Gaming Updates, Meetings and Articles

On Thursday night finished Horror on the Orient Express with a couple of minor changes to make the conclusion less dull and with a tie-in to the next campaign. Whilst a great product there are several major flaws, well elucidated by Lay and Devlin, and reviewed on RPG.net by David MacLennan. Afterwards we did character generation for Eclipse Phase, which I have reviewed in the past, a brilliant setting of transhumanist factionalism, near-space exploration, and alien horror. My character Nicolas Bourbaki, is named after a collective pseudonym of French mathematicians and is a social-democratic outer planets field scientist and xeno-archeologist in a large octopmorphic body. Did I mention that this setting is awesome? On Sunday played another session of Twilight 2000, just beginning a huge battle of river craft on the Vistula, just outside Warsaw.

Have just completed an article on Chávez in Retrospect for the Isocracy Network, arguing that whilst the use of natural resource wealth to fund social welfare systems and build up cooperatives was absolutely necessary, the model of the Boliveran revolution and 21st-century socialism could do will to take up the liberal insights of civil rights and the separation of powers. Also on Sunday morning, went to St. Michael's to hear Dr. Francis McNab discuss the benefits of silence, then attended a morning tea with author and counseller Amanda Stuart, before attending a meeting of the interfaith group, where I gave a brief presentation on possibility of similarities between Islamic jihad and Buddhist mindfulness. On Saturday facilitated the beginners workshop meeting of Linux Users of Victoria, where Andrew Pam gave an excellent presentation on Open Art and Content Tools.