Burrowowl

I’m never one to turn down an opinion poll via phone or postal mail. Oh, I’ll decline to participate in silly weblog polls, but I am often of the opinion that five minutes spent answering a couple of questions about how you feel about public transit is probably a heck of a lot more influential than the ballots I cast every June and November. As a part of a smaller samplings, my opinions get amplified, whereas in a state with 34,000,000 people can kinda down me out a bit.

Pollster.com has spent some time sitting in my list of links over there to your left, but it’s a carefully-collected and calibrated resource aimed at serious people. I wanted something automated. Something web 1.9. Something with the cojones to just scrape together some raw data and cook it down into a sanitary, easily-digested format. Something that blindly aggregates other people’s RSS feeds. Today I found it in Perspctv.com.

Shall we play a game of “let’s make some numbers say anything we want them to?” I love that game. Let’s start with “McCain is a media darling getting disproportionate news network news coverage compared to his polling numbers.” Your turn.

It’s been a while since I’ve commented on any anime. That would be because I’m really only following Code Geass at the moment. This past week saw the twentieth episode of its second season, and I am convinced that the writing staff has been smoking crack. The number of paper-thin plot devices characters has grown completely out of control, with a couple dozen conflicting interests butting heads, and so many plot twists that things have devolved into a simple matter of “what’s this week’s crazy revelation going to be?” This show has truly been a guilty pleasure, what with its Clamp character designs, giant robots, anti-western sentiments, melodrama, love triangles, weaboo fightan action, magical superpowers, and its mess of stupendously-competent characters that keep preventing each other from accomplishing anything.

A big part of me hopes Code Geass ends permanently soon. Wrap up the main thrust of the plot (Lelouche vs. Charles) and be done with it. I’m accepting recommendations for titles that have the following qualities: not a high-school romantic comedy, not tragically hip, reasonably interesting protagonist, reasonably unpredictable plot. Haven’t seen a lot of those floating around lately.

Sometimes I think I’m a little too hard on them.

• Bailing credulous homebuyers out of their lousy mortgages is not the role of the federal government. The government should ensure that parties abide by their contractual agreements. If you didn’t like the terms, you shouldn’t have signed five times and initialed thirty places in front of a notary. If your bank is violating those terms, then it’s time to get the government involved.
• International trade is, on balance, a good thing. Protectionism generally leads to the kinds of international relations that yield wars. There is a trade imbalance between the United States and several notable nations, but when you purchase something from a store, there is a trade imbalance between you and the merchant. He profits and gets your money. You get a good or service that you felt was worth at least as much as the money you paid for it.
• You’ll pay whatever the oil companies demand for gas. Your gas prices may be affected by market speculation and big-money manipulation, but fundamentally you’re being charged what the market will bear. You’ll know when they’ve crossed the line when you stop buying it. This is not a position that the Republicans are keen to shout from the mountaintops, but that’s just because economic populism sells.
• Competition works. Well, it works when there’s real competition, and there are some markets that simply do not lend themselves well to competition, in which case the government will have to step in and make sure the natural monopolies keep things above-board (the Democrats largely agree with this, but there’s a lot of common ground).
• Beefy Austrians make for interesting governors.
• Guns are cool.

Little known facts about the Butcher of Khardov:

• Khadoran Kommandants call him “sir.”
• Orsus Zoktavir does not tolerate card-counting.
• The Butcher of Khardov has a weakness for Victorian romance novels.
• Orsus Zoktavir has a gun. No, really.
• The Butcher has a preset kill-counter that’s stored as a 16-bit signed integer. He must be rebooted after every 32,768 Cygnarans he slays.
• Due to his Suio-Ryu fighting style, The Butcher’s wave-slicing stroke is unbeatable when in the water.
• Orsus Zoktavir is a vegetarian.

There’s been a fair amount of speculation about the future of the Iron Kingdoms, a campaign setting by Privateer Press ever since the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons was announced. They had put any publication of stand-alone books for the roleplaying game on hold, shifting their creative efforts entirely towards their miniatures wargames and drizzling out some RPG material in their magazine. But no word was forthcoming regarding the future of the d20 3.5 RPG product.

Now there’s word from Doug Seacat, their lead writer:

There has been considerable speculation and expectations about the RPG line so I wanted to clarify the situation before GenCon. As our fans know the RPG line has won a number of awards over the last several years and has earned a dedicated following. We have great appreciation and fondness for the readers who have stuck by us despite the occasional long wait between these books. It has been gratifying to have the support of people who have eagerly devoured every scrap of setting information and RPG rules we could produce.

As you are aware, we put future book publications for the RPG line on-hold after we determined that 4th Edition was a reality. With the future status of 3.5 edition uncertain and not knowing the shape of 4th Edition we decided it would be a mistake to invest further time and resources on upcoming products. After evaluating our options we have decided not to adopt 4th Edition for the Iron Kingdoms. We will not be converting our material for the Full-Metal Fantasy line to that system. We will continue to provide periodic RPG articles in No Quarter Magazine for the foreseeable future. This will be the best place to find information pertinent to your Iron Kingdoms campaigns in the months ahead.

As we have additional news or information related to the RPG line or pertinent to our existing books, including those which are currently out of print, we will let you know either here or in No Quarter Magazine. We are definitely aware of the difficulties being faced by those seeking the out of print books in particular.

No 4th edition, but no word of what we’ll be seeing aside from 3.5 articles in No Quarter Magazine for the foreseeable future. No big announcements in the works, either.

Seeing as I like 4e, and I like the Iron Kingdoms setting, but am more or less fed up with the d20 3.5 ruleset and do not care for homebrewing massive quantities of game information, this probably means that I will not be running an Iron Kingdoms game for the foreseeable future (by which I mean when the Privateers publish something other than 3.5 or Pathfinder).