Wizards of the Coast has announced that the licenses for both Dragon and Dungeon magazines will not be renewed. As of September, Paizo Publishing will end its five-year run peddling d20 content to slathering D&D geeks around the world. They are to be replaced by online content instead. Dragon issue 359 and Dungeon issue 150 will be the end of their runs for the foreseeable future.
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Upon looking around for some new anime to watch, I have stumbled across something I’ve noticed for a long time but have never written about. The Japanese market lacks the necessary gag reflex, antibodies, lymphatic system, or whatever it is that keeps really bad rock music from floating to the surface. Warning the “exhibit” links below lead to Youtube content with extremely lame music, and are not recommended for the faint of heart.
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I’m not a Linux guru by any means, but one of my favorite programs over the years has been joe, a text editor with an interface that is nearly-identical to Wordstar, the first word processing software I ever used. Joe makes handy little backup files whenever you edit a text document, named filename~, with the tilde character denoting that it is an old version. After a long day of wrenching away on code, this can result in a lot of clutter. For this reason, the sysadmins at my benevolent employer brewed up the following shell script ages ago:
#!/bin/sh
rm -fv *~
rm -fv .*~
They named it rmtil, and I’ve run it many hundreds of times over the years. Having just implemented it on my own server, I figured I’d put it somewhere others could benefit from it as well. Put it somewhere in your $PATH with execute and read permissions (chmod 755) and rejoice!
*edit (2007.05.10): Bosco wrote this version of rmtil as a Solaris-friendly modification of the original.
The flagship game book for FATE 3.0 by Evil Hat Games, Spirit of the Century is 420 pages of the action, adventure, and damn-the-details Science that we associate with early 20th century pulp writing. Clearly not an endeavor that takes itself too seriously, the authors mold the inherent flexibility of the FATE rule system to suit the over-the-top attitude of the genre.
The character generation system encourages players to treat their creations like the heroes from the works of Edgar Ruce Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and the like. Player characters are assumed to be exceptional, but benefit through the FATE rules by having some exploitable aspects that make the GM’s life easier.
The particulars of the rules set aside the tedious record-keeping that bogs down so many RPGs, with broadly-applicable aspects and skill, built-in mechanisms to allow players to introduce convenient circumstances into the adventure though declarations of facts, and a system of character stunts that allow several of the rules to be bent in specific ways. This is where the underlying FATE system really shines: by focusing the amorphous multi-purpose FATE system into a single genre of death-defying bravado, two-fisted action and mad science, you can hang a very flexible game around a strong skeleton.
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Three episodes in, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann continues its tour de force. The craftsmanship of this story is absolutely top-notch, rivaling Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu in places, surpassing it in others. The animation itself fails to match Kyoto Animation’s masterpiece, but the pacing, voice, and dramatic flair are all second-to-none so far.
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