Live from Austin!

According to WBUR’s quiz, I agree with Jill Stein on practically everything, the only major disagreement being drug policy.

When a woman tells a man that she is broken, the man’s first reaction is generally to want to fix her. Most men enjoy fixing things, or at least tinkering with them until they run a little better.

A man will generally use the same approach to fixing broken women that he would use to fixing anything else broken: He’ll prod and poke at the damaged bits to see just how badly broken they are, and see if the prodding makes the problem any worse. Then he’ll try some quick and easy approaches to fixing things, in the hope that maybe they’ll work and save him from having to seek a more complicated solution.

Unfortunately, this is rarely what the woman wants. Typically women tell men that they’re broken because they want sympathy or compassion, or because they want the man to listen to them and provide some kind of validation for what they’re saying. When they instead get simplistic guesses at how they might be fixed, it tends to make them angry. (Of course, this is a generalization. I’m all too aware that some women react to sympathy the way a cornered raccoon reacts to dogs.)

So the message to women is: Don’t expect men to give you what you’re looking for unless you spell it out to them. Men are simple-minded creatures.

And the message to men is: Approach with caution, and wear gloves.

I have a really sore throat. Other than that, I feel pretty OK. Hungry, even.

The latest terrorist threat is female human mammary glands. Apparently these objects are so dangerous that the mere sight of them can cause an entire airport to be shut down for ten minutes. If you are a woman and have breasts, please, for safety’s sake, keep them restrained in a reinforced brassiere where they can’t cause any danger.

I have Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. In my hands, right now. You may worship me.

Working across the street from the mall has its advantages…

IBM has endorsed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

This morning:

M: Did you see T’s in the office?
B: Yeah, he’s not back permanently… just visiting.
M: He’s still working for Microsoft then?
B: Yeah.
M: What’s he doing there?
B: Oh, you know… [tails off]
meta: Evil?

Then at lunch time, the guilty party turned up to eat lunch with us.

B: So, can we ask you some Microsoft questions?
T: Sure.
B: Lemme think…
meta: I’ve got one. Why can’t I rename a freakin’ network printer under Windows? Why does it have to be called something stupid like “backslash backslash 1 RS dash PRTSRV dash 2 backslash 1 RS 2 S”? Why can’t I rename it “Laser printer in the corner”?
B: I meant nice questions.

At that point I decided to go away and search for coffee, because that was my nice question, so I thought I’d better go away before I asked any of my not-so-nice ones…

…like, “Do they actually pay you in pieces of silver?”

T20 is out.

I’ve always been more interested in SF RPGs than fantasy. The only fantasy RPG I’ve bought is DD, and that’s because everyone plays it. I’ve never had good luck with SF RPGs, though; for some reason they always seem to do badly in the marketplace, usually just after I get interested in them. Plus, I’m picky—I like “rules light-to-moderate”, hard SF.

My favorite SF RPG was the second edition of Star Frontiers. TSR didn’t even finish publishing that one. The first edition was OK, but a bit comic-book. So I started looking around for alternatives.

Torg seemed like it would work, and I kinda liked the idea even if it was stretching the genre somewhat; but it looked a bit blatantly like an attempt to get people to buy a new rulebook every month. Then West End Games trashed PARANOIA, and I stopped thinking about Torg, and WEG seemed to vanish soon after.

I played some ShadowRun. It was a bit ridiculously deadly, and I really don’t need elves in my SF, thanks all the same.

SpaceMaster impressed me enough with its sections on planetary physics, cosmology and the like that I bought it. The background material really sucked, though—Asimov-style imperial space opera—and while I love the open ended die rolls, the rulesystem was far too cumbersome for enjoyable play. I also picked up ICE’s CyberSpace, which was much better—streamlined rules, and a more believable (and less cheesy) cyberpunk-style universe. Still, assembling a workable SF game using CyberSpace enhanced with selected SpaceMaster material was a lot of work. Then ICE went out of business.

Next I tried Traveller. Specifically, MegaTraveller, which quickly died. I didn’t like it that much anyway. The rules were just about OK, if a bit old and creaky; and the background material somehow failed to be pleasing. I played a few games, but wasn’t wildly enthusiastic.

I considered GURPS Space. Then I looked at the rules and discovered that it was all in pounds, feet, and other stupid old measurements. No thanks, not for an SF game. I suggested to Steve Jackson that they ought to do a metric edition of GURPS in English; bizarrely, GURPS in other languages is metric, but the only English edition is in American measurements. I guess Canada and the UK aren’t big enough markets to bother with.

Next, I was just thinking about trying Alternity when Wizards of the Coast had the unusual decency to kill it off before I had a chance to make the mistake of purchasing it.

In desperation, I started thinking about the Star Trek: TNG RPG. It suddenly died in a messy licensing dispute. You know, maybe I have the kiss of death for SF games..?

A few months ago I was even considering the d20 Star Wars RPG, an act of desperation considering how silly and unsuitable for my thematic purposes the Star Wars universe is. Then I discovered that there was an official d20 version of the original Traveller on the way…

And now it’s out. It uses d20, so it’s compatible with anything I want to use from Call of Cthulhu, DD, Star Wars, or any other d20 game. The official Traveller universe is hard SF, with jump drives being the one concession to Sci Fi. “Classic” Traveller has been around for 25 years, and is unlikely to go away any time soon. Now it has a shiny new d20 ruleset to replace the creaky old one, and it’s all in metric at last.

In addition, they’ve done The Right Thing: the rulebook is complete in one volume, modulo the need for a WotC core rulebook to explain d20 character generation and level mechanics. T20 runs to a hefty 440+ pages. Print and paper quality is good, artwork is the best I’ve seen in an RPG outside of WotC products.

Plus it has intelligent space wolves. What more could you ask for?

Now to get a campaign ready… I have a good feeling about this one.

I’m lying in bed beneath a soft flannel-covered duvet, with the ThinkPad from work. I’m using it as a VNC terminal to operate the iMac in the other room. It’s not as good as actually having an iBook, but it’ll have to do.

I notice Quartz/Aqua compresses pretty badly… JPEG artifacts everywhere. It’s usable, though, and it beats Windows.

I created a Sim Ryan last night, and built him a small one-bedroom apartment with cheap furniture, a computer and a TV. As soon as the neighbors came around to say hi, he latched onto Bella Goth and started chatting her up like crazy, much to her husband Mortimer’s annoyance. After Mortimer stomped off in a huff, it was all going well for SimRyan… until he tried to cook a romantic meal for two, and set fire to the kitchen. By the time he’d stopped panicing for long enough to call the fire department, practically everything was destroyed.

Once I’d persuaded him to clean up (no easy task) I replaced the oven with a microwave. He seems to be able to deal with that better. I don’t know what I was thinking giving him a gas oven in the first place…

Career-wise, he started as a mail-room boy, and somehow through demonstrating the ability to fix the photocopier he’s wangled a job as an executive assistant after just over a week.