My employer has denoted this Staff Appreciation Week. One of the perks is free use of a gym this week. I was excited, and showed up bright and early to work out before work… and the front desk there had never heard of it. They suggested I talk to customer service when it opens at 9. You know, at the start of my work day.

I am feeling a typical degree of appreciation.

But at least the staff was willing to take my word for it and let me in. And I’m happy to say I’ve still got (at least a tiny degree of) it. I entered my age on the elliptical cross-trainer, then set it for a target heart rate of 160, and it was all “nuh-uh, old man, you can’t handle it, that’s too hot for you” and I was all “damn your equations, just do what I say!” And I could comfortably maintain it for 20 minutes.

Tomorrow: weights.

There’s a provocative detail in this article about astronaut Chris Hadfield’s cover of Major Tom recorded in space :

“The Larrivée Parlor [Hadfield’s guitar] on the ISS was purchased at the local Guitar Center in Southern Florida and there are actually two of them,” Larrivée told SPACE.com. “The other stays on the ground at NASA so they know what’s up there.”

They really are prepared for a “We gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this using nothing but that.” scene!

A little while ago, I was preparing to run a Cthulhu scenario for my gaming group. I was excited about The Past Is Doomed which had a bunch of cool handouts. And I read it, and I figured I must not be understanding something, and I read it again, and, sure enough, the whole thing hinges on obscuring one particular connection that should be straightforward to find, and it’s extremely contrived that it could be buried so deeply. Once the players do finally get that, they know where to show up for the weird-shit climax. And it’s an interesting weird-shit climax but I wanted a mystery with more heft.

With time running short, I looked to some much recommended scenarios in the Call of Cthulhu 6th edition rulebook. The Edge of Darkness teases with leads to follow, but they’re inconsequential. The only thing that matters is the address of the farmhouse – everything that’s relevant is to be found there, and then you have your bossfight against the monster. So I looked to Dead Man Stomp. It’s a series of scenes for the characters to observe; the rails here are so rigid that the scenario explicitly says more than once “no matter what the characters do, this thing happens.”

Finally I grabbed Mortal Coils and went with Mysteria Matris Oblitae. This one actually offered an interesting mystery, but I still wasn’t thrilled with it just leading to an unwinnable bossfight. (In our case, the characters realized it was unwinnable, skipped town, and survived. The scenario’s situation is bad, but it’s stable and contained.)

Last night I read The Color of His Eyes from Secrets of San Francisco. This featured a really interesting situation… and very little opportunity for the characters to do anything. An NPC has a plan that’ll fix the problem if he’s not interfered with. The characters could kill the NPC or otherwise wreck his plans… and then there’s no way to address the problem and things are screwed. The best thing the characters could do is knock off early and go out for drinks. (I think this could possibly work in the context of a campaign in which the characters would have to encounter the consequences of their actions, but I don’t think it would make for a satisfying one-shot.)

This is all I want:

• a satisfyingly twisty mystery for the characters to unravel
• for the characters’ actions to feel meaningful
• for fight-the-monster climaxes to be an exception rather than the rule

I should elaborate on “feel meaningful.” A standard trope of Lovecraftian horror is the hopelessness. In the long run, we’re doomed. We are insignificant in an uncaring universe, and sooner or later we’re going to end up under something’s boot; it may never even know it squished us. But though the long run is hopeless, not every short run has to be. And even if the situation is unwinnable, the characters should still have meaningful choices, and for the choices to be meaningful, the players need to feel they have consequence.

Once I ran The Dying of St. Margaret’s (with the author’s ultralight Cthulhu Dark system.) It’s one of a set of so-called Purist Adventures in which there’s very deliberately no winning. But we had a good time. Because there was a satisfying mystery to unravel, because the characters managed to help some of the people, because they chose at the end whether to seek the answers when they were fairly certain it would kill them. One character decided not to, and she survived.

So, again, the characters don’t necessarily need to be able to win; they don’t even need to be able to affect much, but it’s crucial that their actions feel consequential.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the last was written for Trail of Cthulhu and everything I’ve complained about has been for Call of Cthulhu. But that’s a discussion for another entry. (Pace, CoC fans; I know there are also good CoC scenarios, and I’m not saying “Trail rules, Call drools.”)

So I went to Kublacon. Friday afternoon, I GM-ed Monster of the Week. I was a little disappointed to only get 3 players. My time slot probably played a role, but mostly I blame the feckless description I had to come up with in a hurry because I’d waited until the last day to submit my game proposals.

My mystery was lifted from Dog Eats Dog. I think it went ok, but I should have done more to up the stakes and the threat level throughout the game. Next time, the monster will have minions. After defeating the chupacabra and finding her two cubs, our heroes located a chupacabra rescue society and transported them there – a happy ending… for everyone except the Chosen, who had had to skip out on planning her best friend’s birthday party to hunt the chupacabra, and so the party was a disaster and her former best friend hates her now.

More disappointing was getting no players at all for Left Coast. Again, Friday 6-8 probably isn’t the most promising slot, but mostly I think my description failed to convey AWESOME STORYTELLING GAME OF PHILDICKIAN HIGH WEIRDNESS!

But it meant I got to hit the Dealers’ room during its first hours, and scored the brand new Investigator Weapons, Vol. 1 for Call of Cthulhu inexplicably at 75% off. I love everything about this book – the period photos, the layout, the content, and the geeky obssessive thoroughness as it catalogs guns from all over the world that were in circulation in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s. The content about laws, attitudes toward guns, and availability may be of use to me, but I’m probably never going to engage in a game where we’re counting rounds and rolling precise, per-gun chances of misfire. But it still makes me happy that this exists.

The dealers included Geek Chiq, makers of bespoke granny-grade game tables. Très belle mais très cher.

I didn’t try to get into a game Friday night, figuring I’d want the time to recover from GM-ing, and I wanted to make it to the flea market at 11. Being unclear on the concept, I killed time in my room for a couple of hours until going down at about a quarter of to find the line for the flea market was hundreds deep. Now I understand why the Lifetime membership perk of admission to the flea market 15 minutes early is actually a big deal.

Kublacon sensibly caps the number of people let in the room at a time, and only allows more as people exit, so it took a half hour until I even got in, but it wasn’t uncomfortably crowded. I picked up Engel and Strike Force and some GURPS Supers supplements.

Saturday morning, I played a playtest of Guns and Glamour by Mickey Schulz GM-ed by John Kim. It’s about a population of refugees from the losing side of a civil war in Faerie crossing into the American midwest in the ‘20’s and establishing themselves in gangland Chicago. The rules are largely from MonsterHearts (which I adore, so that’s a good thing); the biggest variation is that you have both a race and a profession and get moves from each. I was a goblin lieutenant for an NPC Sidhe crime boss, desperately trying to smooth over messes despite having no real authority, and continuing to assure everyone that the boss had some secret plan that would all make sense in the end and it only looked like he was selling us all down the river by setting up the Sidhe, trolls, and pixies as an overclass.

I liked the setting and moves a lot, but I have some qualms with the rules for marking experience: you mark experience when you make a move using your lowest stat, when you inflict harm, and when you receive harm. It’s clearly going for encouraging violence to match the genre, but a result is that you’re kind of screwed three times over if your lowest stat is Tough.

Saturday night was a Call of Cthulhu game. Some of the players were on their third characters by the end of the game; I think one of us might have been marginally sane when the world ended. Overall, my player motivation is puzzle-solving and what I like in Cthulhu gaming is to keep the Investigate in Investigator and for the mystery to be primary. This game was pulpy and monster-heavy and not really what I seek out in Cthulhu gaming. Not that it wasn’t entertaining to hit someone over the head with a ginormous Necronomicon.

Sunday morning was Dread in which there aren’t dice, but a Jenga tower. As you attempt to do things, you have to pull from the tower; if it falls over, you die. The further the game goes on, the more inevitable it becomes. I’ve wanted to play this for years, and it really is a great way to make the players feel tension. I’m a natural-born fidgeter and spent the whole game concentrating on NOT TOUCHING THE TABLE.

After this, my luck ran out in terms of getting into official con games – I didn’t get anything for Sunday night or Monday morning. Happily, I texted a friend and he invited me to the Airbender Fate Accelerated game he was running ad-hoc. Thanks, dude! FAE is a nice, light system.

Monday morning found me back in the flea market where I finally found a reasonably priced copy of Amber. Though I backed the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow kickstarter and am liable to use its rules and setting if I run something with the Amber Diceless system, I still wanted to read the original. (Though it’s available as a reasonably priced PDF, I still haven’t warmed to reading lengthy PDFs that don’t fit on my Kindle DX. Maybe someday I’ll have some high-resolution tablet and that’ll change.)

I contemplated trying to get into the 7th Sea game Villanova’s Birthday but it was scheduled for 8 hours, which was more than I could face – I was pretty much ready to stop breathing hotel air and get home to my wife and cat. But if I’d known the 4-hour Teenagers from Outer Space game Luci the Librarian’s Last Stand needed players, I’d have been tempted to stay. Prior to the past year, TFOS was the only campaign I’d ever GM-ed, some 20 years ago, and I have a serious soft spot for it.

In the cheap irony department, my regular gaming group, which has cancelled about a half-dozen games in a row, was actually playing Monday night. But without me this time.

All in all, a good, exhausting time. I hope to put my new, improved 4-day game-con survival skills to use at Celesticon.

In other news, there’s a kickstarter for a new edition of Call of Cthulhu. Jesus Christ, $76 for two softcovers or $106 for two hardcovers? (Yeah, I know that’s a pretty typical price point these days.)

Tim Powers ama:

I sort of treat the research as clues in a detective story – like I’ve got to figure out what was really going on. And sometimes – as with Russia! – it turns out that “what was really going on” is contrary to what appeared to be going on. As for the Yom Kippur War – I figured the Mossad would like to have that war turn out not to be so costly, not such a close call. I find the historical period (or character, or place) first, just because it’s something intriguing, and then I read everything I can find on it, hoping to find those suggestive little unexplained or implausible details. And when I’ve got a good handful of those, I try to figure out what supernatural back-story would explain them. It’s kind of a screwed-up version of the scientific method!

This is maybe the most science-fictional headline I’ve ever seen: Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years. The article says things like:

once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey.

If someone told me about this, I’d have taken it about as seriously as “AI just around the corner” or “quantum computer renders all encryption obsolete.” “Cold fusion is finally here!” I’d have taken more seriously.

The article’s short on details, but I think I get the gist of it: your computer’s quantum network card randomly generates a one-time pad with quantum-entangled pairs of particles whose wave function collapses when half of them hit the quantum router. The one-time pad can’t be eavesdropped upon, because there isn’t anything to eavesdrop on because quantum physics is freakin’ magic. Then for the lifetime of the connection, both sides use this one-time pad to encrypt their traffic, which is sent conventionally.

Since the message is decrypted at the router, it’s only that first leg of the trip that’s über-secure; things are normal for the rest of your traffic’s trip.

In the article’s comments, jckrumm wins the quantum internet:

After two years, they were using their quantum internet mostly to exchange pictures of Schrödinger’s cat.

My five year old son asked me last week “what do you see through the black circles in my eyes when you’re controlling me when I’m at school?”

Reddit asks: What is the creepiest thing your young child has ever said to you?

One could wear a different t-shirt featuring H.P. Lovecraft or inspired by his works every day for years without repetition.

Cafe Press: Cthulhu t-shirt: 1477 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 1159 results

Zazzle: 746 results Cthulhu t-shirt: 1035 results

Red Bubble: Cthulhu t-shirt: 676 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 801 results

Spreadshirt: Cthulhu t-shirt: 60 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 27 results

In the above, there are some false positives and generally a huge amount of overlap between the two categories.

HP Lovecraft Historical Society: 15 t-shirts

Arkham Bazaar: about 60 t-shirts

T-short Bordello: 8 t-shirts

I could keep going, but you can see the diminishing returns.

So it’s kind of striking that last month Lovecraft Holdings, founded 2009, has filed for a standard character mark for “H.P. Lovecraft” on clothing, including “sweat bands, ear muffs, aprons, scarves, bandanas, belts, suspenders, neckwear, ties, underwear, briefs, bras, socks, robes, underclothes, pajamas, sleepwear, night gowns, nighties, lingerie, hosiery, tights, gloves, mittens, rain slickers”. Just filed, the USPTO hasn’t examined the filing yet.

IP law is a quagmire, so I’m sticking with “striking” rather than so much as speculating on what the consquences would be if it’s granted.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while – on Ebay, for $30 shipped you can get a DVD Box set that includes Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service and more. There’s a similar set with slightly different contents. (So far as I can tell these are legit.)

And this weekend at the Pacific East Mall in Richmond, I saw this catbus with Totoro passengers.

At 7 AM at her school, a 16-year-old student in Florida with good grades and no history as a trouble-maker mixed toilet bowl cleaner with aluminum foil in an 8 oz. water bottle, creating an explosion so violent it caused the top to pop right off! And made some smoke! But the injury count and damage rate was… zero.

So, naturally, she was expelled and arrested on felony charges for which she’s to be tried as an adult.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a geek of my generation who didn’t do stupider shit than this. Numerous scientists and engineers have spoken out about some of their stupid shit. I take the fifth.

We’ve got to stop the insanity.

My twitter feed has a bunch of references to banned science fiction and fantasy books. There are often breathless articles about books being banned, usually during Banned Books Week. And nearly invariably, the “ban” comprises a community challenge to a book’s use in a given curriculum or its presence in a public library – and often the challenge wasn’t even successful. The whole story was… people argued about whether a particular book was appropriate in a particular public, tax-funded context.

I’m here to say that this is a feature. The public is made out of people, and people should argue about what books public institutions are advancing or public funds are supporting. I daresay some of the same people shaking their heads in disgust about challenges to To Kill a Mockingbird or Brave New World would quickly discover the virtue of banning books if some school board somewhere introduced to a curriculum some current white supremacist novel encouraging hate crimes, or a teacher was explaining The 120 Days of Sodom to 9-year-olds.

There’s plenty to disagree with in given motivations for challenging books, or in given ideas of what’s appropriate for different age groups. And that’s why arguing about these things is a good thing.

There are a lot of people extremely dedicated to the premise that the person or persons responsible for the Boston Marathon bombs are one or more of: Arab, Muslim, foreign nationals, members of or sympathizers with Al-Qaeda. And there are some as dedicated to the premise that the person or persons are one or more of: white, domestic, right-wing, homophobic.

At least one of them must be wrong.

I’m sure everyone will be gracious about admitting their surety was erroneous and premature when we finally actually know something.

Kickstarter has made for a golden age for dice. I’m hoping to receive this month a huge pile of dice in all sorts of strange shapes, and I’m still waiting for these and a couple of sets of these fudge dice. (Fudge dice are six-sided dice with two sides blank, two +’s and two -’s, thrown four at a time for Fudge or Fate games – basically, it’s 4d3-8.)

Ending tomorrow is a kickstarter for these adorable rocket dice, and this Sunday night (Pacific time) the kickstarter for these precision machined metal gaming dice concludes. I had considered the creator’s previous precision machined dice kickstarter, but I thought the sharp edges would make them functionally unusable – they won’t roll well unless you have a handy craps table to throw them down, or a dice tower with steep ramps; they’d damage tables; the edges for a soft metal like aluminum would be so fragile you’d have to be careful to keep them from so much as knocking into each other. The chamfered edges on the dice in the current project are just what I wanted.

If you want still yet more fudge dice, there’s a project to create translucent ones and the publisher of Fate Core is making what they’re calling Fate dice.

There are pretty dice in wood and metal and these cool dice whose centers float freely within an exterior cage.

This guy is going to have his hands full.

I was thinking about role-playing game dice mechanics, today. I knew I remembered having heard of a system in which you rolled a pool of d6’s and the result was either the highest die, or, if you rolled more than one of some number, you got that number +1 for each additional die in the set. So 2 6’s or 3 5’s would count as a 7.

I googled “dice mechanic 3 5’s is 7. The second result’s quoted text said “In Orcworld [sic], 3 6’s is an 8, but 3 5’s and a 6 is a 7 (5+2).”

Orkworld I’ve barely heard of; I was probably thinking of Silhouette, the system underlying Tribe 8, where only 6’s are treated that way. The result page’s previous sentence is “In Silhouette, only 6’s do that, so a roll of 3 6’s is an 8, but a 6 and 3 5’s is a 6.” so I got both the system I was thinking of and a system that really worked the way my search described.

My email filter has four levels of spamminess: good, borderline, spam, and null (for the spammiest spam-spam-spam.) At least a couple of times a week, something I want ends up in spam. So I check it out every so often. This is a pain because there’s so much garbage. So I struck on a scheme to send more stuff that was ending up in spam straight to null: if more than half of the from or subject lines are non-ASCII, they go to null. My email filter: now 85% more provincial!

So I noodled around with Perl on the command line until I got this:

perl -MEmail::Folder -e 'use Encode qw(decode); $f=Email::Folder->new(shift @ARGV); for my $m ($f->messages) { $_=decode("Mime-header",$m->header("subject")); $a=()=/\p{ascii}/g; $l=length; $r = $l ? $a/$l : 0; print sprintf "% 3d % 3d %.2f %s\n", $a, $l, $r, $_ }' spam 

which became this in the filter script:

sub ascii_ratio {
  my $str = shift;
  return 0 unless length $str;
  my $num_ascii =()= $str =~ /\p{ASCII}/g;
  return $num_ascii / length $str;
}

my $from = decode("Mime-header", $email->header('from'));
my $subject = decode("Mime-header", $email->header('subject'));

if (ascii_ratio($from) < .5 or ascii_ratio($subject) < .5) {                                                        
$email->accept("/home/zed/Mail/IN.null");                                                                         
exit;                                                                                                             
} 

Notice that ‘ascii’ in the one-liner became ‘ASCII’ in the script. That’s because I developed the one-liner in perl 5.16 and am running the script on perl 5.10, and in 5.10, Unicode Character Property names are case-sensitive but in 5.12+, they’re not. Yay.

There is a Philip K. Dick role-playing game. Sometimes, I’m just astonished that things that seem so narrowly attuned to my tastes could possibly exist. This is one of those.

It doesn’t call itself a PKD RPG, per se. It says

Left Coast is a game about science fiction authors like Philip K. Dick and L. Ron Hubbard living in California at a blurry point between the Summer of Love and Reaganomics.

In the game, some of you will play the Authors, some of you play the friends and slackers surrounding them, demanding their attention, … and some of you play the weird alien forces conspiring to invade the Author’s lives. Together you’ll create a short story about Authors who struggle to control their lives so they can focus on doing the thing they love. Each author scrabbles for their big break, while dealing with their own financial incompetence, the screw-ups of their friends, and with their extremely creative minds slowly unspooling.

And each author is also trapped inside a novel that’s being written by one of their friends –who is making weird things invade their life. […]

The second half of VALIS and the first half of Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K. Dick are near-perfect examples of Left Coast stories.

But it’s hard for me to see it as anything else but the PKD RPG.

My gaming group played the quickstart version. It featured strange loops with different times superimposed on each other, a hostile voice berating the author from anything nearby with a speaker, the Author’s obsessed stalker fan and rival academic colleague cum spurned lover turning out to really be the same person, psychic alien invaders, and a Russian kosmonaut from one of the Author’s stories appearing in the real world.

Will play again.

I haven’t read any Dick or Dickiana for a long time, but I picked up What If Our World is Their Heaven? not long ago. After playing Left Coast, I promptly ordered I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (I already had the older In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis).

Unrelated PKD anecdotes:

A few years ago I read Bishop’s Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (sadly, my copy has the much worse title, “The Secret Ascension”.) It was published in 1987 and is set in a contemporary world featuring the overturn of the 22nd Amendment, Nixon continuing to be the sitting president, and Vietnam having become the 51st U.S. state. Watchmen, which began publication in September, 1986, is set in a contemporary world featuring the overturn of the 22nd Amendment, Nixon continuing to be the sitting president, and Vietnam having become the 51st U.S. state. I find it interesting that Bishop and Moore, whom I presume were writing these works at about the same time, struck on so many common elements.

At a PKD panel at Worldcon a couple of years, an audience member asked a question about Dick’s drug use. A writer on the panel who’d been a friend of Dick’s was quick to say it had been massively exagerrated, and sought to set the story straight, saying without irony, “Well, he used snuff all the time. And he drank – there was a lot of scotch. And he’d smoke pot if someone else had it – if it was around. And there were the amphetamines, but those were by prescription. So were the anti-depressants. And he dropped acid, but only twice. But that was it!”

English translation of a 140,000 word Russian novel telling the Lord of the Rings from a Mordorian perspective, not authorized by Gondor or the Tolkien Estate. The latter has scarier lawyers, so get it while you can: PDF epub or mobi.

Bonus: Gandalf Problem Solving – A Flowchart

I’ve had gadget lust for the Kindle DX since it first came out in 2009, so being the bleeding-edge alpha geek that I am, I finally bought a used Kindle DX Graphite on Ebay, some months after it was discontinued.

Good: 3G, big screen, New Oxford American Dictionary, hackable Android device.

Bad: No wifi, no SD card slot, discontinued (the latest Kindle firmware upgrade left the DX in the cold.)

Ugly: heavy, gives Amazon too much access when 3G is on, dextrocentric controls (which don’t inconvenience me personally, but I still don’t like them.)

The screen is almost 5.5” x 8”, about the size of a typical trade paperback. A big inspiration to buy it was to read some of the 6”x9” RPG PDFs I have, which are generally terrible on smaller e-readers. I’ve tried a few, and they work okay, but the text is pretty small – I need to look into pre-processing the PDFs to trim the margins. I’ve heard any number of accounts of people reading letter-size PDFs on the Kindle DX, but that’s clearly a game for someone with pre-presbyopic eyes (unless you turn the Kindle sideways and look at half-a-page at a time.)

After a long time of stubbornly refusing to buy DRM-ed e-books, I gave in and subscribed to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose digital subscription rate of $12 a year really is a tremendous bargain (and it’s Amazon-exclusive.)

I don’t like the idea of content whose continued availability is dependent on the continued availability of some proprietary platform, and I don’t like the idea of having my only copy of something be somewhere Amazon can delete it, so I did the obvious. I web-searched ‘strip Kindle DRM’, and downloaded and installed Calibre and the DRM removal plugins for it, and after a total of about 10 minutes, had a DRM-free copy. This wasn’t a rigged demo: I didn’t know exactly how to strip the DRM in advance, just that it was possible, straightforward, and easily found through web-searching. It’s almost as if DRM does more to inconvenience paying customers than it does to prevent duplication.

I’ve written before about my love for Paperbackswap. I’ve made a tiny bit of use of their sister site Swapacd, and I knew Swapadvd existed, but I hadn’t used it… until recently. I was looking at a small stack of DVDs I meant to get rid of, and finally the obvious occurred to me.

As with PBS (Paperbackswap), the simplifying assumption is that all DVDs are of equal value – send someone a box set with 6 DVDs and you get 6 credits. The wish list is more complicated than with PBS, where it’s a straightforward queue based on who requested it first. You prioritize your Swapadvd list, and can gain or lose ground in the queue based on how you’ve prioritized it. Maybe you wished for it longer ago, but someone else can get it first because they loved it more.

A DVD costs only a couple of dollars to mail, so sending one is comparable to what a rental used to be.

Some things I’ve received: Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, three seasons of Supernatural, Stardust, Taxi Driver, Pan’s Labyrinth. I’m currently waiting for the first two seasons of Arrested Development. And when I’m done with things I can flip them so they don’t just clutter up the house.

I took Frankenweenie on DVD out of the library. But it’s from Disney. Some recent Disney DVDs use a DRM scheme called ARccOS that Sony claimed was fully compatible with available DVD players and drives, but isn’t; others use something called X-project. Either way, it wouldn’t play on my HTPC.

So I had to take it to my desktop, and use HandBrake to rip a copy so I could watch it, incidentally making a copy of the movie. I’ll delete it when I’m done, but, still: wanted to just play the dvd, couldn’t do it without making a copy due to the stupid efforts to keep me from making the copy I didn’t want.

A long time ago, I used to maintain by hand a web page listing the books I’d read. Well, I’ve been doing the same lately on goodreads.com. There’s also a currently reading list, that keeps growing as I pick up another collection or anthology or other thing that lends itself to occasional reading.

I really like the ease of method chaining in ruby. When I create complicated shell pipelines, especially when there’s a perl one-liner involved, I’ve often wished I could do something ruby-ish. I’m not the first.

• Rubsh
• Fresh
• Rubish
• Rush
• DiaShell
• Urchin

While any number of the examples for use of the above might be a little easier and more concise than the equivalent in bash, none of them are consistently enough so for it to be terribly compelling to switch…

This is King Cotton. He’s a very friendly neighborhood stray whom we feed when he shows up, like Malasada did two nights ago.

Last night, as we got home…

M: No King?

Z: He’s not going to show up every night.

M: But I thought we had something.

Z: No, you were just a foodie call.