Check this out…
No, I haven’t played Atom Zombie Smasher myself yet, but I plan to pick it up after I do the taxes and figure out if I can afford the $15. Â Hopefully I can.
Tag: Check
The Golden Compass
for Steampunk Style and the Best Use of Polar Bears in a movie, ever!
All in all, I was not horribly impressed with The Golden Compass. After all the hoopla and hoohaa, I really expected something more subversive than this, you know, since the Christians are telling people to avoid its atheist message. Frankly, its no more subversive than any other fantasy film, and really the only problem I could imagine a Christian having with it is that it isn’t Narnia, a movie that positively drips with Christian themes.
More after the break.
2007: Day 1
Day 1 began as it always begins, check in. Really, seriously, I need to start planning on coming down on Thursday to avoid Friday. We really didn’t have trouble getting our room, it just wasn’t clean yet. So we got new rooms, but not before the bellman had brought up the bags to the unclean room. Why exactly are there two sets of bellmen? One helps you from the car to check in, the other helps you from check in to your room… two people, they each get half a tip.
With check in behind us, we set out to meet people and do stuff…
This year is seeing a few changes around the old Dragon*Con. Some tracks have been combined or changed, and there are some new ones. The old Tribe stuff has been pulled in to a new Apocalypse Rising track. I think I’m really going to like this one… I went to the kick off panel and we discussed all the ways the world can “end”, but of course apocalypse stories are not about the end of the world most of the time, they are about people surviving the end of the world they knew. Good stuff.
Next up was the MMO Obituary panel where we dragged out the corpses of all the dead (or dying) MMOs and continued to flog them, while at the same time discussing what they did do right and what we hope to see again. The Game Programming track that has finally broken away from the Electronic Frontiers Forums track looks to be another keeper.
Then we decided to wander through the dealer’s room and the exhibit halls… largely its all the same crap that is there every year. Not anything surprising, but some of it is still cool.
Back to the Apocalypse track to discuss pen and paper games. Lots of good stuff out there… Twilight 2000, Fading Suns, Aftermath, Rapture, Shadowrun, Deadlands, the Morrow Porject and more…
Some obligatory standing around and looking at costumes. Some people are crazy, and some are insane, and some simply should not be wearing that.
Last up for the night was a panel called “How NOT to get into the game industry.” I’ve been to the How To panel before, and this was a slightly more humorous take on the same subject… mostly I went to possibly meet Brian “Psychochild” Green, but he canceled, so poo on him.
Time for bed because I’ve been up too long today… and tomorrow is another day…
Forewarned is Forearmed
Be careful what you read today
Be careful what you believe
The truth is out to lunch all day
And lies have a reprieve
They may tell you what you want to hear
They may make you want to scream
Do not do anything rash today
Though important it may seem
Double check your sources
And remember to keep your cool
Because you would not want to be
The one who is the fool
Sharper Than A Serpent`s Tooth
My guilty pleasure returned with Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth
As a side note to this review and something someone brought up on a message board I frequent… its a shame that books are getting really huge these days. Even kids books like Harry Potter and the Artemis Fowl books are clocking in at over 300 pages, with many books screaming past 500. There is nothing wrong with long books, in fact sometimes good long book like one of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books is exactly what I need. But its also nice to sit down and blow through a 200 page or less book, get in, get down to the story, and get out. The Nightside books drew me in because they were well written and short. One book, a half dozen hours of reading. Is it because there is less of a market for shorter books? Is it editors demanding thick novels? Or is it authors running wild? No answers here, except that I think one of the ideas I’m working on will be a series of short books, not huge bricks.
Special Treatment
One of the things I have come to hate over the years is “equality”, mostly because people just don’t use it right. To me, equality means equal opportunity. The door is there, whether I open it and go through it is up to me, but the door is there. Too many people, however, see equality as meaning true equality. If there is a door, and I make the effort to open it and go through it, they should be allowed to go through it too, even if they don’t do the work.
Tied in with this is the concept of trust. Trust is something you earn by being consistant, and when you are trusted, you will be given benefits that less trust worthy people don’t get. Lots of people see those benefits as being “unequal” because they don’t grasp that if they work and become trustworthy, those benefits will be given to them too.
My rent is due each month by the 5th. If you are late, you have to pay a late fee… fair enough. There is a deadline, you miss it, you are penalized. However, since in the past they have run into deadbeats who bounce checks when they are late, my apartment complex requires that late rent must be paid with a cashier’s check or a money order. I’ve lived there for three years, and in three years I have never missed a payment until now. I’m perfectly willing to pay the late fee. I’m late, I don’t deny it. But I asked if, given my payment history, I could be allowed to just write a personal check. They said no. I asked why and they said it was policy, no exceptions. I could totally understand if they demanded all rent in certified payment, but its only the late rent. I tried to pursue it, since I’ve made the last 36 or so payments on time and never bounced a check, but she cut me off, said no again, told me to have a nice day and hung up.
On the other hand, I went to the bank to get myself a cashier’s check for the late rent and the bank manager said that since I’d been a loyal customer for over ten years, they would happily wave the fee for the cashier’s check. Meanwhile, the guy next to me, who was also getting a cashier’s check and was paying the fee, said he thought it was real nice the bank rewarded loyal customers and he looked forward to doing business there for a long time to come.
So today is a loss and a win. More loss than win though, since the late fee on the rent is much much larger than the fee for the cashier’s check. But hey, I’ll take my wins where I can get ’em.
3rd time’s a charm
Its a good thing I don’t write on Mondays, because if I did, yesterday would have been a venomous stream of epithets denegrating the upbringing of a portion of society and a slander of the dubious pedigree of their mothers.
For the third time in six months, I exited work with a skip in my step. Having completed a good solid day of work and embarking on my journey home, ahead of schedule and ahead of the traffic, I came upon my car in the parking lot, minus one window and a stereo. In the morning, I’d had visions of program code dancing in my head, and absentmindedly forgot to take the faceplate of my stereo with me. When I returned in the afternoon, I found my rear passenger door was missing a window, and my dashboard had been skillfully disassembled and my stereo deftly removed. I say ‘skillfully’ and ‘deftly’ because the thieves, as always, caused no damage to the dash or the wiring in removing the stereo. They just popped the dash, pulled the stereo and unhooked all the wires.
As with before, its largely an exercise in annoyance to me… my insurance has been in great standing for years. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in almost a decade, have had only one accident and that was eight years ago, I pay my premiums on time. The last two thefts caused no change in my insurance. This one won’t either. I have a zero deductable for glass damage, and the stereo is fully covered. As of today, just one day later, the glass is already fixed, and the check is in the mail for the stereo. By the end of the week, I’ll actually have a better stereo than the one they stole, for less money than I paid for the last one (and certainly less than what the check will cover). I just don’t get it though… is there really a market for stolen stereos? The one they took, you can buy new for about $100. So the thief will hock it for maybe $20 to a fence or pawn, who will turn around and sell it for… $50? I get $200, buy a new $100 stereo and pocket $100. Hell, if I could just get them to steal my stereo every week, I’d make $5200 a year in non-taxable income.
I could do a lot with $5200. But its still annoying, especially when you consider that I would actually prefer to take public transportation if I could get from here to work with transfer silliness and dealing with two systems that seem to want to refuse to work together. And annoyance leads to fantasy, and I dream of car alarms… no. I dream of theft deterant systems. I dream of spinning blades that cut perpatrators off at the knees, simultaneously cauterizing the wound, leaving them to run away on their stumps.
I’ll sleep pretty well for the next few weeks…
People suck.
That’s is one phrase that I probably overuse. I’m just fond of saying that “people suck”. And every now and then, I consider stopping saying it, because maybe, just maybe, people don’t suck… and then I’m reminded that by and large, people do indeed suck.
Today I got a call from my credit card company. It seems that there was an unusual convenience check written against my account. Now, I use convenience checks all the time… see, I have this one credit card that has a 3.9% rate on transfers, with no fee, but it has a 16.9% rate for purchases… weird, I know, but I’ve learned to live with it. So, I buy stuff with other cards, and then transfer them over to the “better” card, basically giving myself 60 days to pay with no charge instead of 30.
Anyway, this one account however, I’ve never used a convenience check for, hence the reason they called. A $1000 check had been written to a “Tiffany Lane”, and signed by Jodi, my fiancee, who’s name is also on the credit card account. Well, Jodi never even sees the checks before I rip them up, so I was certain it wasn’t her. And of course, we don’t know any Tiffany Lane.
So, the process begins. They are going to close my account and issue me a new one. They will send me an affidavit to indicate which charges are not mine, and they will remove them from my account and start trying to get their money from the other direction.
When I got home today, I pulled out all my paperwork (which I’ve neatly filed ever since a previous landlord tried to double hit me with penalties I had already paid). Sure enough, I checked and this month’s statement should have reached me about a week or so ago. Some filthy scum-sucking piece of human waste stole my credit card statement out of the mail and was trying to use the convenience checks the credit card company happily provides.
Now I have to wait seven to ten days to get my new account, then go about redoing all my automatic transactions and stuff. Pain in my ass.
People suck.
And I looked, and behold, a pale horse…
Today it begins. I’m not linking anything, just check all the normal news sites.
The United States along with allies began an attack on Afghanistan.