Lev Lafayette's journal

It's been a interesting past week for various gaming endeavours. The next issue of RPG Review is coming out soon, although it will be slightly delayed as our guest interview subject - Frank Mentzer - will be away for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile I've been working on Papers and Paychecks, along with several reviews, with a planned Kickstarter launch on October 24. In actual play the Eclipse Phase session last Sunday involved transporting alien eggs (what could go wrong?) to a transhuman habitation and a visit to the cold water world of Droplet. Tonight will be running Delta Green Mimesis, a home brew system that is a stripped down version of GURPS on a simulationist perspective and a built-up version of HeroQuest from a narrativist perspective.

Today was an gruelling day in training, running a course on parallel programming, covering issues in computer architecture, data parallelism using job submissions, library and package extensions in existing applications and programming languages, usage of OpenMP shared-memory programming, finally MPI distributed memory programming. Most of the people were already fairly experienced in the subject, so I hope it wasn't too simple for them. That will be the last training course for several weeks, as Europe beckons. After that courses are being planned for economics (primarily maths and stats), and engineering (numerical solvers and continuum mechanics) It was meant to be an introductory course. Afterwards was the HPC Users Forum where I gave a short presentation on various transition actions from the Edward to Spartan systems and updates on the latter. Not a huge attendance, but a worthwhile one.

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.

"Crappy new year", as they say. Yesterday caseopaya had a small accident on our newish car. Near a fairly busy intersection the passenger's tyre blew and she lost control, clipping the back corner of a delivery truck parked in a 'no standing zone', and then into a second car. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the car looks like it's a write-off. The various insurance agencies will engage in what they do, and hopefully we won't be off the road for too long; indeed, we have our eyes set on the same model vehicle, except what Nissan has called "Prague Nightshade". They mean "dark purple" of course, so we'll end up with a Goth Nissan. Possibly not in the best taste, but I do keep thinking of The Normal's Warm Leatherette in reference to all these events, which was clearly on the mind of some drivers on New Year's Eve, even if they are too young and stupid to know the song itself.

In other events the year has alread taken up its own course. I've booked tickets to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I'm organising the Linux Users of Victoria Annual Penguin Picnic, which will be followed later in the day by the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby. Tonight played through another epic session of Horror on the Orient Express which including fighting Vampires and people drowning in their own facial skin; have also completed chapter three of the write-up for said tale. Also, I've made a real start on the Mimesis roleplaying system. The Isocracy Network now also has a printable leaflet, along with a new enthusiastic organiser in Italy.