NaNoWriMo '11, Day 0

So I've been assembling a fantasy novel in my head for the last few months.  I'm cannibalizing some of the deep background for various D&D and Warhammer games I've run, tossing in some character work I've done for other games, and using that simplest of storytelling frameworks, The Road Trip.

Hey, it worked for old J.R.R., right?

I'm also going to try and aggressively attend various local events, including seminars and writing sessions at local libraries and community colleges, and a kick-off online writing session at exactly midnight tonight.  As I go, I'll keep some basic notes and an online word count here so I can examine some of the writing process in retrospect.

Check back here from time to time to see how I'm doing!

NaNoWriMo Day 0/30
Word Count: 0 / 0%

Write Everyday Project, On Hold for NaNoWriMo

So, starting tomorrow, I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month.  That's where you try to write a novel of 50,000+ words from scratch in the month of November.  As such, all my writing will be devoted to that until December.  We will be writing everyday, of course, just not on this blog.  Normal service should resume in and around December 1st or so, and in the meantime, I'll be posting my progress (or lack of same) at NaNoWriMo here as I go.

Wish me luck...I'll need it.

Write Everyday Project #28, Weekend TV

Though it was a pretty busy weekend for me overall, I still managed to get some TV watching in Friday night and Sunday night, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on what I saw.

Boss - Episode 2 was Friday, and I caught it on the repeat on Starz West after catching the decent but not extraordinary Angelina Jolie action flick Salt.  Boss, episode 2, had a smidge more nudity and the politics was deeper since they weren't fooling around introducing everyone this time.  The trap the Mayor sets for the Governor is well done, and the subplot about Tom's medical condition continues apace.  The details of his relationship with his daughter and wife are delved into as well.  I'm not enthralled by the show, but I'll probably try and catch episode 3 as well, when I get the chance.

Amazing Race XIX - The nineteenth season (they do two a year, with only one the first year, meaning the show's been on for 10 years now) of my favorite reality show chugs on, and while I'm still enjoying it, I'm not as enthused as I used to be.  Partially it's because the show has changed surprisingly little over ten years, and partially because I've been watching Amazing Race: Australia online via YouTube and the two shows get mingled in my head, leading to a certain amount of confusion.  Still, The Amazing Race remains my favorite reality show, if "reality" is the proper word for a competition that involves doing things no regular tourist could ever manage on their own, and I'm glad it's still on the air.

The Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs - They went all out with the casting this year.  I've heard of six out of the ten chefs competing to become an Iron Chef.  That's a huge number, since in previous seasons I'd usually only have heard of one of the chefs, and sometimes not even that.  Mind you, this year that's because they're mining heavily from their own shows for the chefs.  Three of them are Chopped judges (Guarnaschelli, Samuelsson, and m'man Zakarian,) six others from other Food Network and Cooking Network shows like Worst Cooks in America (Irvine, Burrell, MacMillan) and some of the daytime shows on Food and Cooking that I don't watch.    Indeed, there's only one chef on The Next Iron Chef this season who doesn't have her own show, Elizabeth Faulkner, and even she's been a challenger on regular Iron Chef.  So this is like Like Chopped All-Stars taken to an even higher level.  And I'm okay with that.

Write Everyday Project #27, "Boss" Review

(Spoiler Free Version)

I caught the first episode of Boss on Starz.  That's the new drama starring Kelsey Grammer as the mayor of Chicago.  It has promise, even if I saw most of the plot twists coming.  It doesn't portray a very flattering view of the government of Chicago, but then again the Machine does have a deserved image problem.  Between this and The Chicago Code it seems as if Hollywood, or at least TV producers, have finally noticed the dramatic value of a corrupt major city.

The Chicago Code was filmed from the point of view of a bunch of plucky outsiders fighting against the corruption, and didn't last a season.  Boss, on the other hand, places the protagonist at the heart of the corruption, and endeavors to show not only that power corrupts, but that the corruption is itself a form of power.  That's a more interesting story, and one that has been done quite this way, as far as I know.

Another advantage that Boss has over the now departed Chicago Code is that by airing on Starz, they can have swearing and nudity.  The nudity wasn't strictly speaking necessary, as the same plot information could have been conveyed with greater subtlety, and indeed had been done so by the scene immediately prior.  But this is Starz, and if you've ever seen the Spartacus shows, then you know that Starz is all about the gratuitous nudity.  Compared to most Starz shows, though, the nudity in Boss was positively puritanical, and since it happened to cater to my particular sexual demographic I can't find myself getting particularly worked up about it.  Did it have to be there?  No.  Did I mind that it was?  Nope.

I will say that Grammer does an excellent job with the role.  There's nothing of Frasier in his performance.  His Mayor Tom Kaine is done in the Daley style, with great speeches to the public followed by ruthless arrogance behind closed doors.  He'd make a decent villain for a lesser show, but having him as the main protagonist is a stroke of genius.  Darth Vader was always more interesting than Luke Skywalker, after all.

Overall, I like the show.  I hope things get a little less predictable for me, but I'm certainly willing to let that slide in favor of Grammer's performance.  If you like drama, and especially if you're from the Chicagoland area, you should give Boss a try.

(Spoiler Version follows.  If you haven't seen the show yet and plan to, punch out now and come back later.)

Write Everyday Project #26, Papa's Pineapple Bread (Cooking III)

So named because my niece Julia calls my father (her grandfather) "Papa" and one of his signature dishes "Papa Bread," here's a recipe for pineapple muffins that's popular in my family.

2 Cups Flour
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1 Cup White Sugar*
1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil
2 Eggs
1 1/4 Cups Crushed Pineapple (Half a 20 oz can)
1/2 Teaspoon Anise
1 Tablespoon Milk

Pre-heat an oven to 350 degrees.

Grease 12 Muffin Tins.  (We use Pam)

Sift together the Flour, Baking Soda, Baking Powder, and Salt.

Combine Sugar, Oil, Eggs, and Crushed Pineapple.  Stir well.

Slowly add the Flour mixture to the Pineapple mixture, stirring well as you do.

Add Anise.  Stir well.

Add Milk.  Stir well.

Fill 12 muffin tins to just under the brim of the cups.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Makes 12 muffins.  Prep time 10-15 minutes.  30 minutes baking.  Total time 40-45 minutes.

* = Sweeten to taste.  "Papa" prefers to halve the sugar when preparing it for Julia, though this does make it kind of bland for adult eaters.

Write Everyday Project #25, What Dreams May Come

Is there anything more disruptive to your morning than waking up in the middle of a dream?  Okay, yes, getting interrupted by an alien invasion probably would be worse, but we're talking about relatively everyday occurances here.  Sunday morning I woke up in the middle of a truly odd Doctor Who related dream, featuring the tenth and eighth doctors, which was pretty odd since I haven't seen anything but eleventh Doctor shows all this year.  I rarely remember my dreams except when I'm interrupted, and even then the details remain fuzzy.

What gets me about it is how badly it throws me off.  It takes minutes before I'm able to even get out of bed, and hours before I'm feeling fully up to snuff.  Even after food and a shower, I'm still vaguely woozy.  Breaking up that REM is a bad idea!

I do have a recurring dream, of a sort though, that I call the Unfinished Game.  I often wake up feeling like I'm missing a part of a game I'm supposed to be playing.  Sometimes I even make it to my PC before I remember that no, I'm not missing anything.  The odd thing is, that within the dream the rules seem consistent, and when I awake I feel like I should be submitting a turn or preforming some other action, but there is, of course, no real game to play.

It can be a little disconcerting, to tell you the truth.

Still, I sometimes wish that I could remember dreams without having it ruin my morning.  It'd be nice to know what my subconscious is up to in there.

Write Everyday Project #24, Demographics

Did you know that Blogger tracks where people see your blog from?  Check out my stats:

United States 638 Russia 30 Germany 19 United Kingdom 12 Slovenia 12 Canada 6 Singapore 3 Australia 2 Austria 1 Estonia 1

Now obviously most of my pageviews are from the USA, which is to be expected.  I expect that if I could get an even more specialized view that I'd see 90%+ located in and around Chicago with a smattering in Dallas, Washington DC, and Wisconsin for most of the rest.  And since I know at least one of my friends took a trip to Canada in the last few months, I can understand those views.  But how am I getting traffic from Russia?  Or Germany?  Singapore?  Estonia?  


So yeah, if you're seeing this post, do me a favor and post a comment listing where you're from and maybe how you stumbled on this blog.  I'm curious to see how this works.  


Thanks!

Write Everyday Project #23, "Traitor" Mini-Review

I watched Traitor on DVD last night and it was okay.  Too predictable, though.  I pretty much called every major plot twist, and the one place I hoped they'd surprise me, the ending, they went with a standard Hollywood ending instead.

Still, if you can shut your brain's predictive centers down (which I cannot) you might be able to get a decent night's entertainment out of it.  It tries to make some points about radical Islam, and there's a "He who fights with monsters" subtext that isn't really as well explored as I'd have liked, but at least it tries to make you think which is mroe than I can say for most Hollywood films these days.

In the end, though, while it kept my attention while I was watching it, I can't really endorse buying Traitor on DVD.  See it on Netflix, as I did, or on a movie channel that you're already paying for.  It's worth that much, at least.

Write Everyday Project #22, Stuff You, Yahoo

Setting aside my dissatisfaction for how little you make writing for the Yahoo Contributor Network, Yahoo has managed to find an all new way to piss me off.  Since 1996 or so, I've maintained a Yahoo email address and with it, a collection of bookmarks attached to that account.  Since the system was pretty primitive in '96, I had to come up with my own organizational setup.  You see, all it did back then was list your bookmarks in alphabetical order.  So I devised categories for my bookmarks like Cartoon, VidGame, and the ever so popular Misc, and added them to the title of each bookmark.  If they updated regularly, I put what day or days they updated in parenthesis after the title.  Ergo, one of my oldest links is "Cartoon Sluggy Freelance (MTuWThF)".  So if it was first thing Monday morning and I wanted to read that day's webcomics, I just scrolled down to "Cartoon" and picked the (M) ones.  Quick and easy.  Its a system that's worked for me for fifteen years now.

And then, at the beginning of September, I lost the ability to add new Bookmarks.  "Yahoo Bookmarks cannot be added to, modified, or deleted until we complete an upgrade.  Your Bookmarks will be available on October 20th."  Fine, fine.  I can still use the old Bookmarks, and I'll just save new ones in my browser until the service comes back online.  Inconvenient, to be sure, but not game breaking.

Today is the 20th, and I logged on to My Yahoo and discovered that my organizational system is completely screwed up.

Look at that hash!  What's more, I can't figure out what the Hell the system is supposed to be now!  Obviously, it isn't alphabetical.  But its not by the date that I put them in, since the first on the list, "Chugworth Academy" is one I added in 2003, but "Abominable" (short for "The Abominable Charles Christopher") is from last year.  Its not by when I visited them last, since Chugworth quit updating in 2009, hence the (Dead), while Abominable only updates on Wednesdays and I saw it last yesterday.  It just seems to be a random mess.

So, I think to myself, there must be some kind of sorting error.  I'll just fix it in the controls and...

Well.  That's certainly inconvenient.  I prefer not to have toolbars cluttering up my browser, but I've been with Yahoo for 15 years, so I guess if there's any one toolbar I should have, that's the one.  Not a problem...

   

No.

No, I will not install IE 9 just to sort my frikkin' bookmarks.  "Do more from anywhere."  What a cruel joke.  

So that's it.  After fifteen years, I'm finally giving up on My Yahoo.  It's iGoogle for me now.  It'll be a pain in the ass getting all the bookmarks over there, but I was due to clean out some chaff (like the long since creator abandoned Chugworth, for example, or all those Buffy and Angel sites I put in there in the early 2000s) and this is the perfect time to do it.  I just wish it hadn't come to this, but some betrayals cannot be forgiven.

Stuff you, Yahoo.

Write Everyday Project #21, Shake N Bake (Cooking III )

It's been months since I last had Shake N Bake chicken.  Finding myself with one packet of the stuff and some frozen chicken pieces, I decided to put it together in lieu of doing something more complicated.  It would also let me finish the box off.  So I did, and after having it for lunch, I've got one question.

Has Shake N Bake always been this greasy?

I mean, seriously, there was like a quarter inch of grease in the bottom of the pan when it finished baking!  Maybe my recent awakening into better cooking has allowed me to finally notice the details of what I've been eating, but man, how can something baked be so greasy?  Much as it tastes good...and it does...I think I'm going to lay off the stuff.  It just doesn't seem healthy.

Besides, there are more chicken recipes that I want to try....

Write Everyday Project #20, The Bears...are Mediocre

So here we are.  Three and three with wins over the 3-3 Falcons, 1-5 Panthers, and 1-5 Vikings.  We also have losses to the 4-2 Saints, 6-0 Packers, and 5-1 Lions.  If you're a team who can beat average to bad teams but lose to the good ones, that's pretty much the definition of mediocre, don't you think?

Despite banter to the contrary, I have my doubts that we'll be able to beat the 4-2 Buccaneers in London next week.  It seems more likely that the long flight and short week and a game against a decent team will prove our doom.

Indeed, if we calculate based on W/L, we can predict the rest of the Bears schedule...

Buccaneers 4-2
Eagles 2-4
Lions 5-1
Chargers 4-2
Raiders 4-2
Chiefs 2-3
Broncos 1-4
Seahawks 2-3
Packers 6-0
Vikings 1-5

So, that would be wins against the Eagles, Chiefs, Broncos, Seahawks, and Vikings, with losses to the Bucs, Lions, Chargers, Raiders, and Packers.  That gives us a perfectly mediocre 8-8 season.

Which is the worst possible outcome.  If the Bears were going to be truly wretched, I could stop watching and start looking forward to high draft picks in June.  On the other hand, if they were dominant and good, I could look forward to watching them win.  But middle of the road means you want to watch since maybe they can turn it around like they did last season, but in my heart of hearts I have very little hope.

So I'll watch, and I'll gripe, and, if I'm right in the end, I'll say "I told you so."

Write Everyday Project #19, Memory of Snowflakes

Alas, that this entry isn't about remembering a specific snowflake or snowfall.  Nor is it a poem, since a poet I am not.  No, this is a complaint that sometimes my memory seems to made out of snowflakes, ones that melt as fast as I touch them.

This was brought on by something that happened a few minutes ago, where between my deciding to open up a new tab to search for something and my actually doing so, I forgot what I wanted to search about.  I actually did recall a minute or so later, I wanted to Google the new report on the value (or perhaps lack thereof) of multi-vitamins, but it was pretty disturbing to bring up a search box and not recall what I wanted to type in it.  That seems to be happening more and more lately.

There are mnemonic tricks to help remember things, of course.  "Thirty days has September, April, June, and November.  All the rest have thirty one, except February which is all fucked up."  That's how I remember it, anyway.  And since it works, I see no reason to go back and learn the correct version.  I've also found that repeating something out loud at least three times in rapid succession can help keep things straight, to say nothing of simply constantly repeating what you need to recall until you don't need it any more.

Nevertheless, I find myself relying more and more on my phone's calendar and address book functions.  I only know two phone numbers, my own and my parents' (and that last has been the same for 36 years), and I'm fuzzy on my own since I've only had it a few months.  I also use my email as a memory bank, keeping things I want to remember to do in my inbox, while cleaning out the rest.  There's a message from the Pritzker Military Library about a program they'll be webcasting on Thrusday that I want to remember to watch, that I've left in my inbox, for instance.

I do have to wonder if this is an age thing or simply a complexity of modern life thing or possibly a "get more sleep you goon thing".  Or possibly all of the above and other stuff besides.  Whatever the cause, it remains an uncomfortable thought that my mind may not be as reliable as once it was.

Now, where'd I put my phone?

Write Everyday Project #18, Game Day (Cooking II)

I've got a busy weekend, with a D&D game on Saturday and a Mutants & Masterminds game on Sunday.  Plus, if time allows, I'd like to watch Bear/Vikings Sunday night. Naturally, the thing to do is to make the weekend even busier by cooking for these events.

To that end, I'm going for three recipes.

The first is a Blondie Brownie .  I made these yesterday, with my own custom modifications.  To be precise, I switched the semi-sweet chips for milk chocolate, added more of them (about 1 cup and 1/4, since that finished off the bag) and put on a layer of coconut.  For some reason, maybe because of the thick layer of coconut, it took nearly twice as long as the 25 minutes listed in the recipe to bake properly. 

Though the initial reaction has been positive, and it does taste good, I wonder if I overdid it with the toppings.  It's virtually impossible to taste the vanilla of the blondie beneath all the coconut and chips, which makes putting as much effort as I did into the blondie itself seem kind of pointless.  Still, it's hard to go wrong with toasted coconut and chocolate.  I'll take it to the D&D game today and see what the guys think.

Recipe number two is a chilled Clark Bar.  I played this one mostly straight, though again I only had milk chocolate chips rather than the semi-sweet that the recipe calls for.

This one is surprisingly good.  Its got a nutty flavor without being overpoweringly peanut buttery, and despite the layer of milk chocolate on the top, not too sweet.   Lacking an electric mixer, I had to muscle the main bar ingredients together, but other than that, it's a pretty easy recipe to assemble.  You do need a long lead time, though, since the recipe calls for four hours in the refrigerator.  I put it together yesterday and let it chill overnight before trying it in the morning.

Recipe number three is even simpler.  It's one for Glazed Chicken Wings.  There's nothing to it, just combine three ingredients into a sauce, coat wings, apply heat.  Even my own fledgling cooking skills should be able to handle that!  No picture as yet, since I'm planning on just bringing the material over to my brother's and cooking it on site.  I've had some problems with last minute baking and then trying to transport a hot pan somewhere, and since his oven works about as well as mine, there's no reason not to cook them there.  I'll update the post with a picture and the results once I've cooked them.

UPDATE: They were okay.  I probably should have marinated them last night instead of following the recipe as written, since the flavor was heavy on the skin but nothing much on the meat.  Also, one of the guys said there was too much soy sauce, though it was fine to me and the other guy who ate 'em.  But then, I'm notroious for liking my food over-salted, so it probably is too much soy for general consumption.  Anyway, here's what they looked like:

And here's much (but not all) of the other snacks we had on site for the game:

You know, it's probably best that we only do this every couple of weeks.  Though I do have another game with a different group tomorrow.  Since some of the Clark Bars and Blondies survived, I'll bring them for the other gang too, but I don't think I'll eat very much of it this time out.  

Anyway, the Clark Bars were a hit, the Blondies less so, and the Wings less than that.

The Cooking Quest continues!

Write Everday Project #17, The Roman Empire...in SPACE

I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty tired of seeing the Roman Empire in space.  I can understand the instinct, since to those of us from the Western traditions see the Roman Empire as one of the high points of our culture, but the implementation is often so shoddy as to make me cringe.

Star Trek did it with the Romulans and then, since that was too subtle, did it again in "Bread and Circuses,"  Romans in space!  Then there's the Marian Hegemony from Battletech, Romans in mechs in space!  The Telnarian Histories, of course, for Romans with sex slaves in space!  Asimov did it in the first book and a half of Foundation, which was a re-do of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire....in space.  (To his credit, he got bored and threw in the Mule to blow it all up, but everything through the first half of Foundation and Empire is spot-on Romans in space.)  You've got Star Wars and the fall of the Republic and rise of the Empire.  Even the Centauri from Babylon 5 are an example of Rome in decline.

But the worst example of the idea that I'm aware of is in the Tour of the Merrimack books by R.M. Meluch.  In this four book series, with at least two more on the way, the idea is that the Romans went underground.  They survived as a parasitical secret society in America and then, when the time was right, fled to the stars and re-established the Roman Empire.  In space.

What's worse, is that they re-established it exactly as it was in 1 AD.  They use the same political structure, with an Emperor and a Senate.  They use the same military structure, with legions and all the old Roman ranks. They even use high tech versions of ancient Roman armor, and yes, use swords in modern combat.  Granted they also use giant war robots to do all their fighting for them, but even so it all seems to miss the point.

You see, what bugs me about the various interpretations of "Rome in Space," especially the one presented in Tour of the Merrimack is that it ignores what actually made Rome great in favor of the surface details.  Rome wasn't great because they wore armor with skirts on them and marched in formation.  Rome was great because that was the state of the art in warfare at the time, and by the gods, Rome was going to stay ahead of the curve!  The Roman Republic and Empire were guided by people who were relentlessly driven to out-do their ancestors.  That meant learning new ways to build, to make money, and to fight with every generation, because you literally had the the eyes of your ancestors on you!

Which is why going ahead and re-instituting a political and military structure that was two and a half thousand years old is one of the most anti-Roman things you could do!  Being Roman meant adapting to conditions to become stronger.  Relying on ancient methods is the opposite of that.

So what you get is Space RiNOs.  Romans in Name Only.  And I'm sick of it.

Write Everyday Project #16, Cooking (Shoyu Chicken)

I've been using Allrecipes.com to cook from a lot lately.  Mostly desserts, but I've tried a couple of main dishes too.  My most recent one was this Shoyu Chicken recipe.  It worked pretty well.  I'm coming late to cooking.  Most of the time I've lived on my own, my food was either microwaved, or at best, very primitive meat & rice concoctions.  And while I still do love "Miscellaneous Meat & Rice," I'm starting to appreciate what you can get with more effort.

I still don't have a particularly refined palette, and though I tinker with the various recipes, I'm neither classically trained nor know enough to be a chef, but I am starting to become a cook.

Like the man said, "You've taken your first step into a larger world."  And that feels pretty good.

Write Everyday Project #15, Chicago Sports and Labor Problems

Is it just me or do the Chicago teams suffer disproportionately from labor problems in their respective sports?  Look at the history:

1986 NFL Strike - The '85 Bears had won  the Superbowl in a rout and everyone expected a dynasty to compare with the Steelers and Raiders of the '70s.  Instead, the Bears were one and done.  Why?  Part of it was certainly the departure of defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan and the subsequent weakening of the Bear's defense.  Another was the sudden rise of the New York Giants and the "Big Blue Machine" in 1986.  But perhaps the nail in the coffin was the 1987 NFL Strike, and the Bears' handling of it.  The Bears embraced the idea of replacement players with company man Mike Ditka saying "These are my players now!"  Many Bears players from the '87 team have said this "betrayal" hurt team morale, and the Bears haven't won a Superbowl since.

1994 NHL Lockout - The Blackhawks won their division in both 1991 and 1993.  Guess what happened next?  The Hawks wouldn't sniff the division crown, or go deep into the playoffs, until 2009 when they won it all.

1994 MLB Strike - On August 12, 1994, the White Sox were leading the American League Central with a record of 67-46.  That, however, was the last day of the season, because the '94 strike wiped out the rest of it, including the playoffs.  It wouldn't be until 2000 that the Sox would win the division again, and not until 2005 that they would win the World Series.

2011 NFL Lockout - This one is somewhat fuzzier, but given the Bears's record before the lockout was 11-5 and included a trip to the NFC Championship where they lost to the eventual Superbowl winners.  This season, they're 2-3 and sliding fast.  One of the things that's hurting the 2011 Bears is a barrage of injuries to crucial players.... injuries that might not of occurred had there been a full off season and training camp that got canceled because of the lockout!

2011 NBA Lockout - And so now the NBA is locked out. Bulls players are scattering to play across Europe, and the young core of the Bulls can't talk to coaches to learn the system or practice together.  Maybe they'll put it together in the end, but I can't help but feel pessimistic about the season...if there even IS a season.

In short, Chicago keeps getting screwed whenever there's labor troubles in sports, and this year seems no different.

Write Everyday Project #14, Gaming the Cold War

It's tough to find time for this on the weekends, but I suppose that is the point nevertheless.  Don't find time, make it.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the Cold War.  It came up in a Facebook conversation a while back, and then on Friday I ended up picking up a few appropriate board or card games at the Games Plus Auction.  To be precise, I got Junta, a game about seizing power in a banana republic, Cold War, one about the politics of the Cold War where you're using spies and diplomacy to try and sway other nations, and 1965's Nuclear War card game.

It's this last one that we played last night, and the one that got me thinking more about how certain our doom seemed only twenty three years ago and how few people choose to think about it now.

Or that, release of tensions or not, we still have the capability to blow ourselves clear off the planet.

Nuclear War itself is not a very satisfying game.  It's too abstract to be a good simulation, and too random (cards v dice again) to be at all strategic  There are the occasional funny moments (goddamn UN!) but mostly it's about picking your cards and getting lucky.  It's also a game that encourages you to dogpile a single target, so there's a certain amount of diplomacy involved in trying to get your opponents to curbstomp someone else.  But mostly, it's about the cards.

(I also found a Chick Tract in the Nuclear War box.  I couldn't find a link to the one I've got, but here's one to the famous anti-Dungeons and Dragons one.  Clearly, I've been playing in the wrong gaming groups!)

I do wish I hadn't gotten priced out of World at War: Eisenbach Gap, because I'd love to try and fight World War III someday.  Of course, my primary old school wargame opponents live in other states these days and with two cats, a four year old, and a toddler there's no way to leave games up at my brother's place...and he can't game anywhere else.  So owning a good WW3 game would only be an exercise in frustration since I'd never be able to play it, but still, it would have been nice.

I suppose I'll have to dig up Red Storm Rising and catch up with Alekseyev and friends again to get my Cold War fix instead.

Write Everyday Project #13, Baseball v Football

Nothing having drawn my attention today, I'm returning to something I heard on the radio Football versus Baseball.  This came about because the NFL's ratings remain through the roof, while even playoff baseball is comparably unwatched.

But I think that's apples and oranges.  Not only are there ten times as many baseball games as football games, the former just isn't that good as a TV sport and the latter is less watchable in person.

Baseball, in my experience, works best at the ballgame.  Being able to watch the whole field rather than just the pitcher and batter makes for a better experience.  Plus the pace of the game is such that you end up talking about the situation and what you think is going to happen with the friends you came with.  (Note, unless you're a very social person, you get much less out of a baseball game if you go alone.)

Football, on the other hand, generally gives you a pretty good look at the field from TV, and without TV catching it for you, it's too easy to lose track of what's happening on the field.  What's more, unless you have really good seats, at least half the time the game's so far away it's hard to get anything at all.  You end up watching on the jumbotron, and if you're doing that why did you pay so much money for the privilege?  Also, unless you go early in the season or your team plays in a dome, the weather is almost invariably worse.  Sitting out in the cold and paying $4 to get hot chocolate so I don't freeze isn't my idea of a great time.

So when Sunday rolls around it's only natural that, unless you're a fan of one of the baseball teams actually in the playoffs (which I'm not,) that you'll watch the sport that's better on TV, and that's football.

Write Everyday Project #12, Airline Blues

So I'm sitting around waiting for my brother's flight to make it in from Salt Lake City so I can drive him home when it occurs to me that I haven't done the blog yet today.  So here we go.  Obviously, since the flight is more than three hours late, airline efficiency (or lack there of) is weighing heavily on my mind just now.

Now, I understand that times have been tough for the airline industry since 2001.  Everything's more expensive, especially aviation fuel, and the added security they need to pay for makes what was an already dicey business (see Pan-Am, demise of) even harder to survive in.  I get all that.

But doesn't it seem that we're paying more and more and getting less and less on every flight?  The show itself didn't impress me, but the opening sequence of ABC's new Pan-Am really brought home to me that the people flying in the 60's were having a much nicer time than I've ever had on an airplane.  Possibly that's the magic of TV clouding my perception, but everything I've heard about flying in that era makes it seem like an adventure, where as these days it has less romance than driving in the back of a pick-up.

Is "business class" the answer?  I've never flown up front with the rich people, so maybe I need to get rich and try it sometime.  Still, what business class comes with doesn't sound impressive enough to be worth paying an order of magnitude more, but maybe the cumulative effect of all the better stuff adds up to a hugely better experience?

I just don't know.

What I do know, though, is that these days flying sucks, and sucks hard.

Write Everyday Project #11, Autumn Doldrums

In many ways this is usually a nice time of year around Chicagoland.  The heat of summer has gone, but there's no snow yet.  The best description for the weather is "crisp."  Normally, I prefer this weather to any other.

Except this time, I seem to have gotten sick.

Nothing major, mind you, just a little ache in the back of my throat and my feet are literally (rather than metaphorically) cold.  I'm not even congested, which I usually am when I catch something.  No phlegm either, which is a nice bonus.  Still, what I do have is enough to put me off my mood. Whether it's this or the usual Planning Fallacy, it sure is taking me a lot longer to get things done than I expect.

Bah!  (Humbug reserved for Christmas.)

Write Everyday Project #10, "The Wedding of River Song"

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Doctor Who season six finale, "The Wedding of River Song."  To ensure there's no problems, I've included some non-Who commentary first.  Everything past the "*  *  *" is spoiler territory.  You have been warned.

It was a busy weekend, and I ended up only getting one post out.  I'm going to need to make sure to get my writing in early on, since there's no guarantee I'll have time later on once things get busy.  Lesson learned.

There was also a lot to write about this weekend, some of which I' may mine for material in days ahead.  The Bears won ugly, I dabbled in Mage, a role playing game I haven't played in maybe twenty years or so, and the Android board game I played got a little wonky due to the randomness of the cards.  I've already touched on that one in the previous WEP post that I forgot to advertise, and is an example what happens when you try to write something at 4am.

Hint: It's a bad idea.  Coherency suffers.

*  *  *

But rather than talk about any of that, I've decided to go with the finale of season six (or season thirty two if you're a purist) of Doctor Who, which aired Saturday and I managed to catch on Sunday.  I'll want to watch the episode again, but my initial impressions can be summed up as follows: Bait and Switch.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the episode.  There were some great moments, and they did resolve the outstanding Death of the Doctor plot introduced back in episode one, though in retrospect they didn't explain why there's a clear regeneration effect coming out of the robot.  Or how the Tessalector crew got so much better at their jobs that they could skip around and hug people as seen in "Impossible Astronaut" and "The Wedding of River Song" when they could only move mechanically in "Let's Kill Hitler."  Or, for that matter, why shooting the Doctor in the middle of his regeneration is supposed to kill him stone dead, but shooting River in the middle of hers in "Hitler" just makes her bullet proof.  Presumably the energy weapon the Silence developed gets around that, but it shows that while they're better at it than they were under Davies, the Who crew still plays fast and loose with details.

What was eminently predictable was that in resolving this season's mystery, they set up next season's.  Last season they explained the Pandorica Opens mystery but left us with the "What is the Silence?" and "Who blew up the TARDIS?"  This season we get the deal with the Silence, and barring further explanations, can only assume that River's programming kicked in and she blew up the TARDIS while she thought she was trying to save her.  But now we get an even more obscure prophecy from Dorium's head.  "On the fields of Trenzalore, at the Fall of the Eleventh, the question will be asked."  The question being, apparently, "Doctor who?"

I grant you that going into the 50th year of the show that is a great question to ask, and if they're smart they'll have Eleven moving through the years in a kind of greatest hits season.  If they're [i]really[/i] smart, they'll use the occasion to bring back the Time Lords, as I talked about over here after "The Doctor's Wife."  One way or another, we'll definitely see Daleks, and fully functional ones rather than the dying victim we saw in "The Wedding of River Song."

Still, I wanted more and better answers, and I didn't get them, and that leaves me feeling empty rather than anticipating the next season.  I'll watch it, of course, but I was looking for more.

I did call that the Doctor wanted to solve the problem that was introduced in Davies' run of the Doctor playing on his reputation to get things done.  He had, as River said in this episode, become too big.  Moffat had wisely let the Doctor keep doing that in season five, then flipped the script at the end of that season and the halfway point of season six by having people decide to take the Doctor down because he's too threatening.  So it was nice to proven right on that point.  It was also nice to be faked out, because even with evidence right in front of us, none of us called the Tessalector as the way the Doctor cheats death.

In total, though, this is the least excited I've been about a "big" Who episode in the Moffat era.  Maybe I've become used to the big two part season finales, because this one just wasn't as big as I wanted it to be, which is an odd thing to say about a show that had everything from Teradactyls to Churchill in it.