Burrowowl

This year I’ve decided to end Black History Month with a link to the highly-debatable Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love.

I personally feel that the NWA derivatives (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, etc.) should have been somewhere here, probably with NWA’s “Express yourself” or Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice.” I think the pinnacle of this variety of rap music was Eazy E’s “Boyz-N-The-Hood” (known to a very few as “the Ballad of Kilo-G”).

The lack of Run-DMC is also disturbing (Sucka MCs should call me “sire“). Maybe it’s just because I live so close to Mendocino and Humboldt counties (you can arguably find better pot in British Columbia, but I’m no expert on that subject), but the stoner white-people demographic was sorely underrepresented. Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane” and Afro Man’s “Because I Got High” could easily replace some of the marginal cases here.

As we slide back into your regularly-scheduled White History Months (Asians get May, Hispanics get September, Native Americans get November; the rest is for whitey), I leave you with a link to Stuff White People Like.

Back to the subject of words whose meanings have shifted. This afternoon I read an article on The Register named “EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m.” Good article. Informative, lovingly crafted, all that good stuff. The comments, however, rankled me something fierce. A small sample:

I always thought the ideal remedy would be to require Microsoft to write in big print at the top of every contract (including corporate and government procurement contracts) and prominently on every consumer package “Notice: Microsoft, the publisher of this software, is a convicted monopolist.”

Who convicted Microsoft of being a monopoly? Being a monopoly isn’t a crime. Not even in socialist Europe.

Microsoft a monopoly? Funny, I can’t get three posts into one of these threads without someone mentioning Linux or whatever the iComp uses now. If there’s competition, then Microsoft is not a monopoly, it’s just very good at shutting the competition out from the mainstream.

Of course they are. That’s what copyright and patent law confer: legal monopolies over the protected work. Apple isn’t allowed to sell Microsoft products without acquiring the appropriate licenses, the proceeds of which go directly to Microsoft. Neither can anybody else; they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property.

The author of the actual article, John Oates, gets it right: they were fined for abuse of their monopoly, they exhausted the appeals process, dragged their feet, and were fined again for failure to comply with the orders that went along with the original fine. People seem to think that monopolies are inherantly bad. If you’re not in favor of communalizing just about everything (do you have a monopoly on your car? your toothbrush?), then this is a knee-jerk reaction you should probably strive to avoid.

Hey look, it’s day 500 since my last reboot:

$ uptime
08:23:46 up 500 days, 20:19,  1 user,  load average: 0.07, 0.10, 0.08

I’ve had a link up to xkcd.com for several months now, having treated it merely as a frequently-funny webcomic chock-a-block with geeky goodness. I never read the xkcd blog or looked up the author; I was content to assume that whoever wrote those comics was a legitimate math nerd that spends too much time around computers. It took 4chan implementing its new /r9k/ board for me to catch on. Material like the recent article on the Laser Elevator is far and away more interesting than when the constraints of a comic-strip format come into play.

Anyhow, the folks at 4chan have implemented the Robot 9000 concept in what promises to be a mid-to-long-term replacement for /b/. I’m mildly tempted to see how many times I have to copy & paste the word “desu” into a post in order to get it past the filters, but won’t try. Aside from /b/, the various boards were topical and had rules. /b/ is non-topical and has a marked lack of rules. /r9k/ is non-topical and has automatically-enforced rules. I wonder what anon will be filling it up with a month from now? Will the attempt at forced originality help or hinder the entertainment value? Should I set up a betting pool? How many ways can you clearly communicate that somebody should do a barrel roll? So many questions…

Back when Wizards of the Coast canceled Dragon and Dungeon magazines as printed product lines, Paizo Publishing took it upon themselves to finish up an adventure series they already had in-progress. The result was the Rise of the Runelords, a six-part adventure set in a new campaign setting of Paizo’s creation. As with previous adventure paths (starting with the Shackled City that started in Dungeon #97 back in 2003), it is intended to take a group of lowly 1st-level adventurers through an interconnected series of challenges that weave together into a grand adventure culminating with some pretty impressive high-level stuff. Ending an adventure path at level 20 is a reasonable expectation, and the challenges at the climax are worthy adversaries.

I haven’t actually run Rise of the Runelords, having purchased each installment more as a symptom of my RPG addiction than for any practical purpose, but I’m sorely tempted to give it a shot now that I have all the material. Central to the premise is an ancient, largely-forgotten empire ruled by a fractious group of specialist wizards. Some great cataclysm came down upon this ancient empire, and the ruling wizards (the Runelords of the adventure’s title) had to withdraw from the world until they could reconstitute their power. A variety of events have finally come to awaken the transmuter Runelord, which represents a tremendous threat to the wellbeing and safety of everybody on the continent.

A theme that runs throughout the adventure path is the close association of the seven deadly sins with the seven schools of Thassalonian magic (they didn’t have Diviners, it turns out). They may Evocation to Wrath, Transmutation to Greed, Enchantment to Lust, Conjuration to Sloth, and so forth. The less-than-heroic tendencies and personalities of the heroes are to be used at various times, with certain encounters keyed to whoever the most proud party member is, or the greediest, and so forth. The seven deadly sins show up frequently as the primary motivations for the various villains and scoundrels that appear throughout the Rise of the Runelords, something that helps set this story apart from others I’ve seen.

The production quality is excellent, printed in full-color on solid-feeling glossy paper. A number of talented writers and artists were called to collaborate on this project, with writers like Wolfgang Baur and Nicolas Logue putting their weight into background information and individual legs of the adventure, and artists like Wayne Reynolds putting together some great illustrations to help give everything the pop that helps a DM whet his appetite. Priced at $USD19.99 apiece, picking up all six is a bit on an investment, the blow made softer in my case by being spread out over a whole year. I’ve run through the first few chapters in my head and am pretty confident it would take my play group the better part of two years to pound our way through this, which makes it a reasonable investment if you’re keen on the idea of running somebody else’s creation.

Next up will be the Curse of the Crimson Throne, which takes place in the same campaign setting (starting in a different area, one that the party wouldn’t likely have visited in Rise of the Runelords). The Curse of the Crimson Throne should have six installments (I’ve seen preview covers, but only the first three look finished to me, the tail end appearing to be mock-ups put together with artwork from the first adventure). This will be followed by another adventure named the Second Darkness. I’m guessing that the folks at Paizo are pretty happy with how things have been going since their magazine publishing days.

• Rise of the Runelords Player’s Guide
• Curse of the Crimson Throne Player’s Guide