PayPal’s new rules remind me why I hate doing business with them in any capacity. If they’ve decided that one of their users has violated their Acceptable Use Policy, the contract allows them to deduct money directly from your account or from other accounts you control, and the contract specifies that you agree that $2500 USD is a reasonable minimum charge.
It’s amazing the bullshit this company gets away with.
Back when I was running my Kickstarter campaign, Continue reading
Me: “I need to fix my front page to it’s friendly to mobile devices.”
Wife: “Are you going to hire someone to take care of that for you?”
Me: “Nah. Whatever I do, I want to be able to take care of my site myself.”
::immediately collapses website, renders blog posts invisible, and breaks all internal links, including the ones between the book posts and the sample chapters::
So, yeah. It takes a surprisingly long time for my ftp program to download a backup copy of my blog, especially when the download inexplicably stops and restarts several times. I went to couch at 1 am last night and was back up and at my site by 5 am. As of right now, the site is largely fixed.
Special thanks go out to @PandiesSpleen who pointed me to a Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. It works! But it’s slow. It’s also looking at six years worth of old Randomness articles and coming up with a lot of failed connections.
Chaff. My life is full of chaff lately. Every time I try to focus on something, I get a whole of of random shit flying at me.
The worst thing, really, is that at the same time I broke all the internal links to my site, I also broke all the external links that other people have made to my individual posts. I didn’t get a lot of traffic from other blogs, but I don’t get a lot of traffic from any source.
Anyway, the work is mostly done, and I’m tired and stressed and irritable and married. My wife doesn’t deserve this crabby mood (my kid, absolutely, my wife not at all) so I’m going to read something fun or I don’t know what.
#spoilers
2) Pancakebot will print your pancakes in any shape you can draw.
3) Norway is planning to ditch FM radio.
4) Why are board game boxes so big? I assume the transport issue is the difference in weight between 10 games and 16; the fewer games stacked on a palette, the less likely the ones at the bottom will be crushed.
6) “My daughter spent this whole week preparing to GM her first D&D game.
The Distance by Helen Giltrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book 9 in #15in2015
Charlotte Alton is a socialite with the money, manners, clothes, and a secret identity as, Karla, an underworld information broker and fixer who arranges impossible crimes, new identities for fugitives, and carefully leaked tips to government spy agencies.
Sound far-fetched? Well, that’s just the start.
I’ve been trying to read more thrillers lately, in an attempt to get a handle on the way they handle exaggeration. This one…
It’s a weird book. It has high thriller characters but for most of the book it’s a low thriller plot: Karla arranged a cover ID and temporary entrance into an experimental prison colony for a hit man she’s secretly in love with. He has a troubled past! The big boss in the prison wants him for his troubled past! His target is a mystery woman that everyone thinks is already dead!
Eventually, the plot turns it around to big stakes and state secrets, but it takes a long time to get there. In the mean time, there are a lot of dead end investigations, scary prisoners being scary, and our protagonist putting herself more and more at risk for her personal haunted tough guy.
Honestly, I would have given it an extra star if it had been shorter. I enjoyed it, but the plot had too much flailing. Still, it was fun.
The Drowning City by Amanda Downum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book 8 in #15in2015
I wanted to like this more than I did. There’s a lot of promise in the description (A necromancer and spy goes a city that on the brink of open revolution to offer financial aid to the revolutionaries) but the execution doesn’t have a lot of momentum to it.
Part of the problem is that too many of the names are similar. Part is that the protagonist’s mission does not seem particularly difficult to execute. Part is that the text feels awfully slack. There are betrayals, murders, bombings, magic duels, allies switching sides, forbidden attraction, and more, but I never felt that pull that makes it hard to put a book down. I was never powerfully attached.
The setting is terrific, though, and very well-realized.
I’m sorry I didn’t enjoy it more.
I’ll make this brief because the family is heading off to see a Georgia O’Keefe show this morning.
Last night was date night, so I did what I usually wouldn’t: went to the sneak preview with my wife. Sadly, my brilliant idea for dinner beforehand was ruined when we discovered the shawarma place was closed for remodeling. Instead, we ate at an Australian/New Zealand pub, in honor of the Australian actors we were about to see.
It’s a good movie but not a great one, even by the standards of a blockbuster action movies. The whole thing feels like it’s been stuffed to the breaking point: you get the six main Avengers, plus the Maximoff twins, plus the Vision, just as the trailers suggest. What they held back from the publicity is that the movie is also full of the supporting characters from the previous individual movies. As it should be, really.
And considering how full the movie feels, it’s amazing that they’ve managed to give the leads their own (tiny but effective) story lines, sandwiched between huge, destructive action set pieces. And there are so many great actors in this thing that they actually manage to sell the personal crises and miniscule human moments, even while wearing, say, a skin-tight black suit. And Bettany is excellent as The Vision.
There are some unfortunate choices, too, mostly around Ultron. Who’s idea was it that his metal lips would move when he talked? I don’t want to say much more, because spoilers. There were also several scenes that made me think That would make no sense to anyone who missed the first movie.
Still, the pieces seem to be much larger than the whole. I remember leaving the first Avengers movie feeling wow-ed by what they accomplished. This time, I loved all the individual sequences but they didn’t feel as though they added up to a truly satisfying whole. However, I plan to see it again, hopefully with my son. We’ll see how I feel about it then.
Added later: I forgot to mention that there’s a single mid-credits scene but nothing at the very end, so you don’t have to sit through the whole endless scroll of digital artists or whatever.
From PC Gamer: Why too much combat hurts rpgs.
I couldn’t agree more. If I’m playing a game, I’m interested in the world, the supporting characters and the overall story. Fight? Sure. Let’s have some fighting.
But grinding away, room after room, where almost every fight means nothing in terms of the larger story? Boring! The conversations are more interesting.
Admittedly, I have more patience with a first-person shooter than a third-person like Pillars of Eternity, but even so, get to the plot. Get to the plot!
Anyway, interesting article.
Happy news to be shared: I finished the (very) rough draft of the Fate Core rpg supplement for The Great Way. First of all, yay. Fucking yay. Second of all, writing game supplements is really hard. I have never written anything this dense before.
Anyway, I need to finish the supplement for Key/Egg, too, then do another pass through before I pass the pages off to a GM friend of mine for inspection. Then there will be yet another pass, and it’ll be done.
And when it’s done, I can FINALLY move on to my new novel.
I don’t normally blog about this sort of thing, but I do maintain an active interest in it, but I was pretty excited to read that Audi has built a plant (a small one so far, but they have plans to expand) that creates diesel fuel out of water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and renewable energy sources like solar or wind.
I’ve been waiting for this sort of thing to become feasible. Sure, people all over the world have been working on better forms of power generation using natural forces (like the people who are trying to drive turbines with artificial tornadoes, which seems like a cool idea but might work better in a story than in real life) but storing that energy for use in a mobile vehicle is still a huge issue. Better battery technology would be great, but 100% clean diesel would be preferable.
Then again, I’m still waiting for large scale versions of this guy’s machine that turns old plastic back into oil (video), except powered by wind or solar so some entrepreneur could start “drilling” the Pacific trash vortex.
Technology to turn waste products into power is pretty exciting, (says the guy who, many years ago, nearly bought a device that purportedly turned urine into household electricity).