Lev Lafayette's journal

Thus 2018 comes to a close, and as is my want I have a mad rush to complete the various things on my agenda most of which (as caseopaya likes to point out, are things that I set myself through various voluntary associations). On this topic, RPG Review Issue 41 has been released with an emphasis on solo gaming, such as the various Endless Quest and Fighting Fantasy books that were enormously popular in the 80s. I so happened to play through the first FF book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain on Ian Livingstone's (the author) birthday, which he liked. My big contribution to the latest issue of RPG Review is a choose-your-own-adventure for Papers & Paychecks which involves an attempted escape from a North Korean prison camp. In case you haven't noticed there is part of me which has a grim and wry fondness for gallows humour. As it is I've contributed several thousand worlds to the current issue, including RPGaDay, various reviews (including the ill-fated HeartQuest), and the aforementioned adventure.

Also of note on the gaming side of things is various efforts to finish the Papers & Paychecks supplement, and alas "not this year". I'm several thousand words short of the sixty plus thousand required, despite making a concerted effort over the past week or so, putting the finishing touches on scenarios like Keep our Borderlands, Palace of the Electrum Princess (old D&D players should have a chuckle at these), and a fantasy bestiary. What I hoped to be completed by this week will have to be completed in the first week of the new year, c'est la vie. Finally, our regular Megatraveller session was canceled on Thursday as a couple of players weren't available. Instead, we played Munchkin Cthulhu, Star Munchkin, and Guillotine. I just missed out on winning the latter and did quite convincingly on the former two; it all comes down to strategy, in my opinion with that game. Also, just arrived, Munchkin Deluxe Pathfinder; can't wait to give that a run.

And you would think that reality couldn't trump my sense of the absurd. Well, where do you think I get it from? The Immigration Department is sending a North Korean refugee (he is a naughty drug dealer) back to said country, where they acknowledge that he will probably be executed, but this is "not insurmountable". Meanwhile, BHP wants to drill for more oil and says that if there is an oil spill that would be a boost for local economies. By that reasoning so would any and all disasters and especially war. It would seem that BHP doesn't understand opportunity costs, which was well-portrayed manner years ago by the broken window fallacy.

Anyway, there are scant few hours to the end of the year. I will drink French champagne (OK, sparkling white), and watch the fireworks over the city from our prominent viewing location. I will muse about the opportunity costs of such celebration in typically a Swiftian perspective (how many dead children does it cost?). In a few day's time, I'll do a more thorough review of 2018 and plan, optimistically, what I can do for 2019. Because that is my modus operandi, it's how I push myself. I'm rather looking forward to it. Happy new year to all.

Weekend was a full collection of various social activities, starting with attending an exhibition by old friends RJ Cameron and Denham Carr, At The Hard Edge exhibition (FB). Afterwards followed the lead of local artist Cameron Potts (former Sir John Sulman Prize winner) to their studio space in the back of a warehouse in Northcote, where there was also the tail-end and stragglers of a local indie gig. Dave Graney was in attendance, so I thanked him for all the music, and told him he was just too hip (referring to his 1993 hit). For a guy that's pushing sixty it's pretty good to see him make the effort to go out to see undergound indie gigs. Afterwards we stumbled back to Cameron's place for more music and conversation, and I finally decided to head home before the morning sun made an appearance.

Following day included an (thankfully) afternoon trip to Lachlan's Memorial Birthday gathering at the Imperial Hotel, which shows all the signs of becoming a nice tradition, and then on to the annual general meeting of Linux Users of Victoria, where xanni_au stepped down after four years as president, and imajica_lj returned to take up the role after ten or so years since their last tour in the role; not many people come back for a second bite of this cherry. I also announced that this would be my last year on the LUV committee, having held various roles since 2006. It's been a long and fulfilling trip, but with other items coming on my agenda it is about time I gave my activities on LUV over to someone else. Afterwards headed off to Brendan E's place where he showed us a good fan edit of a terrible film; 2012. Cut to around a third of its original length one still gets the main elements of the special effects and plot without loss of continuity. We also watched a few episodes of the dramatic thriller Utopia (not the Papers and Paychecks styled Australian show of the same name), which certainly is a captivating conspiracy.

On Sunday picked up several crates of RPGs which Ben Finney (aka Big Nose of Debian fame) was selling; some real classics in that lot. By the early afternoon caught up with strangedave who was visiting Melbourne, and discussed various matters regarding RuneQuest Down Under which I am pleased to see is doing quite well in terms of registrations. Because strangedave is on of the world's experts in matters RuneQuest and Glorantha he will be a key speaker at the panels planned for the conference. Afterwards I ran a session of Eclipse Phase, which followed on from the previous episode where the Sentienls saved several lobotomised bikini girls with machine guns from the insane L.R. Hobart and made their way to a re-sleeving facility in Belém, Brazil. It hasn't gone well for them as they are now trapped in the hospital's resleeving theatre with dozens of extractors and a hostile supercomputer wanting to make short work of them. Let's see how they get out of this one. After that was the RPG Review Cooperative committee meeting where we discussed various matters relating to the Con, but most importantly thrashed out our first draft of a Code of Conduct. As has been pointed out before, if you don't have one of these earlier, you will regret it later.

The past few days I have worked pretty consistently in getting RPG Review Issue 39 out with the "Far East" focus. It's almost ready, but there's still a matter of finishing off the final parts of layout and editorialising. It's amazing to think that we're close to ten years of this publication, which will be 640 pages in total when issue 40 comes out. Some sort of celebration will be due. In any case, in finishing off the final articles I've written probably close to 7,000 words in the past five days, including various game reviews, campaign summaries, editorials and so forth. Outside of this I've also had the opportunity to engage in a bit of actual play, specifically Megatraveller on Thursday night where we successfully defeated nanite-infected space zombies on a derelict ship, and RuneQuest on Sunday, where we defeated a blood-sucking vampire landlord, which really was a gorgeous metaphor. Mention must also be made that I managed to catch Kate R., who was briefly in town. She was one of the main organisers of MARS after I left Murdoch University and the last time we'd seen her was just over ten years ago. So we gave her a tour of the asylum and then went out to a local restaurant; "good food and even better company" was how she put it.

Workwise I have various papers and presentations piling up and various conferences that I have to prepare for; an article for the Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal due in a couple of days (mostly finished) and the Perth-based HPC Advisory Council for the end of the month. Given the relative brevity of my impending visit to Perth, I still have to consider whether to have my usual dinner gathering of old friends from the western lands. It's going to be doubly difficult given that I'll be sequestered in Fremantle as well and most of the old team are more in the inner north of Perth. I may have to delay such shenanigans for a later visit, which there almost certainly will be. I remember decrypt_era describing Perth as a black hole. To truly escape, you would have to go beyond the event horizon which can periodically suck you in.

The past few days have been very active, very productive, very reflective, and even with a fair dose of active play. It has been a period of "full time", with little to no "dead time", with just enough period for sleep and recharging the proverbial batteries. Busy, even for my own excessive standards, but with a determination for at least some relaxation tomorrow. Workwise attended another part of the Management Development Program, a day-course on Enabling Greater Performance. I find the content of this courses a little less than what I would like, but I recognise that having already done several postgraduate years of management studies that the bar has to be a bit low), and running the courses as interactive face-to-face meetings in a group means that not as much content is provided on the day.

Also managed to organise some courses (Intro to HPC, Shell Scripting, Parallel Programming that I'll be running in a fortnight, and after that will be heading to Perth to present at the HPC Advisory Council at the end of the month (neglected to mention that last week completed my reviews of other people's work for eResearchAustralasia). Courtesy of strangedave attended the launch of Crystal Eye by Red Pirhana, which sort of crosses work and a social occassion.

Politically, wrote the submission for the Victorian Secular Lobby today on parliamentary prayers, supporting a proposal to introduce a secular standard which can include a private religious option. Also just finished a 'blog post on Willful Ignorance of European Marxism based on some personal experiences, and completed an Isocracy Newsletter. I have a couple of articles banked up by others that should go on the website as well, which I should get done by tomorrow morning.

There have been some opportunities for more social and genre-enjoyment, as is my want. Sunday evening was pleasant with cousin Luke, who cared for our house whilst we were away, over for dinner and drinks. On Monday night attended the 50 Anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, a clever low-budget film with superb horror tropes and tragic political commentary. Last night our gaming group finally - after a long break - managed to get together for a game of the Exalted-China, Journey to the Far West where we finally managed to finish the first chapter with concluding my re-write of the classic Tomb of the Five Corners. As a curious aside into public commentary, the RPG Review Cooperative has made a statement about the Federal government's prosed Myhealthrecord in Newsletter - with an interesting side-story.

Visited Swinburne University today to attend NVidia's CUDA and OpenACC course. The content was good, indeed downright excellent, if upside down (OpenACC should have come first), and it didn't have much in the way of instructor guidance. It made me realise how much this sort of teaching requires a strong combination of technical and andragogical knowledge and skills. In other work-related activities, I had a frustrating few days installing a few R packages (just brms, rslurm, dplyr). This doesn't sound like much, but the packages had dependencies which had dependencies, so it ended up being around 65 in total, order is critical, and it's not something that is prone to parallel installation. As a minor bit of news, I've been adding various academic presentations to Figshare and assigning them Digital Object Identifier, probably something I should have done years ago.

I've been a bit busy on the gaming front as I'm working on getting a new edition of RPG Review out (late, of course). On Wednesday I completed a 2000 word review of Star Wars Revised and Expanded Second Edition (they could have called it "third edition"), plus an campaign article which combines existing published material by ICE for Spacemaster, Rolemaster, and MERP, as well as adding in content by others. Last night we had a session of Good Society, the Jane Austen RPG. Whilst our group is making good use of the tropes etc, I am dissatisfied with the lack of development or dynamic in the game system. I suspect the designers will either have pick up their game tremendously and provide a great deal of background material. Finally, the RPG Review Cooperative has released another newsletter, which includes involvement in the one page dungeon contest, the 200 Word RPG Challenge, and involvement in Arcarnacon 2019. We've also had a substantial (30 book, many rare) donation to our library - thanks to Paul Smith.

The past few days my time has been heavily taken up with Puppet training, courtesy of my employer. It's one of those tools that I use on occasion but haven't ever had the opportunity to sit down and investigate in real detail over several days. The principle is, of course, excellent - use of a declarative language (with imperative components for conditional statements and branching) for automated deployments - which of course has implemented by other configuration tools (e.g., Ansible, Chef, Salt). It has its quirks, such as different relationships which do the same thing which is not, in my opinion, a good design. But all this said I'm actually enjoying the course a great deal, even if I'm in the other end of the classroom for a change. More tangential was catching up with Liz B., and Karl B., at a rather fascinating presentation on Epilepsy and Brain Machine Interfaces by some visiting Japanese professors with the curious discovery that amputees who use mental control of robotic limbs still experience phantom pain.

In other work-related activities, I've blogged my attendance at the European two conferences last year (ISC and TERATEC: A Tale of Two Conferences, using mostly the same content as my talk to Linux Users of Victoria late last year. As a related issue, this Sunday was the annual Linux Users of Victoria Penguin Picnic. It was a little warm for the traditional BBQ so we actually spent it indoors at InfoXchange with cold foods, and we took the opportunity to play some Munchkin as well. It was a good follow-up to our regular CheeseQuest with hathhalla and ser_pounce the previous day where we managed to get through two chapters of Mice and Mystics.

In other gaming-related news there's been a flurry of activity on the RPG Review Cooperative Quicksales store following the posting of some new items. Whilst the RPG Review Cooperative library has been fully entered (at 677 items) there is really no need for my personal collection to be six times that size. My personal investments in quality RPG games has been quite successful and it really is time to share some of those choices around. As for RPG actual play, the only event this week was a game of Megatraveller which involved our group capturing space pirates (of given that we're space pirates too, the morality of our actions is entirely partisan). Still, there will be more Megatraveller action this week, followed by some Eclipse Phase, and if I work hard on it tonight, I should get my Whispering Muse submission completed.

Less than two weeks into the new year and I find myself engaging in various social organisational activities and conference preparations. This Sunday is the annual general meeting and BBQ of the RPG Review Coooperative at Studley Park which, it must be said, we've had a stupidly good year for a small club, expanding our library to several hundred items, and getting Papers & Paychecks released. Two weeks after that will the Annual Penguin Picnic for Linux Users of Victoria. In between all this I also have organised a small dinner for the nearest and dearest in Kew for my fiftieth orbit around the sun.

There has also been preparations for the Grand Tour of 2018. At the moment the trip will start in Paris for the TERATEC conference, then across to Frankfurt for the International Supercomputing Conference, down to Basel Switzerland for the Advanced Scientific Computing conference, then to Freiburg's HPC centre, then Stuttgart to visit family and their HPC centre (including the remarkable Department for the Philosophy of Science and Technology of Computation), and then to Enschede, Netherlands, for the conference on Human-Technology Relations. I have abstracts ready to go for for the PASC and Human-Technology conferences, the former on GPU improvements for calculating marine population numbers and movement, and the second for natural language and interfaces improvements in the command line. There is a strong temptation to finish the trip with a ferry across the Channel to the UK.

Speaking of the UK, it is finally hitting me that tomorrow I get to go see The Chameleons, who are - in my carefully considered opinion of course - one the finest of post-punk bands that ever graced this watery world. To this day one finds people who are just a bit overwhelmed in discovering them for the first time. My plan over the next two days is work through their back catalogue in preparation for the concert, as I've been working through Mark Burgess' very readable autobiography A View from a Hill. It also serves a gentle reminder that I have a couple of reviews that I need to finish for Rocknerd.

The last day in New Zealand was spend in the township of Cambridge famous for horse-breeding and an impressive IT company named Nyriad, whom I've mentioned before. It was good to catch up with the gang, and especially to see their new and expanded offices. Their elaborating well on their core GPGPU technologies, which of course has some relationship with the massive GPGPU partition we're building on Spartan. On the latter we've had our share of challenges this week with getting various cutting-edge version components of drivers, OFED, kernels, and multinode libraries to talk together - and that's aside from the applications. Still, the best possible team is working on it, and to keep everyone up-to-date on progress work has me writing effectively a daily newsletter for the technical working group to give everyone a highlight report of what is going on. It sounds a bit like Project Management, eh?

Tim Task has come forth and written a foreword for Papers & Paychecks, which is a world of awesome. The printers have also been told that we're ready to publish. Other gaming news for the week include a session of Eclipse Phase, another of Megatraveller and a visit by a few of us to IMAX to see Blade Runner 2049. Those who know me well would know that I consider the original film to be my personal favourite. This sequal has a lot going for it, and given its aethetic importance to my life, I'll be seeing it again tomorrow at the Balwyn and making a specific post on the subject. In addition to this, I've been polishing the last bits of RPG Review courtesy of same very last minute contributions, but with the latest planned for the end of the weekend, it will be Monday before this is released.

I've penned a new article for Isocracy, on the well-intended but ultimately flawed "propertarian" ethical theory of the Non-Aggression Principle. Apropos another Isocracy Newsletter has come out with alerts us to the new role of Steve Sprigis as editor for the various association publications. Our original public officer, and perennial candidate Dr. Joe Toscano has also put up his hand for the by-election in the state seat of Northcote. Finally, I had an encounter with the NSW Young Libs on their attempted "reverse boycott" of Streets icecream. I penned a few words on their loss of empathy.

It was a pretty gaming intensive weekend; on Saturday I needed to get over three thousand words written for RPG Review 34, a special issue on game design, which has now been released - there was about 1,000 words on Friday and Sunday as well, as well as the layout. Later on session ran a game of Eclipse Phase which has arced up with as the Sentinels confront the neo-fascist Ultimates on an L5 Neptune trojan. It followed from an evening with funontheupfield at a local bar where we played Forbidden Island (cooperative game, easily adaptable for an environmental rather than fantasy theme) and Quizzle. Aproporiately, a new issue of the RPG Review Cooperative Newletter, Crux Australi has just been released.

We've just change our Internet Service Provider. After many years with Optus, there were a couple of events (technical primarily) that were making the relationship shaky, but the clincher was when they wouldn't support Firefox on Linux with the given reason being that only a few people use it this "old" operating system. Well, we've shifted to iiNET, and although there was a bit of a hiccup with the setup, they've done the right thing in terms of compensation etc. In other home life news finished our tax today for the last financial year, a weird timetabling that apparently is ATO approved. Their administrative procedures are a mystery to us mere mortals. Finally, just in case anyone thought I wasn't nerdy enough, I've been using this great Android app which effectively gives one a command-line interface for operating one's phone. Accessing applications with the autocomplete shortcuts and easy of file system navigation I find are its principal advantages.

Arrived in Perth for a flying festive season visit with caseopaya with Perth's temperatures soaring as is increasingly often the case to 42 degrees C. On arrival found out that there was a funeral service to attend for one Alf Graf, a hydralics engineer. I never knew him, but was a friend of caseopaya's family. One could not help but be impressed by the genuine sense of loss among those assembled. He was clearly a person of importance to his family and friends with almost three hundred in attendance with the obituaries mentioning in particular his good humour and generosity.

Yesterday was two big social events just in time for the summer solstice. Lunch was at Ruocco's Pizzeria E Ristorante in Fremantle with several lovely friends, including the ever-animated Grant Stone, Andrei Nikulinsky and stephen_dedman. Dinner, with about twice as many visitors, was at Amore Mio (FB) in Maylands with darklion, ariaflame, strangedave, and thefon in attendance among others. Both events were indeed notable for the fine food and great conversation over a range of topics.

Following morning we were at thefon's place trawling through the records of the Murdoch Alternative Reality Society, a club I formed in 1988. From what I can tell it operated until 2009, just making it into its 21st year but alas could not be revived from there. As well as the records there was also a substantial library, much of it science fiction and fantasy books which are not really worth shipping back to Melbourne. The roleplaying games however are, and a good portion of them will be merged into a semi-successor organisation, the RPG Review Cooperative. On that note, the next issue of RPG Review is going along very well, and as many would have already noticed, we easily made our Kickstarter for Papers & Paychecks. A very good way to end the year.