4th Edition's Competition

The second major overhaul of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise is hitting mid-year, but the grand old flagship roleplaying game is far from immune to competition.

Like a woman scorned, Paizo has decided to push on with 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, recently publishing a playtest version for what amounts to version 3.75 of the system. Paizo used to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines, was a spin-off company of the D&D franchise really, and didn’t get special consideration for early exposure to the new hotness. Clearly there were some sour grapes going on here. That said, the Pathfinder RPG looks pretty good.

With an anticipated release date of August 2009, it looks like it’ll be about a year late. That’s fourteen months after 4th edition hits the shelves, and a full year after 3rd party early-adopters will start peddling their supplements and campaign materials for it. The success of the Pathfinder adventure path series and revenue from their online store may help pad the shock a bit, but I’m rather pessimistic about this endeavor.

Another attempt to horn in on 4th edition FUD is the Graduate Your Game initiative by White Wolf. Maybe they just have a lot of 2nd edition Exalted rulebooks lying around, or maybe they’ve done some serious market research, but they’ve made a bold offer: give them your v3.5 Player’s Handbook and they’ll give you a shiny new copy of the Exalted core rules. A lot of long-time D&D players are upset that their beloved basement-dweller pastime of choice is getting a major overhaul, and I’ve seen a lot of talk about switching to Savage Worlds or True 20, or keeping on with 3.5 indefinitely. Hanging on to 3.5 sounds reasonable, as these gamers already have their books and can run them forever without having to spend a dime on new rules. The problem them becomes new players: how do you get a new player up to speed on the system when the rules are no longer in print? Ask anybody who has looked for the Iron Kingdoms Campaign Guide on Amazon lately, and you’ll find that out-of-print RPG titles can fetch a pretty penny. I wonder if White Wolf intends to open up an eBay shop in a year or two? Hmm…

Anyhow, to a lot of folks, their v3.5 players handbooks are full-color glossy toilet paper once 4th edition comes out. They’ll be adopting the new system or otherwise abandoning the old. Unless you’re chronically-nostalgic, it may be a good chance to pick up a pretty good fantasy RPG.

Network

The other night my wife and I settled down to watch a classic, one which I hadn’t seen since, frankly, I was too young to really understand what it was about: Network. It’s surreal how topical this thirty-two year-old film is. Network tells the story of the later days of a fictional news anchor’s career. Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) is a respectable old journalist whose ratings have slipped as he has personally slid into alcoholism. Beale’s story is a trapping for a larger allegory about the encroachment of entertainment programming into the news cycle, though. Most of the real action takes place between Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway) and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), two ambitious executives seeking to turn Beale’s network around into a profit-center. When Beale announces on live television that he’s going to commit suicide during his final broadcast, the tensions between corporate greed, personal ambition, pride, and tradition all come to a head.

Journalism is expensive, and airtime during a news broadcast is a hard sell. Historically we’ve seen the real-world broadcast networks put on their news programming as what amounts to a pro-bono basis. The costs of maintaining a pool of reporters in areas of interest around the world are high, so corners have to be cut to stay on budget, to keep the ship afloat. In Network, Hackett it looking to subsume the news division into programming, under the same people that handle soap operas, sitcoms, and made-for-TV movies. Christensen sees great entertainment potential in current events, inspired by footage of a terrorist group’s bank robbery. She looks to start up a weekly drama series based on authentic footage of terrorist acts acquired through contacts with the terrorists themselves. When Beale has a breakdown, she sees a great opportunity and jumps for it.

As somebody that habitually leaves CNN or MSNBC on in the background at home, Network strikes me as prophetic. The news cycle is dominated by a perpetual drive for scandal, for a train wreck, for a horse race. Barack Obama started pulling ahead in the polls, the news media promptly starts digging up anything they can to make the Democratic race look competitive again. Wow. The president is trying to gin up a flimsy case for going to war with some third-world country? Sounds like a great chance to draw some eyeballs to the boob-tube; the news media brews up exciting graphics and dramatic music instead of looking into the facts behind the government’s claims. John McCain looked like he was the obvious candidate in 2000 during the Republican primaries, so the news media starts propping up some incompetent southern governor as some kind of contender. The same buffoon somehow beats McCain (with the complicity of newscasters that were looking for a horse race to cover), and the process began over again trying to knock the clearly-more-capable incumbent vice president to make things look competitive. Nobody sticks around to watch a blowout, and the news directors know this. They’ll stick around for months to hear about some blonde that’s missing in the Caribbean, though.

The dialogue was excellent, the casting just about perfect. The production values were what you’d expect from a 1970’s drama, so the camera work and sound levels will probably grate on the delicate sensibilities of folks raised on THX. This certainly isn’t the kind of movie you can just wander in and out of the room for, it’s a serious movie made for people that have an attention span. Highly recommended.

PPPoE on Motorola 2210-02

The Motorola 2210-02 is an ADSL2+ modem recently distributed by AT&T for its residential customers. It features a handsome form factor and reasonably-useful LED status indicators. As it is most commonly introduced through a PPPoE-based provider, it is sometimes necessary to switch it over to a straight ATM<->Ethernet bridge. Here’s what you do:

Connect your computer directly to the Motorola. Browse to http://192.168.1.254/ in the browser of your choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.1.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.1.254 to do so.
You should be challenged for Modem Access Code in order to change anything. This should be a ten-digit number on the bottom of the modem. It should be on a yellow sticker.
The Motorola will present a page prompting you for your PPPoE authentication info. You don’t need this any more, as you’re about to disable PPPoE. Click “Advanced” in the left-hand navigation bar instead.
Once the Advanced navigation has expanded, select “PPP Location.”
You should get a big red warning about the dire consequences of changing PPPoE settings. Ignore the warning and select “Bridged Mode (PPPoE is not used).”
Click the “Save Changes” button. Wait 15 seconds or so.
Switch your computer back to DHCP, hook your router back up, or whatever makes you happy. That’s none of my business; this document is just supposed to help you turn off PPPoE, not find meaning in life, achieve spiritual fulfillment, or any of the other things you should be working on.

Please note that the default Motorola 2210-02 firmware as detailed in the user’s guide available on Motorola’s site has a significantly different interface, as do the Motorola 2210-02 models distributed through BellSouth. I am located in SBC’s incumbent footprint, so the above instructions only apply to the stuff they distributed. I think the BellSouth one is 2210-02-1006 whereas the SBC version is 2210-02-1002, but don’t bet the rent on it. I mention this just in case you run into something purchased on eBay or trucked over during a interstate move.

WiFi FUD

A topic I’ve been interested in for a while now is the stampede mentality some people exhibit in regards to subjects framed as frightening. This includes handgun ownership, terrorism, hormones in food, genetically-engineered food, SARS, and a number of other supposed menaces to your personal safety that account for a very small number of actual problems. One that has come up recently at work has been the adverse effects of WiFi signals. A small but highly-motivated culture of electrosensitives and the chronically-afraid has sprung up around the radio frequencies emitted by cellphones and cellphone towers. Many have decided to associate the years-old paranoia about cellphones to wireless networking as well.

My knee-jerk reaction is that such concerns are overblown, a kind of niche-hysteria that just doesn’t make sense. WiFi access points use very little power; 100 milliwatts is typical, KSRO radio broadcasts at 5,000 watts and is just one of dozens of local radio stations. Shouldn’t we have been seeing health effects from generations of radio broadcasts irradiating us day and night without pause? So I did a little reading.

Looks like one of those great convergences where a handful of scientific studies have fallen into the hands of some highly-vocal people with a vested interest in hyping fear of this technology and a receptive media that is willing to fill (ironically enough) broadcast airtime on hyping it further.

The WiFi health scare has now found fertile soil in Sebastopol, California, where fourteen concerned residents converged on the city council to demand that a community wireless network project be shelved. This happened to be a project my employer was set to implement, more for gee-whiz factor than any real prospect of making money off it, hence my interest in the matter. Sebastopol has an interesting reputation for its residents’ collective insistence that it has an independent streak, often manifesting itself in odd ways including the overuse of political bumper stickers.

Now, I’ll concede that most of the folks that have signed onto the “new things are bad” approach to things are sincere in their intentions. Some honestly believe themselves to be affected by radio signals. Some have concerns about cancer that are amplified by family backgrounds and specific personal situations. Some are genuinely concerned about the well-being of children that are being forced to grow up in the future instead of the past. The problem here is that they’re getting played, manipulated, bamboozled, conned. There’s money to be made in RF-screening paint, curtains, gee-gaws, and even underwear. But who’d buy such things if they weren’t afraid of RF? If you’re somebody that follows links, yes, that’s over $459 for a gallon of paint.

Declaration of victory against WiFi
Observations by the guy trying to give a town free WiFi
Some British guy that’s skeptical on the matter

A proper study on the matter (PDF)

CARET

Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology, or CARET, is the name of the program that “Isaac” worked with during the mid-80’s. As the name indicates, they were looking into some very interesting technology that works on a significantly different set of design principles than those generally associated with Terran engineering. The kind folks at the Jimbo Propulsion Laboratories sent me a link to this interesting material which I now in turn share with you.

The photographs accompanying Isaac’s story are striking in their visual design, incorporating stark contrasts and hard angles with graceful curves at once reminiscent of a Nonokrian rune, katakana, a bat’leth, and sperm. If our military-industrial complex has been working on extraterrestrial tech, I’d like to think that it’s something as cool looking as this stuff.

More information on this matter, including a rebuttal by Isaac to a few of his critics, is available at ufo.whipnet.org.

1917-2008

Arthur C. Clarke passed away earlier today. Sir Arthur is most widely known as the science fiction author behind the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The ideas he put to paper found their way into the fertile minds of generations of scientists and explorers, eventually leading to geostationary satellites and, one can only hope, one day will yield space elevators and such.

Link: BBC Obituary

Ides of March

Yesterday was L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, so Anonymous threw a party in his honor at Scientology centers around the world. T52 posted some great photos of the gathering in London along with some insightful commentary. Looks like they had a great time. The birthday revelry near Atlanta, Georgia turned out a bit differently, with some police officers deciding to arrest demonstrators and ticket passers-by out of what I can only assume was sheer boredom; nobody puts on the badge so they can stand across the street from an unimpressive handful of unenthusiastic protesters.

Supposedly more people showed up for events at the larger cities (per Partyvan), but a bunch of Internet pranksters are hardly to be trusted when it comes to proper numbers. Some say that Anonymous is looking to take the Scientologists down. Some say it’s just for the lulz. I’d say they lack the capacity to have a motivation at all.

WTF

While studiously researching the proper capitalization of Taekwondo (a matter fraught with peril, as it’s a romanization of a Korean term as transmogrified by the Japanese and can rightly be regarded as three separate words), I ran across something that made me smile: the World Taekwondo Federation, aka WTF.

Another amusing pair of acronyms I ran into recently include Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (BATMAN) and its closely-related protocol Routing BATMAN Inside (RO.B.IN). This pair goes from doubly funny for the individual super-hero references to triple funny for the dynamic-duo pairing to quadruple-funny for having Batman inside Robin. Hoo, boy. Gary and Ace would be proud.

Assassin-themed Khador

I don’t care for the whole Khador == Soviet Russia oversimplification, but with the release of the Kayazy Underboss unit attachment and Yuri the Axe, there’s a rather solid cold-blooded-killer army available now for the Motherland:

Faction: Khador
Army Points: 750/750
Victory Points: 26

Kommander Sorscha Kratikoff
– Destroyer
Yuri the Axe
– Manhunter
– Manhunter
Doom Reavers
Kayazy Assassins (8)
– Kayazy Assassins Underboss
Kossite Woodsmen (6)
Widowmakers
Eiryss, Mage Hunter of Ios
Gorman Di Wulfe, Rogue Alchemist
Kell Bailoch
Croe’s Cutthroats (6)

Each model is directly associated with assassination, Kommander Sorscha being renown in WARMACHINE for her “woosh” tactic, leading to the quick demise of many enemy Warcasters over the years. The Destroyer has traditionally played the role of Sorscha’s assassination-partner for the Wind Rush to Icy Gaze combination along with Eiryss. Each of the other mercenaries is explicitly a professional assassin, as are the Kayazy ally unit. The Widowmakers are snipers, not assassins, but this is a rather fine semantic point from the perspective of Khador’s enemies. The only models that are a bit of a stretch thematically are the Doom Reavers (a penal unit of berserkers driven mad by their enchanted weapons). I included them due to the criminality of their background. The Kossite Woodsmen are treated as mercenary near-criminals in the background information, and add to the “hired gun” flavor of much of this list.

It’s also almost entirely Advanced Deployment, which is big fun. Line your little gaggle of murderers up against precisely the assets you mean to. A variation is also possible for 500pt games, but doesn’t quite have the punch and lacks the thematic overkill.

Madame Mirage

When I first saw a piece of cover art for Madame Mirage, I thought is was some kind of Carmen Sandiego bit. Brunette with a wide-brimmed hat, champagne flute in hand, surrounded by tuxedo-clad assailants. How will Carmen get out of this predicament? I was wrong, of course. The two have little in common save for some thrilling headgear.

Produced by Top Cow Productions, generally known for bringing us Witchblade and comic-book adaptations of Gatchaman and Tomb Raider, Madame Mirage is a tale of treachery and revenge. Set in a near-future where technology led to the rise of heroes and villains with superhuman powers, this series uses a now-familiar premise borrowed from The Watchmen, Powers, The Incredibles, and the Nightmare of Futures Past in that there is a population of former super-heroes and super-villains whose operations have been banned. Some supers turned themselves in and have presumably been put into protective custody, many resisted and were forced into captivity, some went to ground. Madame Mirage uses her powers of illusion in a crusade to bring down a criminal organization that traded in their tights and capes for suits and ties.

The artwork, by Kenneth Rocafort, is an interesting blend of highly-stylized character designs and ink work that creates the impression of details through the use of coloring that gives more texture than precision. In several places, a key character on the page is little more than a doodle of ink lines, but the color work gives a richness to the frame as a whole. It reminds me of some of the older Eclipse trading cards and a Paranoia comic that came out ages ago, when airbrushed art was briefly in vogue. Madame Mirage recalls that brief fad without clinging so tightly to some high-falutin artistic conceit.

The plot itself suffers from a heavy-handed Mary Sue syndrome, with the protagonist outsmarting and outmaneuvering and outclassing her opponents at each turn, with even the cliffhangers working into a pre-arranged plan. Once the main character has so thoroughly demonstrated her superiority over all opposition, it gets harder and harder for me to maintain interest; harrowing predicaments fade away. The edge-of-the-seat anticipation is replaced by a disinterested curiosity as to the precise manner in which the bad guys will trip all over themselves and be duped (again) by some ingenious web of deceit. This is a problem I’ve run into with Superman, the Silver Surfer, and most Robert Heinlein books.

The first plot arc is about to wind down with issue 6, after which we’ll see if the series has any real staying power. If the cliffhanger ending to issue 5 is handled properly, Madame Mirage will likely end up on my subscription list for a while to come. If it continues on its current track, it will have amounted to little more than a trashy little pile of eye-candy at the back of a longbox under my stairs.

Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings