Burrowowl

I swear that our elected representatives should start blogging or something. Obviously they are prolific writers, and have staffers that have nothing better to do. Our most recent notable release by the Ministry of Dense Verbage Generation (the US legislature) is, of course, the 9-11 Report, brought to you by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, your tax dollars, and the letter “F”. Here’s a little teaser to get your juices flowing:

We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration. Ten Commissioners, five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s capital at a time of great partisan division, have come together to present this report without dissent.

We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it. September 11, 2001,was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States.The nation was unprepared. How did this happen, and how can we avoid such tragedy again?

At long, long last Privateer Press is reporting that not only is the IKCG written, edited, laid-out, printed, proofed, re-printed, and shipped. It has also been received by distributors. Keenly aware that they have a PR problem with the severe delays in releasing this product, they had the excellent taste to display the following on their main page:

Flying pigs spotted off the coast of Washington!
[7/20/04 19:28 GMT]
First reports have started popping up of distributors receiving the Iron Kingdoms Character Guide! We have seen the reprinted sections of the book, and though the additional delay was inconvenient, we are quite happy with the decision to fix the sections that were too dark. The book finally is real, and should be in stores within the next week or sooner…

Note that I’m not holding my breath yet, but I’ll probably feel a little less pessimistic when I head by my FLGS on Friday to pester the staff about whether UPS has shown up yet.

Just when you thought that the D&D rules were reasonably straightforward, the kind folks at Wizards of the Coast do their level best to prove you wrong. We all knew that Polymorph was a bit of a sticky wicket. But that’s the domain of Wizards, Sorcerors, and other pencil-necked twerps. The noble Fighter, Barbarian, and Rogue are still there for simple gaming pleasure, unfettered by complicated, nuanced rules, right? Wrong.

In the latest installment of their Rules of the Game series, All About Movement, we see that anybody interested in getting his character to where he needs to be amidst a pitched combat is in for some serious rules-applicaiton. Over the course of the last month and a half, we have been given six installments of rules explanations entirely limited to what should be the simple matter of moving from point A to point B, where you can hope to maybe stick +4 Holy Flaming Vorpal Greatsword C through monster D.

Read it if you have the stomach. Though it is more universally-applicable to characters of all kinds, it’s a rather thick six pages.

Strap yourselves in, boys & girls: the second chapter of NHY ni Youkoso. In contrast to a couple people making free scanslations available in a timely manner, Privateer Press still doesn’t have the IKCG out yet. I suppose I finally have to start referring to it as “vaporware,” though I was reluctant to do so for rather a long while. Did you know that the United States has successfully prosecuted two foreign wars since this book was supposed to be out? Anyhow, in the meantime let’s enjoy some free Japanese comics. Go buy a copy if you happen to be near a Kinokuniya.

It looks like there was a bit of a security problem with my favorite web browser, so they dilligently released a patched version. The security problem is similar to something a lot of folks got very upset about in the Macintosh world(see Daring Fireball), namely that a rogue link could cause your system to execute commands. A writeup on this is available at Bugzilla, though there is probably something a bit more human-readable out there somewhere. I must say that I’m rather disappointed in the text blurb that accompanies the 0.9.2 upgrade on the Mozilla site; it gives no up-front admission of the potentially serious security issue. It smacks of the older attitudes of Microsoft and the still poor attitudes of Apple in the face of quality assurance issues.

That being said, go upgrade your Firefox, Thunderbird, and/or Mozilla when you get a chance to. Better safe than sorry, a stitch in time saves nine, and all that good stuff.