Work news, Gaming and Heresy, East Timor coup, Weird Sex

[tcpip]

Over the past few days work has been intense on lots of different levels. For starters, I have established a partnership with Create My Website where I pitch PHP/SQL web development to them and I help them with compliance standards. Then there's been a days serious research on a common sysadmin problem with a seriously workable application idea that could make life a lot easier for a lot of people. Three people - programmers - are seriously interested and a meeting today confirmed the technical and financial plausibility. I've also learned how very cool Ghost 8.0 Professional Edition is, especially compared to Ghost 9.0 and Ghost 2003 and how annoying IBM Think Pad notebooks can be. My classic IT glitch of the week was locking myself out of Samba after setting up an internal webserver for PHP scripting and setting up webserver level security settings.

Finished my review of Hero Wars. Some great ideas, some terrible execution. Next will be a review of Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventures game which I picked up on special (one of the books is even signed by the great Gygax himself). I've also put up the initial call-for-players for a new campaign an Outbreak of Heresy, and completed a Scene 9, part B description for the Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email.

Most pleasant events of the week included dinner with Frans and Anitra with surpise dining guests Gin and Nina from East Timor, and severina_242 engaging on a massive repair job on my unmanageable hair. Speaking of East Timor, the Catholic Church has just forced the government to introduce compulsory religious education, and make abortions and voluntary prostitution criminal offenses. Well, freedom there didn't last there very long, did it?

Same as it ever was.Sexual hypocrisy and serious weirdness among the conservative right.

Comments

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[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

Er, you need to fix the entry!

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

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Shame shame shame!!

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I think I have a few quibbles with your HW review, though not as many as you might think. I certainly agree on the poor presentation and organisation, and could probably get into extended debates on the minutia of various rules. Well, I have, and did so during its playtest, and thats why I have a credit in the game (and you'd probably be surprised to find my voice was usually raised to tighten the gamist side of things. Greg Stafford can't do maths)

I think my biggest disagreement is on the absurd pedestal on which you place RuneQuest. I was a dedicated and fanatic RQ player, and have pretty much everything ever produced for RuneQuest in Glorantha (and a lot more besides). But I can definitely say that, though I loved its simulationist aspects, it really did fall very far short of the narrative goals set by the game world and this was a very well known and much complained about problem in RuneQuest/Glorantha fandom before we knew what narrativism was or had heard of Hero Wars. Everyone had a sort of solution (from home brewed RQ extensions to completely new systems to the drastic like running games using Pendragon rules), but none of them worked well or meshed well with plain old RuneQuest, and it was certainly widely accepted that RuneQuest was not really capable of running most of the stories about Glorantha that we knew from the literature.

I'd disagree with a few specific things as well. You said the runes had decreased in narrative importance, but they really haven't. In RuneQuest 2, they had almost no relevance to actual play. And its not really fair to pick on the poor group simple contest mechanic as being a poor simulation, simple contests are never intended for things that matter.

And I maintain that everyone, including you but also the game designers, misunderstand edges and trys to make a simulationist tool out of what was intended to be a narrativist one. Thus I deny both the rules and your criticisms thereof as being valid, so there.

But I think the biggest criticism is probably that you write off the rewrite you say it needs most unfairly. HeroQuest addressed several specific problems mentioned in your review, and on the whole was a much classier product (though I disagree with one or two specific issues in the revision, its definitely fixed several of the problems you mentioned. And Mysticism as written desperately needed removing, though that wasn't really the reason, which had more to do with changing Staffordian attitudes).

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

The Create My Website folks seem to share your taste for monk like minimalism in web sites. Can't say I think it will catch on much though, I'm afraid - but you do seem well matched.

These days my tendency is just to crush most website issues with the 10 ton truck of a heavyweight content management system like Plone, and subdue all remaining resistance with lots of CSS.
Pity its not so easy to convince clients that they don't need the graphical prettiness that the tables/imageready/javascript school of web design provides (at a terrible cost).

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

Wow, only half a page...

[elzia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, over here in ETAN/US we were really unsure as to waht to do about the response to the new laws, and also taking into account what we know about recent protest laws as well (like in Dili), and the protests in favor that seemed to come with the new catholic laws. We put out some sort of letter encouraging public debate but criticizing the new school laws specifically. grrr. well, that might be confusing, it was all second hand info from a conference call, but my point is, yeah, religious laws=not good.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Speaking of East Timor, the Catholic Church has just forced the government to introduce compulsory religious education, and make abortions and voluntary prostitution criminal offenses.

Impressive. They've rolled over to Howard on the sea border for $5B (cheap now, let alone in 5-20 years as the oil price starts rising geometrically as oil supplies dry up). Now they've rolled over to the religious Right. Who can they surrender to next?