Fiftieth Orbit Gathering, Gaming Updates, Courses

My fiftieth orbit gathering was apparently enjoyed by all. In hindsight I could have organised a larger group in a bigger venue. As it was India At Q did a brilliant job, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with close friends old and new. One of the more amusing comments I heard on multiple occasions was "You have such interesting and intelligent friends!" - the speaker overlooking the fact that they are one of those interesting and intelligent people. I was in very good spirits in this company and some even managed to convince me to give an impromptu speech which apparently wasn't terrible. I did drink a fair amount and the evening concluding with sipping armagnac. The following morning my head reminded me of exactly how much I had.

Nevertheless, I recovered enough to run a session of Eclipe Phase the following afternoon where the Sentinels are travelled to Luna to find out exactly what Cognite's Overlord Unit (aka Dr. Revolution) is really up to. It had been a pretty heavy SFRPG game few days, with playing Justin A's Eclipse Phase on Friday evening, and Megatraveller the night before (anothe session of Megatravaller is planned for tomorrow night. Posthuman Studios is having an "Open Muse" publication, and I'm very tempted to submit something. I might even find some inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin who passed away today. Like many others I was particularly taken by The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc, but most of all, her essays The Language of the Night. EDIT. Neglected to mention the utilitarian calculation in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which was the basis of a Pathfinder Planescape campaign that I was part of for many months.

The past three days I've been conducting training courses for the University of Melbourne researchers (and one from Victoria University). They have been the usual trio which are well established (Introduction to Linux and HPC, Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting, and Introduction to Parallel Programming), but the content never remains static with updates after every time I run the training days. I do have a tendency to try to push more and more information into each iteration, although it is clear that new courses (e.g., GPGPU programming) will need to be organised. Even after all these years they are no less tiring to run however, even with the interesting and inquisitive questions from participants. But providing researchers the systems and ability to conduct their computational tasks is a powerful internal motivation, and one which drives me every day.