Blackmoor Vituperative

In case you missed the Lost series finale, here it is:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!

With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled?

Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. We all know it, and no one wants to say it. Well, I am done with the charade.

Babies are stupid and ugly. No one’s baby is “beautiful”. No one’s baby is “smart”. They are misshapen, shrieking lumps that can’t read or write or tell what is edible and what isn’t. Not only that, but they smell bad: a combination of poop, stale sweat, and spoiled milk.

I don’t mind if you bring your baby to a movie — you are the bad parent, not me. But if it makes noise, I can and will ask you to take the ugly, stupid, foul-smelling creature outside. Having a baby to take care of does not give you special permission to ruin a movie for 400 other people. You chose to have it: we didn’t. We didn’t bring our barking dogs and pneumatic wrenches to the movie, did we? Why do you suppose that is? Think real hard.

That goes for anywhere else in public, too. If you can’t keep your larva quiet, keep it somewhere where it isn’t causing a nuisance for everyone else. Home, your car, or wherever: just not near me.

It looks like I will soon have a gig with a company out of New York doing more or less what I would have done for the ebook publishing company, had I not screwed that up beyond repair. Just consulting work so far, but they are talking about bringing me on full-time. I am still kicking myself over throwing away the opportunity with the ebook company, but having a job will ease the pain the bit. More than a bit: it seems like a really good company. Small, well-funded, and with a product that isn’t going away any time soon.

I need to stop thinking about that ebook job. Regret serves no useful purpose. Ah, well.

By the way, Portal is free on Steam until May 24.

P.S. And when you’re dead I will be still alive.

This is pretty neat. The offer is valid for two more days, so don’t drag your feet.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a unique kind of bundle that we are trying out.

Pay what you want. If you bought these five games separately, it would cost around $80 but we’re letting you set the price!

All of the games work great on Mac, Windows, and Linux. We didn’t want to leave anyone out.

There is no middle-man. You can rest assured that 100% of your purchase goes directly to the developers and non-profits as you specify (minus credit card fees).

We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely.

Your contribution supports the amazing Child’s Play charity and Electronic Frontier Foundation. By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child’s Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you’d like.

And now, thanks to a humble donation from Amanita Design: all contributors are given a free copy of Samorost 2!

Bad news for people working at Hasbro on their D&D game line: more layoffs. Actually, rumour has it that Peter Schaefer left voluntarily, as did Andy Collins, but Jesse Decker seems to have been plain old fired. At least Hasbro didn’t do it right before Christmas, as they have in the past. Not like there is ever a good time to lose one’s job, but some times are worse than others. My best wishes to everyone, and I hope you land on your feet and find rewarding positions elsewhere.

On the bright side, experts seem to agree that whenever the Great Recession finally comes to an end, there will be a strong demand for skilled people in a variety of jobs in the USA. Check these out.

• The future’s 15 most wanted workers
• The 25 best-paying jobs for women

In almost entirely unrelated news, Jason Durall (who has done great work on a wide variety of games) answers a battery of questions about his Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (Diceless) game. Interesting stuff.

Cory Doctorow, one of a handful of People Who Have A Clue, reports on the recent abomination handed to the USA by the FCC on behalf of the media robber barons and the Digital Rights Mafia:

The FCC has given Hollywood permission to activate the “Selective Output Control” technologies in your set-top box. These are hidden flags that allow the MPAA to deactivate parts of your home theater depending on what you’re watching. And it sucks. As Dan Gillmor notes, “Fans of old TV science fiction will remember the Outer Limits. Given Hollywood’s victory today at the FCC — they’ll be able to reach over the lines and disable functions on your TV — the intro to the show takes on modern relevance.”

The FCC says that they’re doing this because they believe that if they do so, the MPAA will start releasing first-run movies (the ones that are still in theaters) for TV. They say that Hollywood won’t make these movies available unless they get Selectable Output Control because SOC will stop piracy.

This is ridiculous.

First, it’s ridiculous because this can’t ever stop piracy or get first-run movies into your living room. Even with SOC, the studios are not going to release high-value movies that are still in theatrical distribution for viewing in your house, where you could set up a tripod and high-quality camera (along with ideal lighting) in order to make your own camcordered copy and put it online.

Now, the FCC could have solved this by saying that only movies that are in their first theatrical release run can have SOC turned on, but they didn’t, because they knew that the MPAA was lying through its teeth about using SOC to enable the “new business model” of showing you first run movies in your home.

Second, it’s ridiculous because it’s possible in the first place. The FCC (and the candy-ass consumer electronics companies) allowed for Selectable Output Control to be inserted into your devices even though they claimed all along that they would never allow it to be used. Read your Chekhov, people: the gun on the mantelpiece in act one will go off in act three. Allowing the MPAA to get SOC in your set-top box but “never planning on using it” is like buying a freezer full of chocolate ice-cream and never planning on eating it.

If the CE companies and FCC wanted to prevent SOC from being used, the best way of doing that would be to not include it in devices in the first place.

Finally, this is ridiculous because of what it’s really for: ensuring that Hollywood gets control of all the features in your home’s devices and computers. Here’s how that works:

• SOC only works with DRM-crippled outputs, like those locked with HDCP, DTLA, etc.
• Now that some content will have SOC on it, every manufacturer will race to add SOC (and hence HDCP and DTLA and so on) to their devices
• The committees that run DTLA and HDCP and other DRM cartels are absolutely in thrall to the MPAA. When I’ve attended DRM committee meetings, I’ve watched the MPAA reps tie the consumer electronics guys in knots, playing them off against each other, bullying them, dirty tricking them
• Putting DTLA or HDCP in your devices isn’t simple: in order to do so, you have to comply with an enormous about of restrictions that the MPAA dreams up and crams into the license agreements (much of these agreements are secret, and not available for regulators or consumer to inspect)
• Ergo: now that the FCC has allowed SOC in devices, all devices will have SOC, and since SOC comes with DRM, and since the studios control DRM licensing, and since they shove all kinds of restrictive crap into DRM licenses, the FCC has essentially just guaranteed that the future of all media will be controlled by Hollywood, to our eternal torment and detriment

Now here’s the really scary part:

I’m not just talking about TVs and set-top boxes here. This stuff is targetted squarely at operating system vendors. Both Apple and Microsoft have enthusiastically signed onto adding DRM to their OSes in order to comply with HDCP, DTLA and other “device-based” DRMs.

In the PC world, compliance with DTLA and HDCP rules isn’t just about what features the OS can have, but what features the video cards, hard-drives, network interfaces, motherboards and drivers can have.

So the FCC has just handed the keys to specify drivers and components for general purpose PCs to the thrashing dinosaurs of Hollywood. Because even your cheapo netbook or homebuilt Linux box relies on components that are manufactured for the gigantic mainstream PC and laptop markets.

Now that the mainstream component market has a new de-facto regulator at the MPAA, watch for all of those components to come with restrictions built in.

The Obama White House has done some good, but its administrative branch is stuffed with Hollywood lawyers who are Democratic Party stalwarts. The FCC has some great tech people on this, but the commissioners’ staffers who wrote this memo are either the most credulous yokels that ever met an MPAA lobbyist, or they’re in the pockets of Big Content.

(from FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future, Boing Boing)

Not too long ago, I made the observation that anarchists and mad bombers aren’t new, that spies and subversives are not new. We have laws that deal with these offenses, and we should be using them, rather than looking for opportunities to deprive people (even criminals and terrorists, gasp, shudder!) of their civil rights, or even of their citizenship.

Well, greed and stupidity are not new, either, and there is no finer example of greed and stupidity than the endless battle of the media robber barons (the MPAA, the RIAA, and the rest of the Digital Rights Mafia) against the people who create and enjoy media (you and me, for example). With that long-winded preface out of the way, here are five examples of “file sharing” hysteria which predate the Internet.

UFO abduction lamps from Make: Onlne.

Today is my sweetie’s birthday. As a present, I converted the videotape of our wedding to DVD (something I have been meaning to do for, oh, five or six years, at least). Since it is Mother’s Day this Sunday, I made copies for our mothers, as well.

Okay, so once that was done, I had to make the graphics for the DVD and for the case liner. I have to: I am like that. I browsed the typical “wedding” images, looking for suitable images, but I had some trouble. Our wedding was pretty traditional, but the color scheme wasn’t. The bride’s wedding dress was teal and black, and the bouquet was dark red roses with babies’ breath, wrapped in black crinkly fabric. The wedding cake was black chocolate with teal cream cheese icing between the layers; the icing outside was black with white piping.

Suffice to say, the typical white flowery wedding images did not really fit.

Then I saw an image of a black rose, and I had an inspiration. My sweetheart and I were huge fans of a game called Vampire, which was published the year we were married (1991). It is the only role-playing game my sweetie has ever really liked. The game is out of print, and we haven’t played it in well over a decade, but it was a great source of joy for us in the early years of our marriage, and it still holds a special place in our hearts.

Happy birthday, sweetheart. And thanks, Mark Rein-Hagen and the rest of the White Wolf folks, wherever you are.

P.S. I just realized that I should have called this blog entry “Blood and roses”. Ah, well. It’s far from the worst mistake I have made recently.

HP and Slashgear are having a contest for some computer equipment. So I figured, what the heck, and created this video for the contest.

It irks me that the sound sync is off. It’s 2010, and on a brand new laptop, I can’t even record a silly little video and have the sound in sync?