You hear that, Mr Andersen?

"... and I didn't lose!"

Slept for about 10 hours last night, which may explain why I'm so much less tired today. :) I did wake up for an hour around 9pm to have dinner - Giffy was there, but I'm afraid my brain never got out of the "just wake up enough to avoid stabbing yourself or others with cutlery" mode, so I doubt I was the most entertaining dinner companion. Yay to the marvelous Sok for tasty stew - so tasty!

[Dinosaur comic]

***

I'm hitting my head against getting MySQL 4 replication to work on a couple of Debian boxes. If that means nothing to you, then you should consider yourself lucky. I think I'm at the stage I'm going to have to get one of the systems people to give me a hand - this kind of system administration isn't really my forte, unfortunately.

On the plus side, I finally have a whiteboard! This is an essential tool for me, since it's the best place for things-to-do that would otherwise slop out of my brain and disappear. It's only half-full, but I haven't trolled through my mailbox and litter of notes on my desk.

***

Rang home on a mission of chocolate mercy, since I noticed Sok complaining that there was no chocolate. Of course there's chocolate - you just have to know where to look. :)

A Toonish Vignette

Speaking of stuff that I write for games that I'm playing in, here's something I wrote for Hix's game that I sent to him, and he suggested I post. To give a bit of background to the character, Danny is meant to be a small-timer, modelled in part on the boy who works for Gutman in the Maltese Falcon - he wants respect, and doesn't realise how expendible he is to those he trusts. He's been given a chance by a Toon underworld figure to get what he thinks he wants: he's got a job as the masked main character of a movie serial. (I'm thinking of the five-minute shorts that used to play before movies, full of action and very little else.) He's the fourth guy to play the part, bonded to the toon gun that's the icon (and in many ways, the real star) of the series. So, he's got what he wants... kind of. And in return, he acts as deniable muscle in the main part of LA.

I'm kinda aware of the flaws of the vignette, so... uh, yeah.

***

The single light-bulb in the lamp-stand just makes the deserted sound-stage seem bigger. Someone has left a radio on in the background; a ragtime tune tinkles into the darkness. Everyone's gone home for the day, except the four figures around the rickety card table - three hulking silhouettes and Danny, frowning at his cards and chewing nervously on his cigar. The hyena on his left, looking like he's been stuffed into his pinstripe suit, blows a smoke ring and gestures with his stogie's glowing tip.

"Ya see, ya gots to unnerstand, ain't none o'those bozos wanna piss off da boss, but dey don' get paid ta likes it, so they's gonna take it out on someone; it ain't nuttin' personal, like."

"You yappin' or playin', Hutz?" rumbles the shark. Even the creases in his pocket handkerchief are as crisp as they were at the beginning of the day. The smoke curls up from his cigar like fronds of seaweed, and his stillness is like a giant steel trap.

"I'm playin', I'm playin'. Sheez, Turk, why da big hurry? Da pot ain't goin' nowhere. Okay... I seez Danny's buck, an' raise a buck."

"See." A couple of crisp notes are placed in the pot with a banker's precision.

The baboon absentmindedly replaces the cigarette on the end of his ebony holder, and tucks the silver cigarette case back into his white dinner jacket. "As usual, Hutz, you can't see past your own damn nose. They ain't pissed - they're scared. Scared of us, scared of what we can do; and they don't like Danny-boy, 'cos he ain't scared. Are ya, boy?"

"Huh? Uh, nuh-uh - I guess I ain't scared o'nuttin much, Mr Daley."

"Heh, 'Mr Daley'; why can't you punks gimme respect like that?"

"We know you. Play."

"Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on. See the two, raise you five."

"Five?" Danny swallows.

"What, Danny-boy? The game too rich for your blood?" Daley's scarlet lips draw back in a caricature of a grin, his huge fangs gleaming yellow in the lamp-light.

"Uh... no, no, I'm in. See your five."

"He-he-he, it's six, man, six - don' forget my buck, Danny."

"Yeah, six, I meant six."

"See, you gotta know when ya outta y'league, Danny. Me, I knows better than bettin' agains' Sid when he's grinnin' like that - I'm foldin'. If I wanna throw money away, it won' be ta anyone wit a mug like yours, Sid. Oh, man, dere's dis sweet kid up at the Purple Orchid..."

"See the five. Raise one."

"Hmm. So... Danny, I guess the question is - how far are you willing to go? I see the buck, and raise ten."

"Hoo hoo hoo, Danny, ya goin' down now! You be goin' home wearin' one o'dose barrels, like in da funny papers!"

"I... I guess I'll... just a second." Danny fumbles in his pockets, and pulls out a fiver that has seen better days. "There - eleven. I see."

"See." Two crisp fives are placed precisely on the pile.

"Right, Danny boy - the moment of truth. There we are, boys - three kings. How'd you make out, Danny?"

Danny slowly grins, and spreads his cards on the table. "Well, I got a full house - sorry to disappoint you, Mr Hutz. I guess you just gotta stick it out sometimes." He makes a move to collect the pot, when Turk sets down his hand with a crisp click. The tinkling piano of the radio is replaced with quiet static.

"Straight flush. You lose. Hutz, deal."

Hutz gathers the cards, and starts to shuffle, sniggering, while Turk gathers the notes and casually flattens them before adding them to his tidy pile. Daley taps ash from his cigarette on the floor, and nods to Danny, who is slowly colouring. "Important lesson, Danny. Sometimes you lose on something that looks like a sure thing. But that's why they call it a risk. You know that, right, Danny?"

Danny glowers, but reluctantly nods, and the static on the radio fades; the programme has moved on, and the melody has a more plaintive note.

"Sorry guys, but I'm cleaned out, and, uh, I don't know where they keep those barrels." Danny smiles - it's sour, but it's a smile. "Besides, I gotta get home."

"Want a loan?" For the first time, Turk grins, showing row upon row of sharp, serrated teeth.

"Uh, nah, don't think I want to go down that road, sir, thanks all the same."

"Good. Smart move." Turk nods once, and then turns his attention back to the card game. Danny walks across to the stage door, lets himself into the clear, cold air and starts the long walk home - but he's grinning. Those actor bums may think that he's some no-account toon-caddy, but Turk said he's smart, and he's been in the business forever... what do those jerks know, huh? Yeah.

***

Since toons can't leave Toon Town without being bonded to a human, I figured that there would be a term to mock people who were seen as just tools for their toon - hence, "toon-caddy".

Boing, boing...

Just had a brilliant idea! If you're worried about cellphone radiation, mount the transmitter/receiver away from your body - say, on a set springs on top of your head! That's right, deelie-bopper phones! Stylish and practical, you betcha!

***

Just recently, I've had a craving to play a proper computer game, like Civ3 or XCom. I managed to get XCom: Apocalypse to mostly run on my XP box (by searching the mighty interweb for suggestions), but there's a definite emphasis on "mostly" - the mouse doesn't work quite right, for example. I've thought about buying one of these new-fangled "recently released" games, but since I'm not managing to play anything I currently own, I'm unconvinced that it'd be a useful investment.

It looks like I'm semi-officially back at 50-hour weeks. It's really not worth leaving work around five - the traffic is awful and stressful, and the amount of extra time at home that I gain is trivial. And if I leave at six, then at least I get paid for another hour. The only problem is, the longer I wait, the better the chances that I get called up ten minutes before I go with a problem that the caller thinks is super-urgent and should only take a moment to fix, that ends up keeping me at work for another four hours...

Actually, worse is the problem that comes in just after I've fixed the above problem, and have started packing to finally go home. But that hasn't happened more than a handful of times - and it's better than being called back into work. :)

Work is slightly more stressful recently; I'm sure it'll settle down in a month or two.

***

Hix is running Sorcerer at the moment. We did the character creation this week, which was interesting. He has pitched a setting that's something like a hybrid betwen LA Confidential/Chinatown and Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, with toons filling the role of demons in the Sorcerer system - toons need to be bound to a human to enter the "real world". It's promising to be a pretty cool game.

One of the problems that I have with a game that I'm interested in is that I want to explore it more - draw maps, think about the politics and history, write dialogues between minor characters, and so on. It's not entirely helpful, especially when the games we're doing at the moment tend to run an average of three or four sessions. I mean, it takes a while to write out this sort of thing, even if it's only for my own entertainment - and it's time I could spend doing something other people would enjoy, too. :) Also, there's the problem of giving too much to the person who's actually running the game - they probably don't want to have to wade through ten pages of notes on locations in a fictional city that they've foolishly given me a map of. (Sorry, other Matt!)

It's a pity that I have some idea of how hard it is to break into writing; otherwise, I might actually try to do it seriously. :)

***

Saw Jack and Heather last night, and had a chat with them, Michael R., Maire & Roger, and the elusive Stu. It was really nice to chat with them, even if I didn't get a chance to see their small kid (who they were touchingly worried about, and was apparently very well behaved for her grandmother). They want to come back to NZ, but mentioned that they had to wait until the area their house was in gentrified, so they could afford to move back. ;)

I promised to babysit if they came back - a promise I'll be happy to fufil. Very cute baby.

And when I got home, delicious chicken goodness cooked by the lovely Puggle. Yay!!

***

Not too long to the weekend. Thank goodness.

Ooncha Ooncha

For those who heard about the TGS CD that was made, here it is. Matt, I am very sorry that I have used the fruits of your photographic talents for evil.

***

The morass of work continues to suck me deeper. One problem I have is that work will easily absorb any time I put in; it's like a black hole, but with free fruit and coffee, and less chance of the 1923 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica popping out of its event horizon.

Okay, that's probably not true - I suspect that, even though Weta Digital is likely to be more ephemeral than your typical singularity, there's a better chance that an unlikely series of events will result in a copy of the Britannica from 1923 turning up at work than one spontaneously appearing in deep space through the mysterious power of physics. In either case, it would be cool if I could nab it - those older editions have weird and crazy things in them. :)

***

Did a fair bit of driving in the weekend. Despite being a "singing loudly in the car" advocate, Puggle managed a fairly cutting put-down during the drive, along the lines of, "Who sang this?" [name of the band]; "Well, maybe you should let them, then."

We visited Puggle & Giffle's Auntle and Uncle, and looked in on my grandmother and mum in Foxton. Then it was a dash for the train station in Paraparaumu, so we could let Erik get to his game in town, while still enjoying the scintillating company of Matt and Debbie, who had very kindly invited us to dinner. (This drop-off was a little more exciting than I had anticipated, since the train was sitting at the station as we drove past, missing the appropriate turn-off, which meant we had to do a quick tour of the McDonalds carpark to turn around; I then had to scramble for my wallet to find some cash so Erik could buy a ticket. Hey, come to think of it, Erik owes me ten bucks! Eh, I'll probably forget before I see him again. :)

Any time with Matt & Debbie is fun, but dinners especially so - it's a pity I'm never able to drink at their place, since they're dab hands at delicious alcoholic concoctions. Many games were played - I repeatedly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Uno, getting the dread seven-card "not saying Uno on your last card" penalty something like four times in one game. They also treated us to a very odd early Mexican musical (filmed in magnificent OverAct-o-Vision), and selected exerpts from what is presumably the only Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare musical (Love's Labours Lost, with random Cole Porter songs - "Branagh's Hollywood imports look like startled bunnies in the headlights", according to the IMDB).

***

People are already making accomodation plans for next year. I'm not particularly interested in dealing with people I don't know at home, so if I go flatting, it currently looks like I'll be by myself. But on the other hand, if I buy a house, I guess I'll have get a flatmate. Bah. I like flatting with people I know, and I think I'd feel even more that way if I owned the house. On the other hand, I've never been a big one for long-term planning; I figure I'll just see what's available around the time the flat's lease expires.

Mortages are intimidating things, especially when you're not an employee. And I know that I'd stop buying frivolous and fun stuff, and put every penny I could towards the mortage, since I don't like being in debt. And really, once I've paid rates and maintainence, would I save any money compared to renting?

Yeah, I guess I probably would. ;)

Little Brown Jug

Super-busy today - lots of little things. Lots and lots and lots of little things, like clouds of midges - I'm wearing long pants, so I'm more worried about inhaling them than bites, but it's not easy to concentrate.

Hmm. That metaphor kind of got away from me.

***

My grandfather and sister have introduced me to the wonders of Frangelica. Sok recommends it on the basis that it's a ingredient of the cocktail "Toblerone", so I may have to look into picking up a bottle in the near future.

Speaking of alcohol - I mentioned that I had picked up a bottle of "Purple Death"[1] when chatting to my mum's mother and my aunt and uncle. The aunt was surprised that it was still for sale, and there was much reminiscing about teenage highjinks.

Later that day, I went to the Four-Square to pick up some Foxton Fizz (creaming soda flavour), and the person who served me asked whether I was a [mum's maiden name]. It was spooky, but kind of cool. They've redesigned the label for Foxton Fizz, by the way - they seem to be competing at the budget end of the market, which I don't think is that great idea, since I would have thought that there was too much competition down the bottom. I mean, I can imagine that there's a big café market for a genuine traditional NZ soda, from the original bottling plant (as well as a fair amount of tourist dollars). On the other hand, I'm not in the biz, so what do I know? :)

***

We just had a discussion about the state of our network in the style of the little fluffy guys in Rejected. Unfortunately, I don't think I can convey the hilarity of the moment in text form. :) It reminds me of the first or second Buffy game I ran, when someone made a Homestar Runner joke and everyone got it. Hooray for shared context!

***

When replying to Puggle's blog, I realised that my car doesn't have a name. The two that I'm thinking about are "Arthur" and "John", for family-related reasons; but if someone has a suggestion, I'll certainly consider it. Puns and clever allusions will give your suggestion bonus points! ;)

[1] At Jenni's urging - she recommended it on the grounds that it tasted like cough medicine, and that she'd drink it for me. I'm not sure about how this motivated me, exactly, but the bottle is sitting in my cupboard...

Let's go see the stars...

Pearce isn't that keen on Firefly so far - have a look at his blog (linked to in the sidebar) to see his completely reasonable reasons. One of his comments started me thinking - what "classic" show formats might translate into a interesting and compelling sci-fi show? (Preferably one that hasn't already been done.)

Let's see - the police procedural is always a popular format. I can't, off the top of my head, think of any sci-fi versions of this... I mean, in some ways Star Trek draws on the some of the same themes, but you don't really get the situation where everyone gets assigned their tasks, and is sent off - everyone tends to be involved in whatever the current crisis is. Alien Nation is another one that my office was able to come up with, but it's really a buddy cop series, rather than a prolice procedural of the Hill Street Blues/CSI/NYPD Blue ilk. Paul just suggested Stingers, but I've never watched it, so I don't know whether it really fits. Ultraviolet might qualify, but it's really mostly about the journey of the "hero" rather than having the ensemble cast that seems to be one of the key parts of the procedural.

What other formats? Well, there's soap opera... but I think that space opera tends to have most of the distinctive elements of these creep in. Many sci-fi shows seem to have a setting-altering climax that they're working towards, but that's not always the case - look to the Star Trek family of shows, for example. (Apart from Voyager, I guess, where there's a definite goal in sight.)

Sci-fi comedies tend towards parodies (Red Dwarf, Futurama), but I suspect this is inevitable, since a lot of comedy is a twisted look at the familiar. I wonder if you could do a straight Friends or the like in an established sci-fi world, like Babylon 5... I suspect your target market might end up being very, very small indeed. :)

***

For those readers who like Amélie, here's a note from Cinefex Weekly Update (subscribe for special effects movie news at http://www.cinefex.com/weeklyupdate.html):

A Very Long Engagement: Aint-it-cool-news.com has posted screen grabs and a streaming video link to a trailer here for this Warner Independent release, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tatou, star of Jeunet's charming Amélie. A Very Long Engagement is an epic romance set against the backdrop of World War I France and, as usual for Jeunet, looks stunning and beautifully surreal. IMDb states Jeunet and Guillame Laurent adapted the screenplay from Un long dimanche de fiançailles, a novel by Sébastien Japrisot. Yves Domenjoud and Olivier Gleyze supervised special effects and Alain Carsoux supervised visual effects at Duboi. The film opens in France on October 27 and is scheduled for limited release in the U.S. on November 26.

***

I'd like to think about the who sci-fi/format thing a bit more... I may revisit it in a bit.

Say something funny, say something profound

I was talking to an old friend at lunch at the other day, and we ended up talking about groups of friends that we've more or less lost contact with. I was pretty surprised to learn that there was a fair degree of animosity bubbling under the surface in one of the groups towards the person I was chatting to - I mean, once I had it pointed out to me, it made sense, but I wasn't really aware of it at all at the time. The friend had managed to piss off one member of the group, and that group as a whole gradually came to dislike them.

It sometimes worries me how oblivious I can be to this kind of thing - I mean, I can easily imagine working with someone for years and never realising that I grate on their nerves in the most irritating way imaginable. (I suspect I'd find me annoying to work with, if only because I tend to find faults I worry that I have to be much more irritating than they deserve to be. :) )

Of course, since I'm basically of a sunny disposish, and don't really think that often about what people are thinking very often, it doesn't worry me all that much. :)

***

Listening to crazy Japanese lounge music that one of the artists has brought in with him - they appear to be called Natsukashi no CM Song Daizen Vol 3 & 4, but it's pretty difficult to tell, and none of the tracks have English titles, or even English characters. Would I listen to this stuff if it was in my native language? There's a fairly good chance that I would - I've certainly listened to a fair bit of Astrud Gilberto and Yma Sumac[1]. But I'm not sure whether the same answer would be true for some of the anime I've been watching - if it had been put out by an English or American animation house, I don't think I'd have made it to the end. Or maybe I would; after all, I have a fairly strong completist streak, which is pretty much the only reason that I picked up the latest Phule book[2].

Ironically, the only reason that I ended up looking at this particular crazy japanese lounge music is because I can't get the theme tune to Steel Angel Kurumi out of my head. "Ririkaru, komikaru, koi suru torokeru" indeed. I've watched the first disk - the pacing is a bit uneven, and I'm not that keen on the fan service, but the changes to the artwork to denote mood (chibi for comical violence, lots of shading and crosshatching for "serious" violence) is kinda neat, and things like the boy dressed as a "modern girl" with a little cloche hat was pretty cool - of course, I have a weak spot for the 1920s.

Puggle suggested running a game where each character got a random infatuation at the beginning. I think the potential carnage would be fairly great, but I've tended to find that my players can generate any amount of complications with only minimal encouragement from me. :)

Goodness - a weird and crazy version of "Let It Be" with xylophones and sqeaky Japanese women has just turned up in my headphones. Huh. In case you're interested, I think it's from an album called Shang Shang Typhoon 2, though some of that may actually be the band name.

***

Argh. I've just tracked down the cause of a weird problem, and it's a mistake that I made, and didn't catch because I didn't test a solution to a different problem sufficiently. What's worse, the person who noticed the weird problem was the CTO. Oh, the humanity.

What's somewhat boggling is that the thing that was broken was something that I thought was pretty important, and it looks like it might have been broken for the whole time we've been doing Kong (three or four months), and no-one noticed. Which may indicate that this thing is not quite as vital as I thought. (Or we're only now starting to rely on it, which seems more likely.)

Maybe I'll slip off home now, before anything else goes wrong.

[1] Okay, technically Yma Sumac is Peruvian, and Astrud Gilberto is Brazillian... but at least some of their songs were in English, and I'd consider them part of mainstream Western music. Well, mainstream-ish. :)

[2] To those who aren't familiar with this Robert Asprin series, they follow the misfits of the Space Legion welded into an effective force by an officer who believes in them - and happens to be a multi-millionaire. (It's intended to be light sit-com, in case I hadn't made that clear.) The main problem that I have with Asprin's work is that his characters all tend to end up speaking and thinking alike (especially the "smart" ones)... given that he's trying to write an ensemble-style book, this is a bit of a problem. They're not a bad series, really - but if I didn't have a slight collector's streak, I probably wouldn't have got the latest one. :)

I've got my crystal ball...

We've got a copy of "Bust A Groove" in the lounge, and I've got an urge to play it - I can't tell if it's nostalgia, or wanting to hear those darn catchy songs again. Shorty and the Easy Mouse, indeed.

***

A flurry of comment spam earlier. There has been a Hitherby about forcasting the future from the spam you receive (The Interpretation of Spam), which seems just as reasonable as watching the flight of birds or the patterns of clouds. However, if I don't bother reading my horoscope, I can't imagine going to the trouble of spammomancy.

I presume that the main reason they do it is to boost their page-rank, so that search engines think that tonnes of other pages link to the spammed site. I wonder whether Google is purging references from sites running Movable Type yet...

***

I seem to be falling into the 50 hour trap already - I had hoped to hold out a little while longer. For some reason, it's just gotten really busy all of a sudden; unfortunately, there are about three or four projects that need just a bit more work before being rolled out, but can be used as long as I'm doing it. I've seen people doing this in order to become indispensible; I'd much prefer to be able to get it off my plate, but it's a matter of having enough time...

Huh. To make this a completely typical Svend post, I guess I should write about what I cooked for dinner - roast lamb, kumera, potatoes and garlic, brocolli and mushrooms & corgettes. Oh, and bread and dips beforehand (brought by the lovely Ming and Caleb). Sok and I compared the cream sherry I bought a couple of days ago with my Danish sherry, we had a nice reisling with the meal (because Caleb doesn't like reds), and had a bottle of Black Doris plum wine after dinner. Very nice.

Oh, and I guess I need to mention some music.... uh, listened to Respect Overdue today, which is a bunch of Australasian jazz tracks from (I think) the 70s/80s.

***

I've just been summoned to Editorial. Urgently. I hope I get to go home soon...

[edit at 6:50pm]
And the crisis is solved - random undocumented changes, how I love you. Leave at 4pm, bah. I better run away before they break anything else.

Boogie Slacks, They Can't Be Beat

Listening to P-Bass Expressway's Express Funk at work - good fun. :)

Went on a road-trip up to Foxton yesterday with Erik, and managed to randomly ambush Matt & Debz at a service station. (It was even more random than normal, since I'd normally go into a BP for AA reasons, but decided that gliding to an elegant halt in the middle of the motorway wouldn't be conducive to actually making it to the Manawatu.) I can appreciate why people find NZ too small, but I find it comforting that, for example, while shopping for black feathers for a costume for Jenni's party in Spotlight, I'll bump into the technician who used to work in Dad's workshop, and discover that she's now working for the optician that works with Weta Workshop, and that I should come in and have a cup of tea next time I'm in Kilbirnie...

Um, anyway - the afternoon drive up was very nice, and we managed to pop into both Prenzel's and the Honey Hive on the way up. Unlike the last two or three times I've been to Lindale, we actually got icecreams - lime sorbet for me, but Erik got a "spicy apple crumble" which he pronounced very nice indeed. For my part, I picked up about six bottles of fruit wine (a couple of black doris plum, a blackberry, a blueberry, an "autumn harvest" and a port-style one), plus a rasberry brandy. I'll definitely have to start trying to make a dent into my wine-cellar/liquor cabinet - on the other hand, driving makes everything so much easier, so I don't tend to drink at parties as much any more, and I've not really gotten into the habit of drinking with dinner. Just discovered that Glengarry is offering a Weta discount, though, so maybe it's a vice I should acquire.

Listened to They Might Be Giants' Mink Car & Flood on the way up - Erik was familiar with some, but not all of the tracks. Listened to The Black Eyed Peas' Elephunk on the way back down, and had just started into Minuit's The Eighty-Eight when the poor mp3 player ran out of power - so on came National Radio. The influence of my sister Ellen spreads its sinister tentacles into my very stereo!

***

I went so far as to wish that I was supporting Access today. Very frustrating. (Or v. frustrating, if anyone is still on a Bridget Jones kick.) I eventually gave up, and went back to doing some MySQL stuff that needs to be dealt with.

***

As others have said, Jenni's party was fun, and her dress was impressive. I got to see and chat to the lovely Emba, which happens all too rarely nowdays - as instructed, I am in the process of forgetting the ominous foreshadowing of the nefarious plots she and her mother are hatching. Hey, that ties in nicely with my "use up more of my wine cellar" plan! ;)

I'll admit to a mortifying failure at the party - we were this close to getting Sas to laugh cake out her nose, but we weren't quite able to push her over the edge. Sok and Jon, we Must Try Harder next time!

It was nice to chat a bit with Luke, Sam, Debz & Matt, even if it's looking more and more like we're some time away from picking up the Buffy game. And seeing Gino and Viv in their costumes of amazingness was pretty cool too. Didn't really get to talk much to Jarratt or Evie, thought their outfits were just as impressive as we've come to expect.

Oh, and Debz & Matt did an amazing job with the t-shirt. Very, very cool. :)

***

Looking forward to making a nice roast of whatever's reasonable at the supermarket tonight. I might try roasting some thinly-sliced carrots, since they were pretty darn yummy when I did them in beer batter. Mm, dinner...

There's connection, there's completeness

While driving into work today, I hit a nice groove of NZ music - The Muttonbirds' "A Thing Well Made", Cloudboy's "Ahoy", Audiosauce's "Hopsscotch" and Mink's "In My Craft Or Sullen Art". I think the Audiosauce track would make an interesting background to an action scene, by the by.

I find "A Thing Well Made" both creepy and compelling. I'm always a bit wary about pop-psychology, but I've certainly noticed that I have the "completely focus on one thing" attribute that's meant to be common among males, and I can easily understand the compelling fascination of an elegant solution. Then again, maybe women have the same experience - anyone want to comment?

Of course, the type of things that fascinate me are slightly more geeky than guns. Like the Schwartzian transform - it's a very, very cool perl sorting trick:

  @ordered_list = map {$_->[1]}

                  sort {$a->[0] <=> $b->[0]}

                  map {[compute($_), $_]}

                  @unordered_list;

The first map takes the unordered list, and transforms it into an a list of two-element annonymous arrays - the first element is contains the thing you want to sort by, and the second element is the original item. Then you sort by the first element of all these annonymous arrays; and finally, change it back to a simple list (now in the order you wanted) by pulling off the second element of the annonymous arrays.

Obvious once you get it, but it's pretty damn nifty.

***

Heh. You might wonder whether Mink is a NZ band, and then you hear the following lines in "Baby Yesterday":

"I saw my baby yesterday;
She sussed my problem right away."

I should definitely try and track down more Mink stuff - all I have is the For My Mink album. I also want to find the Cloudboy EP that was put out before Down At The End Of The Garden.

I've been listening to For My Mink in the background while I'm working, in case you haven't guessed. The last track on the cd is "Duette", and I've just decided to reproduce the lyrics here. It's a quiet, slightly wistful ballad, with a call-and-response pattern - the lines marked 'B' are sung by both.

M: Sad to say no love left anymore.
W: Loving you, I never stopped.
M:Too many times we've closed that door.
W: I never slammed it shut

B: We should be old enough to know
B: That love will always come or go...
M: Both would be fine.
W: Is this your fantasy, or mine?

M: What kind of love will last?
W: What kind of man are you?
M: Young girl with no baggage from the past.
W: To say the things you do?

B: Or someone old enough to know
B: That love will always come or go...
M: Both would be fine.
W: Is this your fantasy, or mine?

B: Is this your fantasy, or mine?

B: We should be old enough to know
B: That love will always come or go...
M: Both would be fine.
W: Is this your fantasy, or mine?

B: Is this your fantasy, or mine?
B: Is this your fantasy, or mine?

***

As I said on Jenni's blog, I've put the full character sheets up for "A Ticklish Romp". I guess a followup game would be a good way to test out my ideas for an InSpectres/Wodehouse system. :)

16 ways to blow your mind

One of the things I find most challenging is to switch modes of thinking to fit the weird constraints of the various packages we use. I think the closest non-programmer analogy that I can come up with is having to switch between using an opinion-piece format to writing something like a sestina or pantoum - while still conveying the same information.

Now, imagine you're also not allowed to use the letters 'e' or 's' when writing in poetry form, and you have an idea of what working in FileMaker is like.

Of course, I kinda like writing poems in those kind of constrained forms, so this may be the underlying reason I've ended up supporting FileMaker.

***

I'm waiting for Erik to text me that he's made it into Wellington airport safe and sound. I'm quite happy that Mum asked me to pick him up, since it's another chance to see Ellen while she's still in the country - we'll go over to the parents for dinner once I collect him.

Oops, there's his text message - gotta go!

Gotta Keep On Running

Last night I reran "A Ticklish Romp", a 1920s farce in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. I've got some notes on the game here, though it's not complete; I'll update the page to include all the character descriptions and some notes on running it when I get home tonight. (I'd worry about spoilers, but frankly, I suspect that the intersection of people who read my blog and for whom I'm likely to rerun this game are vanishingly small.)

We had six players, so Teddy Plott-D'Vice was made an NPC - there's a fair number of supporting characters, so it was a little frantic at times for me, though the other players were excellent at stepping up to the plate and providing butlers, aunts, generals and the like. (Being tired and distracted meant that I occasionally ended up declaring thing like, "Horses sweat, gentlemen per-spider and ladies drool.") I was also a little worried about running long, since it was a weeknight, and people had buses to catch; on the other hand, we started at about 7:30pm, and finished at about half-past ten, which isn't bad for a convention game. I still wish there had been more time to spend at the ball.

Our Tuesday regulars were uniformly excellent, as we've come to expect - special shout-outs to Hix for doing a fine turn as a lovelorn poet willing to step outside his sphere of competence and attempt to fight crime in order to win the heart of the most beautiful young lady in all of London. And then there was Seraph as the American musical producer with the heart of gold, the flip-chart and the vision of "Romeo And Juliet With A Happy Ending: The Musical!"; and the big W (don't know your online handle, sorry!) and his well travelled big ol' liar with his thoughtful gifts (the Unfortunate Chinese Hat!). Oh, and Jenni's protrayal of the fair Jasmine was both excellent and hilarious, especially when she was being withering.

We were lucky to have two awesome guests, as well. Norman made a marvellously bumbling Pickles and a tremendously dashing Le Shadow Magnifique ("Is there anything that he can't do?" - random policeman), and I certainly felt sorry for him when Jasmine callously broke his heart. And you wouldn't have realised that this was C's first game from her portrayal of Prudence - her near-legendary ineptitude with firearms ("This is a different dog") and her conspiracy with Jasmine ("Do you have a congenital back defect?") were very cool.

(C is a workmate of Jenni's, and a friend of Puggle's - I'm not sure how she prefers to be referred to online. If we're lucky, she may come back and play again at some point. :)

I know Jenni wrote down some quotes, so hopefully some will turn up on her blog at some point.

***

Work is ever so slightly bonkers. One of our big problems is the fact that we don't have very much control over the format of stuff that people outside us give us - so it's a little bit of a pain to translate it into a form that's useful internally, even by hand (and using my leet coding skillz), and really quite hard to create an automated way of doing it. Argh.

Of course, it could be worse - my poor friend David is working for a digital grading house, and so he has to deal with multiple groups of people who have no interest in changing how they give you info, or being consistent about how they do so. On the other hand, he can now help pay for his nice flat in Wimbledon, so my sympathy is somewhat limited. ;)

Anyway, the one upside of this is that I got to add something to my "hot buttons" list. (The office has a section of whiteboard set aside to list things that will more often than not send each person off into a rant.)

Yep, everyone is real keen on reading me blather about work, uh huh. :) So I guess the only thing to do is to point towards this Register article about the possibility that Bush has been connected to a coach by wifi during the recent presidential debates - after all, everyone loves politics. ;)

Those were the days, my friend.

Hunting around online, it looks like Sorcery and Cecelia has been reprinted, with a sequel - I might have to see if Arty Bees have it in, or order it online. I'm currently considering ordering Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) - the Reeves and Mortimer version, rather than the original. One of the things that's putting me off is that there are a lot of complaints about the fact that it was filmed and shown in widescreen, but has been put out on DVD in pan&scan. However, my reasoning goes along the following lines - when they put out a widescreen version, technology will have moved on enough that it'll be in a different format, so I'd have to update my collection anyway...

Actually, that's a terrible reason to buy a copy now. :)

***

Puggle has decided to join the LIveJournalistas. If I were serious about joining the blogging "community", I can see a lot of reasons to use LiveJournal - the whole Friends thing would be a very handy way to keep track of other people's blogs, for example, and it has plenty of nifty things built in, such as the whole "listening to" thing. The ever-present scourge of comment spam seems to be less of a problem there, too.

On the other hand, while I might not be using the customizability of Movable Type, I value the fact that it's there. :) I kinda wish that I had the spare time and enthusiasm for random coding projects that I used to -- I think that a lot of my creativity in that sphere is drained off for my job. On the other hand, I know that I'm a much better programmer now than I was a couple of years ago, and infinitely better than I was when I first entered the job market. I just wish that I had kept up my Java/C++ skills - perl's inherent coolness makes me lazy. ;)

***

I wonder whether trying to chase "Billy, Don't Be A Hero" out of my head by using Kylie's Fever was such a good idea after all...

***

Beer O'Clock in ten minutes or so, and then off to have dinner with some of my Old School friends (i.e. friends from my undergrad years at university). In many ways, I'm quite happy to have my different groups of acquaintances fairly separate; on the other hand, in Wellington people tend to have unexpected connections, so it's not like the different groups are hermetically sealed off from each other.

The particular group that I'm having dinner with I know through an accident of nomenclature - I did my first year chemistry labs with someone called Andrea Arcus, and it's through her that I know many of the people in this group. (She's won't be at the dinner, but it's at her house -- it's the magic of house-sitting!) It's weird how random events like that can have repercussions so many years down the line; on the other hand, I imagine I'd be a very different person if I hadn't known those people.

Anyway, the beer is here, so I'll sign off until next time. :)

UPDATE bodies SET status = 'dead'

I'm waiting for people to finish and go home so I can do database stuff - of course a certain comic pops into my head. I am that micro-niche market, my friend!

Huh - it's 7:30pm and someone is ringing the Systems room. I could rush and pick up the phone, but really, I'd only be bringing grief to myself. There's a person on call who is paid to suffer grief, who knows a great deal more than I do -- if it's important enough, they'll call them.

***

Read Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head today. Odd. Very odd. Kind of fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as Hellboy, possibly because it was very obvious that this was all there was to it.

***

The rest of this post is musings on a game system to produce a P.G. Wodehouse experience - this may be of limited interest to most people. :)

There have been other attempts at creating a Wodehousian game - The Drones immediately springs to mind - but playing InSpectres made me wonder whether a game that threw the narrative burden on the players might also work well.

One of the things that I find vaguely unsatisfying about InSpectres is the death-spiral - once you start to lose your cool, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve anything. While there's a certain amount of humour and spotlight time to be derived from spectacular failures, it's not necessarily fun to fail all the time; and using franchise dice feels deprotagonising to me. I think it's an interesting balance mechanism, in that you'll use up your franchise dice if you bite off more than you can chew, so the next challenge you face will be easier to deal with; but the stress rules seem a bit harsher than I really enjoy.

It does feel like a Wodehouse game should have some sort of stress mechanism - indeed, when Aunt Agatha is in the picture Bertie seems to spend half the time boggled, bewildered, or simply cowed. However, once his dreaded Aunt has denounced, declaimed and departed, he doesn't take very long to perk up again - usually as a result of a good idea from Jeeves, or a terrible idea of his own (or one of his friends).

I briefly considered looking at Toon, which I seem to remember had rules for making characters Fall Down, and thus be unable to interact. However, I was thinking that the InSpectres system might work well, with some modifications.

In InSpectres, you generally lose attribute dice if you fail a stress check, distributing the penalty amoung your stats in a way that is appropriate for the situation that caused you to fail. This penalty applies until the end of the mission, when you can spend some of the franchise dice that you won on "holidays" for your staff, effectively healing them. In the variant I was considering, when a Wodehouse character fails a stress test, they add one or more points to their Boggled pool, which substracts that number of dice from every roll they make. However, if they haven't made a stress check this scene, then they (or their allies) can do things to reduce their Boggled pool.

What kind of things? Well, an ill-thought-out and overly complicated plan to solve the problem is an obvious one. Falling in love, joining the Seekers (and stealing a constable's helmet), or deciding to become a Bohemian Poet might be appropriate, too. Some of these things (such as well-intentioned but terrible plans) other players might be able to do for the victim - I may have to think of some sort of reward for doing so, but on the other hand, the spotlight time might be sufficient.

The confessional (where you can foreshadow, mess with time, or give other players attributes) could be brought over pretty much as-is, though it might become translated into "Dear Diary". Some of The Drones' advantages and disadvantages would translate into the InSpectres "Talent", but most would simply be attributes that players would assign each other during Diary sessions. Translating Academic, Athletics, Technology and Contacts into Grey Matter, Vim & Vigour, The Readies and Outer Crust seems straightforward.

I could see giving The Club the same kind of status as the Franchise, but I don't think it really fits - players are unlikely to seriously affect the club's status or resources. Also, the nature of the world is essentially static. I'm going to have to think hard about how the "game" aspect of InSpectres might translate across - what reward will players receive for playing out the attributes assigned to them?

Anyway, there's the outlines of what I was thinking. Feel free to comment, if you feel so inclined.

A room without a book is like a body without a soul.

The good thing about buying a whole smoked chicken is that gives a structure to the next few dinners - you know that, no matter what, you've got to use the chicken before it goes off. The pasta was fairly successful; if I were cooking tonight, I'd probably go for a kedgeree variant, where you replace the fish with smoked chicken. (I probably won't be, since I've got a game at Jenni's to go to.)

Oh, one of the nicest things about the pasta - it basically dirties just one chopping board, one pot, a knife, a wooden spoon, and a serving spoon; and the pot can also be used to serve it in. Hooray for minimal dishes! :)

***

I still haven't managed to transfer my t-shirts to the shiny new rack that my parents gave me for my birthday; my armchair is also still buried under debris from my trip, and my floor has a bunch of boxes that I pulled out from underneath the bed. I have the best of intentions, room-cleaning-wise, but... eh... I'll probably have the same intentions tomorrow, too. :)

***

Reading Robin McKinley is always a relaxing experience - I just read Spindle's End and Rose Daughter. I hadn't realised that she was married to Peter Dickinson (of The Last Unicorn fame), but I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised - if working in the film industry has taught me nothing else, it's that groups like special effects artists (and, one presumes, fantasy writers) are not actually as big as you might think, and people who've been in industries like these for a few years tend to know each other (or at least have acquaintances in common).

For those of you who are interested in the genre - I enjoyed reading the books I mentioned, but I think I enjoyed her first take on the Sleeping Beauty legend (Beauty) more. I particularly liked the folk-details of Spindle's End - the idea that carved spindle ends become something like Welsh loving spoons is pretty neat.

Currently, I'm resisting the urge to reread Vinge's Fire on the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky - there are the kinds of problems that you almost always get with books that have more than one concurrent storyline, but I've reread both several times, and I'm sure I'll reread them again. Speaking of books that do this that I enjoy, if anyone sees a second-hand copy of Sorcery and Cecelia about, then I'd be most interested. As in, if it has all the pages, buy it and I'll pay you back. :)

(Sorcery and Cecelia is written in letter form, with two young ladies in an Edwardian fantasy world corresponding to each other as a mystery unfolds; the first draft was written by the authors in exactly this format, sending letters back and forth. I enjoyed it a lot.)

The title is quoting Cicero, by the way - oh, how cultured I am. ;)

B is for biscuit, that's good enough for me.

I quite like Griffin's version of Belgian biscuits, but that's tempered by the fact that I know I've done better. (Plus, making Belgian biscuits is kind of cool - making the sausage of dough, chilling it, then just carving off as much as you need is kinda nifty.) Unfortunately, although I get to cook main meals quite a bit, I very rarely do desserts, and almost never get around to baking. I'm not sure why or how this has happened -- perhaps it's because I'm only doing necessary cooking. This would fit with the fact that I tend to avoid meals that require a lot of preliminary prep.; I wouldn't include marinades in this, of course, since that's just "mix these things together and then leave them in the fridge for a while".

Which reminds me -- the chicken and ale casserole worked quite well. I've not had much experience with casseroles, and was making things up off the top of my head; I think that next time there will be more carrots and potatoes, since those were very nice, and more of them would have worked well. I guess there are those bottles full of beer downstairs that we have to use up; I'll just have to think of some other dishes to try making with them. (A friend from work suggested rendering them down for "beer stock"; I'll admit I didn't realise she was teasing me for a few moments.)

Tonight - smoked chicken, crasin and cashew pasta, possibly with bacon, mushroom and pesto if I remember to go into the supermarket. Oh, and probably the last of the speculaas, as well -- I bought them as a treat, and was able to give one to the building owner when he unexpectedly called around, thus giving him the impression that we are both nice and classy. :)

(Speculaas are a Dutch spiced bicuit, and are pretty darn tasty. I should add that to the list of things I should find out how to make, along with Cornish farthings.)

***

Okay, enough food blogging. Watched up to the fifth DVD of .hack//SIGN, the third episode of the series that Puggle gave me, and the first disc of Fruits Baskets, so I don't think I can be said not to be doing my part. As long as my part involves sitting very still and letting the lovely animated characters seep into my brain.

(Watching Fruits Baskets with Puggle & Sok is odd - they've both seen it before, so they're reading magazines at the same time. And at least one of them has declared that they're going to marry one of the main male characters. I, on the other hand, could imagine wanting to take in and look after the main female character, but I suspect that's just my vunerability to things like Li'l Brudder talking. He's just such a trooper...)

***

My sister's having her birthday this weekend, owing to the fact that she's a year and a week younger than me. That week, by the way, was very important only two decades ago; it's less significant now, I guess. ;) I've got one or two things I could give her, but I'm still not entirely sure which it should be - or whether I should go for something comletely different. On the plus side, I have high hopes for the thing that I got Jenni for her birthday.

Speaking of sisters - my sister Ellen ordered something over the web with a NZ credit card, and got the postcode wrong, which meant that the order was rejected -- except she didn't find out until quite a bit later. I now know that Island Bay is 6002, while central city is 6001... but I also know that I have never been able to find a nice list on the net of postcodes, and I'm not sure what Nairn St would be considered to fall within. So - good wishes to Ellen, and I hope things get sorted quickly and cleanly.

Oh, and in the style of LiveJournal:
Listening to: Rhombus, Bass Player.

Kitchen Stories

I had read the last part of this quote before, but here's more context to what C.S. Lewis was saying:

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

Why did I think of this quote? Well, the primary thing was Pearce talking about catching 'the "comics are for kids" disease' on his blog; but there was also elements of Sok's blog, where she talked about the old = bad/young = good thing in advertising and the like. I guess there's an age that's meant to be an ideal, and any deviation from that is substandard. (At a guess, the age is probably mid-twenties.)

As of this point, I choose to declare my own age and interests as my ideal. It makes perfection a lot easier to achieve. ;)

***

I went home during lunchtime - never a very good idea, since that cuts about half an hour out of my break by itself. However, I'm glad I did so, since that means dinner just needs to start cooking, and since it's a casserole, it will take a little longer than usual. (Chicken pieces, onion, garlic, potatoes and carrots, plus various herbs, paprika, tumeric, a pinch or two of chilli powder, a shake of ginger, some green herb stock, and the Monteith's Golden Ale I'm trying to use up - I might add mushrooms and zucchini once it's been cooking for a while, and maybe some flour or cornflower to thicken the gravy (though the onions should help). I hope it turns out well.)

My brother Phillip and his wife gave me a cookbook stand yesterday when I drove up to Foxton with Erik and dad. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to deploy it in our current kitchen environment - we've only just started to get a grip on the current sprawl. I guess this gives me that little bit more motivation to find a place after this - a place with a nice, big, well laid-out kitchen.

I feel I should point out that, despite what reading this blog might lead you to believe, the others do actually cook. :)

***

I'm waiting around for other people to leave, since there are a few things that I want to do that involve taking things down and bringing them back up. I guess this makes up for taking off early yesterday. :)