my DM Shield, right underneath the Six Rules.