| Karl Gallagher's Journal 20 most recent entries |
10,000 Year Explosion
Never fit into haiku But acronyms do
Watching Disney's Robin Hood got 7-year-old Maggie onto the subject of honeymoons and where to go on them. I figure that's a decision to make together with the spouse-to-be. So next time this comes up I'm tempted to say "You should decide that with your husband. So when you meet someone, ask him where he'd want to go on a honeymoon so you can get to know him better." Is that:
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Good advice. Bad advice. Bad advice which will drive off most boys. Do it.
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I finally got to see Star Trek last weekend. Overall a fun movie. Tossing the existing continuity overboard leaves things open for them to tell whatever stories they want. I'd like to see more good SF movies. But I still have complaints.
"The boat is sinking and you are the only one who can help me out. By the time you get this message I may have drowned but please try to call me anyway."
Your result for Transylvania Polygnostic University entrance exam... Hugo GlassvitchNot bad. About as good as one could expect from a non-spark in fact.
Ouch. Some tough ones in this. 2 comments | post a comment
We had our traditional Memorial Day observance on Monday. I read the Gettysburg Address to the kids, preceding it with watching the movie Gettysburg. Well, most of it. It's a bit longer than a six-year-old's attention span. So we ended it with Chamberlain's defense of Little Round Top. Pickett's Charge can wait until they're older and can handle moral ambiguity a bit better. Next year it'll be a WWII movie. Maggie is understanding the issues a bit better but I want to find something clear-cut. Gettysburg is still a good choice for the day. The movie does a lovely job of bringing out the issues people were fighting about with a minimum of lecturing. 2 comments | post a comment
Last night Jamie came up to me in the living room and challenged me to a duel. He was offering a drumstick and a cooking spoon as weapons, which I wasn't thrilled with, so I offered a pillow fight instead. We quickly armed ourselves with cushions from the couch and comfy chair and started swinging away. Maggie promptly got a pillow and joined in. I made sure they weren't going to whack Alanna, who was toddling around enjoying the show. Then the little one picked up a pillow of her own and walked into the middle of us. Just wanted to join the fun. So I tapped her pillow with mine, just hard enough for her to feel it, and went back to whacking the big two as they kept swinging at me. Alanna laughed! She was so happy to be part of the game. So I gave her some more taps until we were all tired of the pillow fight.
Though it's not called a meme when the site is asking . . .
Moore's Law of Mad Scientists* continues apace.
Our current "quality" initiative is being promoted with pretty posters in the major hallways. For emphasis the poster are in cases, big glass-front boxes with 3 or 4 inches of depth for the poster to be displayed in. The current version is praising a particular bottom-rank employee for his attention to detail. The posters were put up with weak glue, so they've all come off the back of the box and are slumped against the glass. It's been like that for a couple of weeks now. They're still readable even with all the wrinkles, it's fairly stiff cardboard. But I wonder what impression this "attention to detail" message makes on the test pilots. 10 comments | post a comment
I understand you're upset when people's words don't match their actions. But "hippocracy" means "government by horses" which is a completely different problem. 20 comments | post a comment
Last Saturday Tom and Sarah came over with their three daughters. This was supposed to be a fun gaming day for the adults but I think the kids enjoyed it the most. They were bouncing around constantly all day. Linda,
Driving to work this morning I merged on to the freeway behind a dawdling tanker truck. Waiting for my chance to pass it I noticed the hazard sign "1.5 Blasting Agents." Wait--is this guy carrying explosives? The company name and motto was written proudly on the tank:
Y'all are invited over to our place for a gaming day a week from Saturday, 3/21/09. This is in honor of
And also not very good at getting away with it. 8 comments | post a comment
Your result for "Surviving The Singularity" Test... ( Read more... ) 2 comments | post a comment
Feeling tagged by
So what have I been up to since Fencon? Playing WoW. Lots. There was this new expansion, arriving just as I reached the end of the existing content that had been built over the previous four years. It's good, too. Very fun game. But it sucks up lots of time and energy that could go into blog posts. The minor stuff can still be fun. I've sold three more RPG articles to JTAS. They're write-ups of the scenarios I've been running at conventions, converted from Firefly to Traveller (GT:IW). They haven't impressed the readership--average or below ratings and no comments. This is a big contrast to my first article, "Terran Consuls," which was being praised months later as a reason to subscribe to the webzine. I'm a bit amused by the contrast. The consuls piece was a minor bit of worldbuilding (worldshimming?) and I hadn't playtested it, nor has anyone ever used it in a game as far as I know. Meanwhile the characters and scenarios have worked quite well and entertained dozens of people. At this point I'm just happy to get the material published. I'd originally written them intending to sell it as a mini-campaign supplement. This went through a few different forms. Now I'm breaking it up as separate articles. A more successful project was making a train table for Jamie. We've had wooden train track playsets around for years. Having a box full of various track segments is fun for anyone who wants to build lots of different layouts, but they haven't been used that much. Our kids don't want to design a transit system, they want to run the trains around. So they're always thrilled when they find a play area with a glued-down train set for them to play with. Building some loops and having them come apart as the trains go by isn't as much fun. We had an old coffee table that wasn't being used much. I painted it green with some help from Jamie (he didn't ask why--he just had fun brushing it on). Then I took our pile of track, some special pieces from We made it the last present, hiding it in the garage until the kids were done with their others. Then One thing that's improved my quality of life in the past year is a CPAP machine. I got it just over a year ago as a sleep apnea treatment. When I sleep I put on a mask that blows pressurized air into my nose and mouth. That way any time the pipe would be too blocked to inhale the extra pressure lets me take a breath. So I'm not having little suffocation episodes in the middle of the night and can get a solid night's sleep. Now I'm a lot less likely to fall asleep in the middle of a meeting or a party. There's also less snoring. That's what we were hoping for. What I wasn't expecting was that I'm more awake overall. I used to need a jolt of caffeine every morning to get me going, and picked a commuting route that required minimal decisions. Now I have almost no caffeine in me at all (I'm drinking fruit juice instead of Coke) and switched to a shorter commute. I've been having a blast playing the new World of Warcraft expansion. They made a beautiful play area, have good stories, and gave us interesting things to do. Okay, you're still killing assorted baddies by the score, but there's more variety mixed in with that. I'm been through almost all the content at this point. Did the various Northrend quests, tanked my way through all of Naxxramas, tanked Sartharion with one drake up, and got to phase three of the Malygos fight. I've got a very well-geared warrior, mostly because the RNG seems to love him. It's not that I win with great rolls, it's that the gear I could use drops when there's nobody else around wanting it. At this point I've gotten all the raiding I want. I'd like to keep going with one group to keep my skills and connections up but I don't want to do four nights a week. I've seen complaints about Naxx being too easy for the end game, especially compared to Karazhan. I don't think it's the instance that's been made too easy. It's the power level of the PCs relative to the monsters they're facing that's changed. If we had to go to Naxxramas carefully marking and crowd-controlling every pull it'd take a lot longer to get through it. What's changed is the boost in the power level for tanks. I love it as a tank--I get to blast whole groups and zip around in a fight if I need to grab something. It's a huge difference from how I tanked before the expansion. If I'd gone into Kara the first time grabbing and holding groups we'd've rolled through. I don't think the Naxx boss fights are easier than the Kara ones, they're mostly harder in terms of the player skill you need to hold things together, but they're easier and faster to get to, so you have more time and energy to deal with them. I think that power boost is what created the current tank glut. It's more fun to play a tank now, certainly for warriors and paladins. Druids haven't gotten as big a boost but they're still more powerful than they were pre-expansion from what I've seen. So anyone who'd ever played a tank is spending time on that toon enjoying the power. It's also easier for a tank to do solo or pvp fighting than it used to be. So we're not losing tanks to burnout, we're getting back some who'd switched to other roles, and there's less work required to get your tank the money/mats/rep you need to raid. So now I'll sign up for a raid and notice half of the first eight signing up are tanks, and my favorite tank blogger posts "You should take some time off and let someone else have a turn tanking." Hopefully Blizzard will figure how to make healing that much fun in the next expansion, or sooner. 8 comments | post a comment |
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