Blackmoor Vituperative

I am in the midst of upgrading from WordPress 1.5 to WordPress 2.1.3. Better features, better security, all around better. But I need to update the Blackmoor Vituperative theme to work with the new version of WordPress, and until then the blog may look a little wonky. Bear with me.

Update: That was easier than I thought it would be. If I’d known how simple that would be, I’d have upgraded months ago. This has been on my to-do list for the better part of a year.

According to the BBC, Richard Gere aroused the ire of Indians when he kissed actor Shilpa Shetty on the cheek at a charity event.

An Indian court has issued an arrest warrant for Hollywood actor Richard Gere after he kissed Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in public.

Gere, 57, kissed Shetty, 31, several times on the cheek at an Aids awareness event in Delhi earlier this month.

The court in Jaipur in Rajasthan state called it “an obscene act”, after a local lawyer filed a complaint.

It was not immediately clear how the warrant could affect Gere, who is a frequent visitor to India.

Shetty, who found fame outside India as the winner of Celebrity Big Brother in the UK, has also been asked to appear before the court.

Photographs of the clinch were splashed across front pages of newspapers in India.

Public displays of affection are still largely taboo in India, and protestors in Mumbai (Bombay) set fire to effigies of Gere following the incident.

(from BBC News, Gere faces Indian arrest warrant)

I think it’s sad that the culture that gave us the Khajuraho temples, which house some of the most beautiful erotic sculptures on Earth, is so uptight that they issue arrest warrants for public displays of affection.

The USA is pretty messed up, as far as our hypocritical neo-Puritan ways are concerned, but at least we aren’t that messed up.

The name of the protagonist in Spider Season (the novel I am writing) is “Rain”. That’s not her real name, but that’s a long story (the whole first chapter, actually).

I like to picture characters as actors. It helps me visualize. The actor I picture as Rain is Rachel McAdams. She has large eyes, a quick smile, an expressive face, and she seems mischievous.

I also happen to like her as an actor. I really enjoyed Red Eye. I am not sure McAdams will be the Next Big Thing (what’s she done lately?), but I do think she’s a talented actor and she’ll have a successful career.

Here’s some news about her next role:

“Rachel McAdams has signed on to star in “The Return,” a bittersweet drama about three injured soldiers who come home from Iraq and learn that life has moved on without them.

Collee (McAdams), T.K. (Michael Pena) and Cheever (Tim Robbins) end up on an unexpected road trip across the U.S., with Collee on a mission to bring her boyfriend’s guitar back to his family because he saved her life.

T.K., meanwhile, seeks the confidence to face his wife after a shrapnel injury that threatens his sexual function, and middle-aged Cheever plans to hit the casinos in a desperate effort to pay for his son’s college tuition.

Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”) will direct the independently financed project, which Lionsgate will distribute. The budget is less than $20 million.

McAdams, known for her work in “The Notebook” and “Wedding Crashers,” most recently appeared in “The Family Stone.”

Sounds like kind of a chick movie, but I’ll go see it. I hope she’s a brunette in this one. She’s a natural blonde, but I think she looks better with dark hair. Rain has unkempt dark hair.

Rain is a slim, pale human girl with an athletic, almost boyish figure (64" tall, 113 pounds). Her hair is a wild black mane that falls to between her shoulderblades before being gathered into a half-dozen long, slender braids. Her features are angular and mischievous, her large eyes and wide mouth giving her a vaguely elf-like cast.

I wrote that long before I heard of Rachel McAdams, but doesn’t it sound like her?

Apparently, in Japan, Spider-Man pilots a Transformer robot.

Red Hat’s JBoss division is planning to move in June to a model similar to that used by RHEL/Fedora model, said sources close to the company.

The move would mean that JBoss would deliver a Fedora-like community edition of its core software that only looks forward. As with the Fedora Linux project, no backward compatibility is guaranteed — Fedora is focused on the future and new features.

Typically, a Fedora release is targeted as the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. RHEL forks or branches a specific Fedora release. The RHEL team stabilizes the Fedora code tree it branches, productizes it and certifies it for a number of different platforms.

However, the difference with the JBoss Fedora-like offering will be that the JBoss source code control system will be public, sources said. RHEL’s source code control system is private and not available to the community, although the source code itself is published. And RHEL binaries are only distributed to subscription holders.

According to sources, JBoss will follow the same model except that the source control system will be public. And community releases — JBoss’ Fedora equivalent — will have binaries distributed.

(from eWeek, Red Hat’s JBoss to Adopt Fedora Model)

How times flies. I have written nothing on Spider Season for seven months. However, this weekend was RavenCon, and I attended a couple of writing workshops that I think really helped me with a couple of details that I’d completely overlooked. It also rekindled my interest in finishing Spider Season, at the very least. So to that end, I have downloaded yWrite and am organizing my various scattered notes as we speak.

I am up to about 4,700 words, not including notes. Gee, only around 95,300 to go….

In a move no less significant than when Western Union stopped providing telegraph service, Dragon Magazine will cease publication in September of 2007.

Today, Wizards of the Coast and Paizo Publishing announced the conclusion of Paizo’s license to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The magazines will cease publication following the release of the September issues, which ship to subscribers and newsstands in August. The final issues will be Dragon #359 and Dungeon #150.

Wizards of the Coast will be moving the kind of content currently found in Dragon and Dungeon to an online model. Both companies remain on good terms and continue to discuss future opportunities for publishing partnerships.

Today also marks the official announcement of Pathfinder, a new monthly 96-page, perfect-bound, OGL-compatible full-color softcover Adventure Path book printed on high-quality paper for use with the world’s most popular roleplaying game. Over the last several months, the same editors who bring you Dragon and Dungeon have been developing the next evolution in RPG campaigns, and we hope you’ll take some time to look at what we have to offer. Pathfinder will debut in August at hobby retail stores, bookstores, and here on paizo.com, and — though it’s a book, not a magazine—we’ll be offering a subscription service for gamers eager to add a vorpal edge to their campaigns. In fact, you can subscribe to Pathfinder right now and receive a free bonus Player’s Guide to the first Pathfinder Adventure Path: Rise of the Runelords.

Speaking of subscriptions, the discontinuation of Dragon and Dungeon will leave many of our valued subscribers with excess subscription credit. Paizo has set up a special Transition Page that offers multiple options to these subscribers.

We’re sure many of you have questions about this development, so we’ve developed a special Frequently Asked Questions page that covers many of the issues you’ll wonder about. If you don’t see your question listed there, drop by the new Magazine Transition forum on our Customer Service messageboards, which we will be monitoring closely.

If you’re concerned about the future of Paizo, you can relax.  We’re very excited about Pathfinder, our GameMastery line of RPG modules and accessories, our Titanic Games line of deluxe board games, and Planet Stories, our recently announced line of classic science fiction and fantasy novels. No Paizo staffers have lost their jobs as a result of this development — in fact, we’re so enthusiastic about our future that we’ve recently hired several new employees. However, if you’re wondering what you can do to help Paizo succeed in our new ventures, please visit our What Can I Do to Help? page.

Dragon and Dungeon have been the backbone of Paizo Publishing for five years since we spun off from Wizards of the Coast’s periodicals department in 2002, and both magazines have been an integral part of the RPG publishing world for decades. Bringing the magazines to you every month has been a true honor, and we in the Paizo family look forward to the continuing honor of serving your gaming needs for years and years to come.

(from Paizo.com)

I am really disappointed. I looked forward to reading Dragon every month. That’s why I renewed my subscription on Monday. Yeah, my timing is just impeccable….

Since we moved to Richmond, Susan and I don’t get down to the Chesapeake Library for Fantasmo Cult Cinema like we used to, but we did get to attend the all-night schlock-a-thon this past weekend. The high point of the evening was, I think, the peculiar musical The Apple. I considered myself something of an expert on bad movies, yet I had never heard of this film. You owe it to yourself to see this if you get the chance. It’s not every day that one sees General Zod singing disco in an airport.

By the way, the site I linked to above, The Unknown Movies, has reviews for quite a few lesser-known films, and not all of them are bad. It’s worth checking out.

Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were on Bill Maher’s show this evening, publicizing a tour they are doing to promote awareness of “global warming”. You know, I don’t mind that they believe that planetary temperature shifts are a real, human-caused phenomenon. What I do mind is that they call it a “fact”, based on the experts they choose to believe, and completely discount the experts who disagree [1] [2] and the people who choose to believe to those experts. It’s a theory, not a fact, and claiming it’s a “fact” is just an attempt to prevent informed discourse.

(This is a compilation of my impressions of Star Wars Galaxies. It repeats parts from some of my previous blog posts, hopefully in a more coherent form.)

I am willing to give a lot of leeway to a game if it allows me to play in the Star Wars universe, but Star Wars Galaxies has so many problems it’s nearly unplayable.

• The graphics are extremely dated, like something from the mid-1990s. Compared to beautifully rendered games like Guild Wars… it’s just no comparison.
• The radar (sometimes called the compass) featured by nearly all games (other than World Of Warcraft, which has a minimap but no radar), is unavailable until one reaches roughly 10th level. That is simply absurd.
• The controls for the game make the most basic tasks — targeting an opponent and then attacking them — an exercise in frustration. Essentially, it’s impossible to simply select a target and attack them, as you can in every other game I have ever played. Guild Wars, again, is the high water mark here.
• The Player-vs-Player mechanics are utterly borked. There is no separation between areas that are “safe” and areas that aren’t — there are no safe areas. If PVP is enabled, it is enabled everywhere. There is also no separation or discouragement for players of wildly different level attacking each other, meaning that anyone who enables PVP is instantly killed unless they are at least 70th-80th level.
• The game only permits you to have two characters per server. Two. 2. T-W-O. That’s ridiculous. Every other MMO game I have played permits at least six.
• The last straw for me was the idiotic name filter.

I had played a Jedi up to level 20, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named “Siobhan”, I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um… what? Since when is the name “Siobhan” a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I’d somehow never heard of. The answer was… ye gods, it’s just too ridiculous. The answer was, “Because the name filter won’t permit any name that has the letters H – A – N in it.”

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. “…han…” is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You’re kidding me, right? They weren’t kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I have listed only a few), but I struggled through and persevered for a couple of weeks because, by gosh, it’s Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But that was just the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware’s MMOG.

Finally, a word about the “New Game Experience” and the “Combat Upgrade”. A great many forum posts and reviews are nothing but bitching and moaning about these game updates from 2005. News flash: this is 2007. Get over it. Complaining about something that happened in 2005 is just pathetic, particularly when there are more than enough things to complain about in the game as it is today.