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Entry tags:
Blogging, Gaming, Work Updates
Every few months I glance at the LJ/DW calendar and realise that my preferred 'blogging rate of twice a week is neglected, and that certainly has been the case this past month. This sort of journaling is superb for the content-heavy mental organisaton of planning and reflection, an implementation of slow blogging. At the other extreme the Twitter-jitters tends towards immediate and often often unreflective emotional responses although, I acknowledge, that many people treat it as either a public instant messaging service or a bookmarking tool, which is possibly more sensible. Facebook/Google+ isn't really too different due to the sheer volume and the ease of reposting articles, although a review of those in their own right. I want to like Google+, but I don't. I think they have failed at what was best about the original Google, a web implementation the Unix philosophy: This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
On Sunday played GURPS Middle Earth; our group in now up to eight players with some richness in conversation, even if the particular scenario is getting frustrating with its ambiguity (and that's not on moral level, like Simone de Beauvoir as DM). Thursday night was our regular Masks of Nyarlathotep game. The players are reaching the end of the Egyptian chapter. With some desperate praying on behalf of the hitherto loyal Catholic exorcist, the appearance of a disturbingly attractive and naked Bast, goddess of cats has directed the party towards the cultic ritual beneath the Sphinx. Also during the past week, I've dusted off some notes and started a collection of essays on the design of Mimesis RPG, my own pet (and incomplete project). This entry deals with the dice mechanics of the core resolution system.
The past week at work has witnessed a bit of preparation for my paper at the International Conference on Computational Science, along with the usual tasks. Friday was particularly awesome however, as we hosted a Hackathon. Whilst the turnout was lower than expected we created an environment of pizza and cherry cola, playing Front 242 remixes, all in true cyberpunk style. Most of my time was spent on "Refactoring Fortran Code for Abaqus Finite Element Analysis with the Portable Batch System"; yes that is the title of the relevant 'blog post. At the end of the day the users were very happy indeed. The weird thing about it the experience is that I now want to code more in Fortran, which is clearly all sorts of wrong-fun.
On Sunday played GURPS Middle Earth; our group in now up to eight players with some richness in conversation, even if the particular scenario is getting frustrating with its ambiguity (and that's not on moral level, like Simone de Beauvoir as DM). Thursday night was our regular Masks of Nyarlathotep game. The players are reaching the end of the Egyptian chapter. With some desperate praying on behalf of the hitherto loyal Catholic exorcist, the appearance of a disturbingly attractive and naked Bast, goddess of cats has directed the party towards the cultic ritual beneath the Sphinx. Also during the past week, I've dusted off some notes and started a collection of essays on the design of Mimesis RPG, my own pet (and incomplete project). This entry deals with the dice mechanics of the core resolution system.
The past week at work has witnessed a bit of preparation for my paper at the International Conference on Computational Science, along with the usual tasks. Friday was particularly awesome however, as we hosted a Hackathon. Whilst the turnout was lower than expected we created an environment of pizza and cherry cola, playing Front 242 remixes, all in true cyberpunk style. Most of my time was spent on "Refactoring Fortran Code for Abaqus Finite Element Analysis with the Portable Batch System"; yes that is the title of the relevant 'blog post. At the end of the day the users were very happy indeed. The weird thing about it the experience is that I now want to code more in Fortran, which is clearly all sorts of wrong-fun.
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Oh, and of course they have the same big bad as well. "He" really does take an interest in humanity.