Inkor Eynowd

Well, the Seers of the Throne book for Mage: the Awakening was released today. I wrote 20,000 words for it, comprising of the opening fiction and most of the chapter on what the order thinks and believes.

I have to say that I was nervous as hell in the lead up to its release. It's been a highly anticipated book for a long time. Normally, there's a high risk of disappointing people in a situation like this (see Gamma World D20).

However, at least on the new WW Mage Forum, the general response from the early acquirers has been very positive indeed. For me, at least, this is very relieving :)

(It also helped that the opening fiction at least got a big thumbs up from DaveB, who was a co-author on the book, and the author of the two awesome Mage Actual Play threads on RPGnet).

I haven't received my author's copies yet, and there weren't redlines for the project either, so I have no idea how much of my work survived as written. I'll be interested to check once my books show up (whenever that happens to be).

Still, if the general reaction to the book continues, I'll be a happy camper indeed.

For those keeping score at home, dvixen has managed to find a home for Combat (her cat). A friend has volunteered to take the cat in temporarily and look for a permanent home. Apparently, there have been a couple of people very interested in taking her.

To say this is a huge relief is an understatement :)

I'll be picking dvixen up at Sydney International Airport in about 37 hours. It's kinda hard to believe we're finally going to be together for more than just a holiday :D

If you ever happen to be in Katoomba, NSW, and some smartarse declares that it'd be a good idea to walk up the Giant Staircase next to the Three Sisters, please — for the love of all things sacred — bitch slap some sense into them.

dvixen and I have just come back from four days in the Blue Mountains. We had a great time, but we just about killed ourselves physically the other day. We walked several kilometres to find a geocache, then climbed down several hundred steps at Furber Steps, and then hiked nearly 3 more kms around the Three Sisters, to the bottom of the Giant Staircase.

That's when we discovered the flaw in our cunning plan.

The Giant Staircase consists of 900 very steep steps, climbing over 200m vertically up a sheer sandstone cliff face. When you're already tired from a day's hiking, it's damn near torture. I, of course, made things worse by lugging a backpack full of camera gear (including a tripod) with me for the whole day, thereby adding quite a few kilograms to my load.

To make matters worse, once we made it to the top of the staircase, we still had another 1.5km to walk back to the hostel. Needless to say we were both in a lot of pain by the time we got back.

And then, just in case we hadn't had enough of staircases for one week, yesterday, we decided to visit the Jenolan Caves.

In a word, wow. Especially the Temple of Baal cave, which had some truly spectacular formations, which were beautifully lit up.

Photos of such things to (hopefully) follow in due course, assuming of course that they turn out once I download them from the camera onto my computer.

We didn't get to see even close to everything the Caves had to offer, so we'll have to go back sometime and try again. Still so much cool stuff to do there.

The only hassle with the whole day was the abundance of steps into and out of the caves, again carrying a backpack full of camera gear. You think I would have learned the day before...

But after a long day of driving and geocaching, we arrived home again tonight. It's going to be nice to sleep in my own bed again. Thank God I live in a single storey house...

Last year, when dvixen came to visit, it was sunny, hot and very, very dry here. All of the grass was brown and everything was just dry. Bushfires were raging through large parts of Victoria.

She kept saying she was going to ask for rain for Australia and she was going to bring some of the stuff from Canada for us. She's done that in spades. This year, we have had two weeks of overcast skies and rain nearly every day. This morning, it's been absolutely bucketing down, so it looks like today is going to be an inside day, where we play video games or read or stuff like that.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of Changeling: the Lost for Christmas, so I'm thinking I might curl up on the couch with a nice cup of tea and read it. He wants to run a CtL game in the new year, so I need to come up with a character concept. At the moment, I'm leaning towards a Changeling version of Peter Gabriel, but there's no kiths for musos, which I find somewhat odd.

But anyway, I'm going to just try and enjoy myself :D

I've been kinda half looking lately for some new and interesting things to read on the net. I tend to be fairly static in the sets of websites I repeatedly visit, so finding some new stuff to read is always a good thing.

A friend of mine pointed me at this website with details about 7 underground wonders which I thought was very cool indeed. By following some of the hyperlinks on that page, I found something even cooler.

It's the BldgBlog, which has some fabulous information about architecture and architectural oddities from all over the world. I have a deep seated love for architecture. Despite having no desire to actually do any of it, I really enjoy taking photographs of buildings. I'm also very fond of abandoned buildings and how they decay once mankind has left them alone for a while. I don't quite understand why I find them so fascinating, but sometimes you just got to go with the flow on these things. :)

The BldgBlog has some wonderful posts in it. I've read a few of them today and I'm looking forward to reading more of them in the coming weeks. Seeing all sorts of weird buildings and structures (like the huge underground storm water caverns beneath Tokyo) is starting to fire up my creative juices and give me all sorts of ideas.

I figured I'd share my find because there's probably a few people who read my stuff that might get a kick out of it as well.

IRC bots.

Over the next few months, I'm thinking about attempting to run anothe RPG game in a chatroom. Despite the fact that my previous attempt back in 2004 imploded due to real life factors, I haven't ever felt as comfortable as a GM as I did in that game. I was enjoying myself immensely and was pleased with the way the game was going.

As I've mentioned before, I'd like to run some of the new World of Darkness stuff. However, because of the mechanics I find myself in need of a dicebot that will handle the way the dice are rolled in nWoD. I don't have a problem writing one myself. I've already written myself a class in Python that will simulate a nWoD dice pool, including the ability to change the threshold for rolling again. By default, if you get a 10 on any die in your pool, you reroll it. However, in Mage, there are certain spells which can change that to 9 or in some cases 8).

There are a couple of bots written in Python, and I'm playing with Supybot at the moment. I picked that one because I can write plugins for it in Python, so I can take the stuff I've already done and get it into the bot.


Now, there are a couple of other things that I'd particularly like to be able to do, but I'm not familiar enough with IRC to know if it's even possible.
I'd like the ability for a GM (for example) to be able to have the things he says appear to come from another player character. Under the Calvin chat system (similar to IRC), the GM can use the /as command and it will appear as though some other character has said something. This is really useful when you're running multiple NPCs in the same scene.

Calvin also has the /narrate command, which works similar to the /me command, except that it doesn't automatically put your nick at the beginning of the line. This is great for scene setting.

Is it even possible to do such things under IRC? Or am I sol?

EDIT: Don't worry about the Dicebot side of things. I've managed to get my supybot plugin script working, and it even manages to do the 8-again and 9-again thing. This pleases me to no end. Now, if I could figure out how to do the equivalent of /as and /narrate, I'd be ecstatic (although I could - and have - run without them before, so it's a nice to have).

Just because I want to get in first this year:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO WIZ FOR TOMORROW!

and because I doubt anyone around here will remember, Happy birthday to me for today :)

OK, so I'm a few days behind the rest of the world (and about six weeks ahead of most of Australia), but I just sat and watched Ep 20.

Daymn.

For yea verily, that show does continue to get better and better. I think I may have to sit and study this show more, because it's hitting all the right notes, IMHO.

Do you read my geoffinthemorn blog?

If so, what keeps you interested? What would you like to see more of?

I don't expect this to make sense to anyone I know, but I'm hoping it will reach the people it's meant to somehow. I'm simply relaying this on behalf of a friend from Montreal:

---

Andrew and Family!
Think / Pray 4 the David you knew back in Montreal.
Yes. Everything is drawing near the end.
I thought to let you know the fastest way I knew: from the pocket of a kangaroo.
Signed:
The one your wife said she is a little Light but that refused to be one.

---

Getting AVI files to playback on the TV.

I bought an S-video cable today, so that I can plug my laptop into my TV. I've hooked it up and switched the graphics card to send the data to both the laptop screen and the TV. No problems there - I can see the computer desktop on the TV.

Now, Quicktime will let me play .mov files and I can see them on the TV.

But when I try to watch an AVI file on the tele using Windows Media Player, something weird happens. I can see all the GUI parts of the window on the TV, but the region of the screen that actually shows the show itself - it stays completely black. The file is playing properly on my laptop screen, but there's no video appearing on the TV screen.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I maintain that the laughing of babies is one of the best sounds in the universe. So, with that in mind, here's something that's bound to brighten up your day.

As a bonus, they're all completely work safe as well :)

Clip one
Clip two
Clip three

I totally love it when I can still laugh like a kid. It still happens occasionally and I'm usually reduced to fits of helpless giggling. It's fantastic. There should be more of this sort of thing in the world, IMHO :)

After reading one of illdrinn's posts today, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice.org v2.1. I've been using Sun's StarOffice 7 for the past couple of years and I quite like it. I orginally bought it because I didn't want a pirate copy of MS Office and it was hideously expensive to buy.

StarOffice 7 has served me well, but it had a couple of annoying bits missing. For me, as a (sometimes) writer, the most annoying feature missing was a proper word count menu option (particularly one that could count words in a selection). I eventually found a macro that would do it for me, but I still missed the old Alt-T>W keystroke sequence when I was writing.

OOo2.1 has that feature. It also seamlessly opens all my StarOffice files, so there's a better than average chance that I could be uninstalling StarOffice in the not too distant future and just going with the free software. I'll use it for a while and see how it plays, but I do like having a fully featured open-source office suite. :)

Before New Year, my iPod started playing up and stopping tracks partway through, then skipping onto the next one in the playlist. I wasn't sure what was going on, so I decided to use iTunes 7 to restore it to factory settings (erasing all the music) and then copy everything across to it again.

Unfortunately, since then, I haven't been able to get the music onto it. I've got about 25gig I want to copy, and the most I've been able to get across is 1.74GB. After that, it just seems to hang iTunes and the whole thing is screwed royally. I must have restored my iPod about six or seven times now at least, hoping to bring it back to a state where it can work properly again.

I don't know if the problem is the iPod itself or with bugs in v7 of iTunes. Part of me is inclined to believe it's the latter, because it seems to lock up all the time. Until recently, my iPod had been working like a champion for months. The problems seem to start when I had the new motherboard installed in my computer and upgraded to iTunes v7 to synch up the music. Since then it just hasn't been quite right (or even remotely right).

Anyone have any suggestions? I really want my music back again...

Some YouTube links:

South Park's Tribute to Monty Python

The French Castle Scene, HALO style

How Not To Be Seen - HALO style

Enjoy :)

I finally found a way to use fuzzy logic at work.

It's something I've wanted to do since I finished my Masters degree, back in 1996.

I still need to do some work on the program to actually make it seriously useful, but I proved the concept to myself and I am happy with it. It should, hopefully, save me a lot of time in the future. Not to mention removing most of the pain from what could be an otherwise extremely dull and tedious task.

Over the past year and a bit, I've become a fan of the Savage Worlds RPG system (in fact, it's the only thing I play these days).

A week or so back, a friend of mine made a comment about Call of Cthulhu and it got me thinking about such things.

I was wondering if there was already a set of rules for Savage Worlds that made it possible to play CoC style games in that system? Most SW games I've played in have been more action-adventure orientated, rather than the more subtle and cerebral style that CoC seems to promote. There isn't a decent sanity rule system in SW either (at least not that I've been able to find).


I'm not saying I'm going to run it. I'm just curious about whether such an animal actually exists.

Well, I keep forgetting to update my LJ. My bad.

Life, on the whole, is pretty good. While there have been a couple of things that have bummed me out recently, I feel content within myself, so that's all that really matters.

Geocaching is my new drug. I racked up my 100th cache find last Sunday, and I've already found a couple more since then. I've also hidden six now, and have another couple in the works. Not only that, but figuring out puzzles to disguise GPS coordinates really gets the devious part of my brain working in overdrive. I love that :)

Caching is also having some useful benefits for my health: I've dropped 4kg (about 9lbs) in the past month. I haven't changed my diet much (apart from cutting out milk, which wasn't agreeing with me), but I have been walking lots - 10-20km a weekend while looking for caches is not unusual now.

I survived a week in Brisbane last week. I had to go up for work, and it reminded me how glad I am to be out of there.

I saw Children of Men yesterday while my car was being repaired. A good movie, although it had a few too many WTF moments for my liking. Too many unanswered questions.

I've been watching Billy Connolly's World Tour series lately. I've finished the World Tour of Scotland and the World Tour of Australia, and I'm more than halfway through his World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales. He remains, IMHO, the funniest man alive, bar none.

That's about it for now. I should get around to updating this more often, and I've even got a Geoff In The Morning post that's been scratching at the inside of my skull for a while, wanting to get out. I might have to do that soon too...

Well, tonight I did something I haven't done since 1989.

My son is studying Ancient Egypt at school this term, and they're having a presentation in which the students are encouraged to dress up in costume. I, being all ambitious all of a sudden, have decided to make him a Tutankhamen headpiece, out of papier mache.

I have done this since I went to my first roleplaying convention, back in December of 1989. We played a Toon game based on Battle of the Planets, and the whole team papier mached the helmets for the game. I drew the shortstraw and got Princess, so I had a flower on top of my helmet.

Tonight has been fun, albeit messy. I hope the silly thing is going to be strong enough. It's really only got to last a couple of hours in anger, so we shall see.

Now, I'm going to sit down and enjoy another episode of The 4,400, Season 2 :)

On Monday, Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray.

Today, Australian motor racing legend, Peter Brock, has reportedly been killed in a race in Western Australia.

Bloody hell. Which poor bastard is next?