Why Vox Still Kicks Ass! – Married Voxer Edition

This morning despite having 615 unread posts in my feedreader I've been taking my time going through my voxy friend's posts first because if I start punching through posts to wear down the numbers I won't take the time to meaningfully respond to all the great stuff I read.  


I doubt I'll ever fully leave Vox, it's a great little corner of the intertubes that has some genuinely unique personalities that really do bring joy to my life.  So today I'm gonna throw a bit of love around and thus explain why it's still worth coming here.

Awesome Husbands and Wives.


For me this is utterly true for three couples of whom I got to know the same way.  I met the wife first, and then came to find the husband just-as or possibly more awesome.  

Buttrock Ken (Awesome pornstar name btw) and Shush are both great folks who I totally intend to give ranking positions in my evil empire as soon as the banks approve my loan.  Shush is discovering critical acclaim on WordPress as we speak, which I'm thrilled about mostly because I yelled at her and made her go back to it.  I just hope that as she skyrockets to fame she'll say hi to me every once in a while.

Redzillla and Hubbicula are also a fantastic couple.  They deserve each other so much, because they both crack me up.  Just today Hubbicula said to me:

"Well, the war is "stimulating the economy" in the way that Bush conceives of "stimulating the economy"–i.e., funneling public funds into the coifers of Bechtel, KBR, etc. 
At any rate, every time I hear Bush talk about "stimulating the economy," I imagine that he's picturing the economy as a prostate, and all he needs to do, is…"

It's a good thing I have a defibrillator here with me… I almost died.

Then there's Foxsydee and her husband Slasher who are great people and so energetic.  Dee is fantastic and beautiful in all the ways that matter, and slasher is an athlete par excellence I'd love to go climbing with him sometime.  They're both going through a bit of a tough time right now which worries me.  I hope things work out.

So those are the three couples on my list that both vox.  If you know others I'd love to hear about them, especially if they're crazy. 


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A Tribute to Gary Gygax R.I.P

Gygax
Gygax

On March 4th Gary Gygax passed away after suffering multiple strokes and an heart attack.  Gary was a co-creator and co-founder of Dungeons and Dragons and the Co Founder of TSR.  Nearly every Role-Playing Game, be it Pen and Paper or Video owes some degree of inspiration from his work and anyone who realizes that not all dice have 6 sides probably has been touched in some way by his legacy.  

I've taken the time to dig up some of the other tributes to him, for mine is woefully inadequate.






I hope gamers everywhere observe 1d6 minutes of silence for one of the great contributers to RPG's.  May he rest in peace.

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Toe Knee the Matchmaker – Hath Married OSX and Windows Mobile in (Un)Holy Union

Despite some pretty significant setbacks, my evil empire achieved a major milestone today for I have succeeded in getting my Macbook to connect to the internet using my PDA!  Over bluetooth no less!  


The dark gods are fickle though and for this great boon they demanded a sacrifice… Last night my satellite dish which has thus-far been a complete waste of way too much money decided to go wind surfing and flew from the roof of my shack severing the arm from he dish.  If that isn't a sacrifice to the dark gods of the intertubes I don't know what is.  

A Virgin Sat-Dish has died for the greater good.  The internet crops I reap better be bountiful this season.

Oh, and I've enhanced my hottness!  I have altered my hairstyle for the first time in several years, and for your viewing pleasure I shall post pictures.  Ladies, feel free to swoon.

The Before MeCrew Haircut with HighlightsYes, I am THAT Crazy.

The first picture is me with old hair.  Second is me without styling product after the cut.  The Third is Me With Faux-Hawk courtesy of new cut, just for those days when hair-straight-back isn't good enough.

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For Shush: From the Writer of God’s Debris

I'm finding I'm enjoying Scott Adam's Dilbert Blog, he writes some very interesting things.  I've read a bit of his web book God's Debris which I didn't find particularly groundbreaking because they were thoughts I've had long ago, but the fact that he wrote them signals that he's an enlightened soul.  (By enlightened soul I mean that he thinks like I do.)


The last two posts he writes about how people's individual sense of beauty could be proof that there is a God, which is rather profound if you think about it… we know that there are instinctive perceptions of attractiveness, but there is still personal preference as well.  From a scientific standpoint this is a variable that cannot be quantified (or whatever), but from a metaphysical standpoint it is a fundamental aspect about we as humans that cannot be explained.  

Isn't that cool?

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A Warrior Prince

Today the Huffington Post posted an article about Prince Harry having been fighting in Afghanistan for the past 3 months.  There are claims that he's personally seen combat and that he threatened to resign his post should he not be allowed to serve a combat post.


I think I'm probably in the same camp as most people when I find this very cool that a royal member is fighting in a war.  If Canada's prime minister, or America's presidents, or hell even our rock stars and corporate moguls; were sending their children off to fight in a war I'm pretty sure there would be some serious questions raised about whether or not it is a war we should be fighting.  I think it does a lot for the morale of a nation to have someone so highly placed willing to risk his life for such a cause.  

Having said that I sincerely hope that his presence doesn't further politicize the efforts of the troops in Afghanistan.  To paraphrase from Sun Tsu's Art of War: "A General must exercise the disciplines of the military without interference of politics to be successful."  And the reverse is true as well, a military man does not necessarily make a good politician.

But all that is moot because ultimately this is about one boy taking up arms in service to his country, I hope that on the battlefield it's never going to be anything else, otherwise it lessens the nobility of his service.  Let it be called whatever it will back home and abroad, but out there a bullet doesn't care who you are, and I hope Harry, his squad-mates, his commanding officers and his enemy are aware of nothing else.

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10 Things I Want To Do With RPG’s

No, not Rocket Propelled Grenades, Role-Playing Games!

That's right this is another gaming post that generally get such a small amount of attention here that I rarely bother, but for the past three days this has basically been the only thing occupying my mind so I'm going to subject you to it if only to get some closure on the matter.

I am a gamer who suckled on the teat of the good old fashoned pen and paper RPG's and so when I play computer games I find them limiting in so many ways when compared to the simplistic joy of declairing your actions to another human being who can interpret (or misinterpret) your actions and respond as only a human can.  P&P RP'ing is not limited to computer code or disc size, or artificial anything, because it has the natural element of pitting one intellect against another and then at times working together to achive something sublime.  

The resolution system of the game plays a part in this as well, if a game maintains consistancy in how it resolves uncertainty and it's rules encompass just about any action that one can concieve of, from doing a suplex on your opponent, to impressing the belle of the ball with your graceful dancing skills, if a system works well than any action a person could concievably take is represented with ease and little interpretation then it gets my stamp as a good game.  This particular element of an RPG we call gameplay, and in both video games and pen and paper RPG's it makes or breaks the title, good gameplay is fluid and graceful and examples of it in the video game world are in games like Assassin's Creed, where the character interacts with his environment with grace, being able to move all throughout a world so fluidly that it is very close to simulating life.  However gameplay is not the only important thing to consider with RPG's.

The setting of an RPG is the second most pivotal thing in my opinion, I'm a setting fanatic as Shush will quickly tell you.  For me the joy in role-playing comes from exploring new things and basking in the little details.  After that I move on to conquering and seeing if I can make the setting work for me.  Assassin's Creed also has a great setting, as do all of the Elder Scrolls games, Uncharted – Drakes Fortune, Exalted, and Star Wars.
Now wait, I just mentioned Star Wars, which isn't a game!  Actually it is, many times over in fact, Star Wars was a Pen and Paper RPG published by West End games before Wizards of the Coast got their grubby corporate paws on it and dipped it in the vat of slime that is D20.  The setting has also spawned fantastic video game titles such as Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars Battlefront, Jedi Knight, and the upcoming Force Unleashed, and nearly all of these titles have been spectacularly popular because Star Wars is a fantastic setting, it works is fun and has flavor.  Even the recent movies with their shitty acting, and poor writing couldn't overshadow the fact that the Star Wars setting is the Middle Earth of the Sci Fi genre. 
Setting gives you something to do in an RPG, good ones are immersive and filled with possibility with plenty of challenge woven in to keep characters on their toes, and without it a game quickly stagnates or becomes arbitrary, neither is a good thing.


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FoxNews… oh so credible

Shit like this makes me sick.  


FoxNews posts an article about the candidacy race and has to throw this little tidbit in at the bottom:

"Who is Usama Rooting For?

Who does Usama bin Laden want to be the next president? More people think the terrorist leader wants Obama to win (30 percent) than think he wants Clinton (22 percent) or McCain (10 percent). Another 18 percent says it doesn’t matter to bin Laden and 20 percent are unsure"

Okay… first off we who use the english language use periods at the end of sentences.  If you're using a pen this is accomplished by pressing it down but not moving it, or if you're using one of those new-fangled typewriters or computer thingys it's that button sorta below the one that says "L"… try it out.  

Also, Osama bin Laden is spelled with an "O"!  Not a "U".  I'm really suprised actually that you would mess this up because spelling his name the right way would make it all the easier to do the ol' Obama/Osama freudian slip which some networks are working hard to perfect.

But really, if you want to publish crap, why not make it factual crap?  Why not use Senator Obama's MIDDLE NAME!  You can find it on his Wikipedia page which I'll provide a LINK for you in case you can't figure out how to get there.  It's Hussein!  Just like that guy who ran that country… what was it again?  You can say he's channeling the essence of the two greatest enemies of the US in recent history, I'm sure your readership will believe you, because if they're believing your shit now, then they'll likely believe anything.

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Personal Update

Today has been a pretty casual day for me and nothing politically has overly pissed me off so I'm feeling good.

Two days ago I bought my very own piece of internet real-estate which I will be posting a custom blog of my very own on, I doubt many of you will read it because it's going to focus on Role-Playing and Gaming culture, and won't at all be like this one, which I assure you I won't be abandoning. 

My storywriting juices are starting to flow a bit more and I've been slowly developing ideas.  This is nice but I still don't have anything I could start pounding out into something cool yet.  Instead it's given me a boost of confidence about the game I run over Skype.  I'm really stoked about running it tonight and seeing where things go.

Fitness wise I'm trying to consider what I'm eating and doing more.  Still not pulling off very many chinups but I'm going to keep working at it.   Anyhow, that's sorta it.  Not too much happens out here to really get worked up about, hence the casual day so I'll end the post with a pretty picture which will be the cover art for the Exalted Fair Folk book which will hopefully be on store shelves this fall, right now it's my wallpaper.
0000216h
0000216h

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My Solution to this Iraq Fiasco

As the presidential primaries are coming to their climactic finish, I'm starting to see which issues are going to be pushed in the coming months and one of the big issues is going to be national security.  The FISA bill is still drawing a lot of attention, torture is yet a hot topic, but the biggest issue that's closest to every American is the war in Iraq.  Now we know that McCain has pledged war for all eternity, and we know Obama supports withdrawal and Clinton sits somewhere in the middle.  We also know that this war is supremely expensive in terms of both money and lives and whether or not you believe the "surge is working" rhetoric, the fact is there aren't any troops coming home yet.


Now I'm going to pretend that there is a moral justification for this war even though I know there is not.  War has never been about helping people and never will be.  War is about seizing assets, in this case oil.  It's fairly obvious at this point that the assets are seized, however by withdrawing they would be wide open for Iran to march in and take all the precious black gold as their own and that would be just no good.  

But anyhow, back to this whole "Moral War" fiction:  The United States government would like for it's people to believe that they're busy blowing up buildings over there to help the Iraqis accept and embrace the joy and enlightenment of democracy into their hearts and minds.  The problem is, democracy forced upon you while looking down the barrel of a gun doesn't seem like the utopia you'd always envisioned.  Make no mistake, to the people of Iraq the US troops aren't glorious liberators, they are a foreign invasion, and because of this perception it is nigh impossible to re establish a government. 

There are two solutions to this; the Bush regime can acknowledge it's expansionist policies and just declare Iraq conquered and thus the 52nd state, OR they can walk away, ask the UN to come in with peacekeeping troops and allow the Iraqi's to rebuild their country before they start eating their own dead.  

That's right, I said it, the UN!  Those nancyboy paper-pushers who didn't want Iraq invaded in the first place because they were too fucking incompetent to find those WMD's!  But incompetence aside, UN soldiers would look a hell of a lot less foreign invaderish and might even be able to calm some of those suicide bombers into a more lethargic state with their liberal opiates.  This in turn would give the American military some well deserved R&R before going after someone else… I'm thinking Iran or North Korea myself.

The idea isn't that crazy.  If the United States pledged 1/4 the money that's being spent on the war to the UN to help clean up iraq and get them on track again it would be not only a huge economic burden lifted, but a major step towards healing broken relations between the US and the UN.  It would be a fantastic step towards a more enlightened US foreign policy that could start to heal the rifts between the American people and the rest of the world.

And hey, if you don't think my idea has merit you can always put you're trust in this guy.  

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