Burrowowl

While travelling recently, I did a lot of reading. Men that stand six foot, nine inches tall have problems sleeping comfortably on airplanes, so there is little else to do. One of the books I picked up was Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Those familiar with the panda joke will recognize this as being a book about punctuation. The prose is witty and enlightening. It is strongly grounded in the literary traditions of the english language and the necessity of change and growth in a living language. The author asserts that this is a book for sticklers, but on this point I firmly disaggree: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is for everyone with any interest in writing or reading. Even for those who read only when compelled to do so. The following is taken from a chapter entitled “Airs and Graces:”

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop.

Some wankers would argue that the above quote was improperly punctuated; however the overcapitalized “ups” and the uneven distribution of commas serve a clear stylistic purpose. Style has a place in our written language. It is nice to see Ms. Truss fighting hard to keep it there. Now I think I’ll go sequester myself for a few days and re-edit my previous entries, which I suspect are absolutely horrible…

I’ll admit that I watch the news too much. I watch CNN when Larry King isn’t on, I watch CNBC when the infomercials aren’t on, I watch MSNBC when their wonks aren’t yelling at each other, and I watch Fox News when they don’t have Hannity or O’Reilly on. I’ve repeatedly had to halt my news-watching because all four have decided to watch dogs sniffing around in some hedges, or because jurors were expected back from deliberation in some high-profile case. It is understandable for them to do this, because there’s a chance of breaking news that the public wants to see.

The past three days have been something else, though. The only news channel I can get any non-Reagan stories from is CNBC, and that only because they have a stated goal of showing busines news above and beyond any other journalism. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have turned the world into a three-day all-Reagan-all-day spectacle with no end in sight. So far this week, I have yet to turn on Fox News without see live coverage of Reagan’s casket. Yes, live coverage of a casket. Is the news director there concerned that the 93 year old alzheimers victim is going to claw his way out and feast upon the flesh of the living?

This is not about Ronald Reagan. I have nothing in particular to say about the guy. This is about how american television news fails us on a regular basis, and how particularly obvious it is this week.

The public has been informed of his death. The journalistic responsibility has been met. People who are upset about it are upset. Other things are happening in the world that we should know about. It’s time to move on. 72-hour live coverage of a corpse is sick, sick, sick, and sick.

The Privateers are at it again. Having shipped the IKCG to the printers back in May, the crew of Privateer Press have decided to wave pages of their long-awaited tome under our noses. Last week we were given glimpses of several sections, and this week we get even more.

The second preview contains a lot of juicy goodness:

1. A fraction of the explanation of the Morrowan Calendar, including major feastdays and the origins of month names.
2. The the Cleric class entry and the beginning of the Druid entry.
3. A snippet of item descriptions for miscellaneous equipment.
4. The tail end of the description of the god Menoth, and the beginning of Dhunia’s entry. Information regarding the origin of Menoth is especially tastey. We also see that Dhunia has four brand-spanking-new clerical domains, one for each season.
5. A pageful of alchemical healing items. A couple of them look at lot like what my players have been relying on in my Falconbridge campaign. Volden Mirsk would be proud. My version is a lot more potent and I have made them much more affordable, but I tend to run low-money games, so I suppose it fits. Nothing listed for alchemical goods is what I would normally consider a good bargain.
6. An appendix of clerical titles (Priest, Chaplain, Battle Chaplain, Rector, et cetera).

Overall, this provides a pleasant combination of fluff and crunchy rules-stuff. I was seriously concerned, when the IKCG and the IKWG were split apart from the original IKCG project, that we’d get a whole bunch of new rules in the first book, and all the excellent Iron Kingdoms fluff in the second book. I recognize that more people are looking for crunchy rules than fluffy background information, but I’m glad that it at least looks like they’re putting in a solid effort to achieve a balance.

Continuing a series of articles explaining the minutiae of how some of the D&D rules, WotC has just recently finished up their official explaination of polymorphing. This includes the spells polymorph, baleful polymorph, and polymorph any object, alter self, shape change, and a number of class features and “special qualities” that some monsters have which have similar effects.

As a four-part series, it starts out slow. Really slow. Painfully slow. Definitions-of-terms slow. They move on to some tastier fare in the second part with almost 300 lines of text describing the Alter Self spell in painstaking detail.

The series really comes up to speed in the third part, which describes the Polymorph spell itself. It’s a little detailed. 837 lines of detail. If only for the sake of DM-sanity maintenance, this spell should probably be stricken from the game. In fairness to the author, a great deal of this mountain of text is simply a repeat of what exactly the “subtype” characteristics are. For every subtype in standard D&D 3.5. Yes, every subtype. While my eyes were glazing over and I was passing in and out of consciousness trying to read the thing I may have missed one or two. I’m pretty sure they’re all listed.

Part Four brings us a return to sanity, as multiple spells are described in short order. Relying upon an assumption that somebody would want to wade through the previous entry on Polymorph itself, it focuses more upon how Baleful Polymorph, Shape Change, Wild Shape, and Alternate Form differ from the previous spells.

This four-part Rules of the Game series brings to light the problems that the most versatile forms of magic introduce into game mechanics. Transmutation and Illusion, as schools of magic, are probably the most open to exploitation (and enjoyment) by players and DMs alike. As such they bring to light the some of the most awkward restrictions and gaping holes in the D20 ruleset. I can only hope that the next entry will be regarding such gems as Minor Image.

I don’t know how this kind of thing happens. It makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, Windows Update just operates through a minimal-nonsense web interface. So Apple made a little GUI widget for their product updates. Fine. What what on Earth would cause the creation of this atrocity?

Has the past twenty years of steadily losing market share and relevance amongst all but the most delusional sub-niche of computer users driven the Mac community this far?

That being said, thank you, Crazy Apple Rumors, for showing us that while Apple has been bungling the PR aspect of recent security problems in ways that make Microsoft look like respectable members of the business community, somebady is out there willing to remind us that Mac OSX 10.3.4 still provides Stickies that are far less sticky than in previous releases.