For my friends in cold places (basically most of the country besides Southern California):
Temperatures and Europeans

I love the California reference:
-5°C / 23°F People in California almost freeze to death.

I should do one for New Yorkers, Minnesotans and Californians. :grin:

Something to play around with when I get a MT Blog:
Intro to RSS

Thanks to Julia (Society for Aesthetic Deletions--gotta love a Heinlein reference) for inspiration, as well as ***Dave ,here is my Friday Five.

1. What is one thing you don't like about your body?

Considering my penchant for self-loathing, I will limit myself to my height. 5' 7" (5' 7 1/2" if I am generous) is too short for my taste. I am the runt of my family.

2. What are two things you love about your body?

Good grief. Okay, I like my eye color (hazel is just as nice as blue!) and I can get my leg briefly behind my head still.

3. What are three things you want to change about your home?

Get a home, first and foremost. My apartment doesn't feel like one. California doesn't feel like home...

4. What are four books you want to read this year?

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (next on my queue as it so happens)
A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman

5. What are five promises you have kept to yourself?
Get out of my parents house (unfortunately into another bad situation)
Open my heart to love again after Lisa passed away
Learn to cook at least passably
Learn to live on my own
Keep my chin up enough to not give into the maw of darkness

Messing with a good thing.

One of the few TV shows these days that I make a point to watch is Alias. If you haven't seen it (and the ratings have been somewhat underwhelming), go do so. I am not usually a fan of the spy genre or at least not compared to some other genres, but I discovered Alias by accident one Sunday and have watched it henceforth.

Salon has done a profile on the show. that unfortunately mentions they are jettisoning the complex, byzantine multi-episode story arcs that got me hooked, and going for more self contained individual episodes. I LIKE the complexity, however. Even though I did not watch the entire first season, I caught myself up gradually, picking up stuff in every episode about the mythology and the world of the show. I don't mind the occasional one-shot, but I'd take the long story arcs (a la Babylon 5 and the last seasons of Ds9) over just an ordinary series of "spy adventures" any day of the week.

But go do watch it. Jennifer Garner is a good actress (she will be Elektra in the upcoming Daredevil movie), and having Victor Garber and Lena Olin as her feuding parents is great television. Characters have complexities, shades of grey, and I was happy in the last episode where the major antagonist managed to extricate himself from the monstrous organization he had created and escaped to reunite with his thought-to-be-dead wife. Mind you, Arvin Sloane, while being the amoral head of Sd-6, also was a father figure of sorts to Sydney, and never devolved into a cardboard character.

Besides, for my RPG friends, ALIAS is also is a wonderful fount of ideas for games of various sorts. The byzantine machinations and plans suit Amber very well, and if you are playing something like Modern D20, you can lift things wholesale from this show. Pacing, plotting and world-building really shone through, it took me a while to get into the world, not starting from the start, but you can get a sense of what a complex, integrated world looks like over time.

Are you ready for some football?

Tampa Bay versus Oakland. I did mention that I thought Tampa Bay, if they could defeat the Eagles in cold Philadelphia (and they did, and how!) were possibly built just right to stop the Oakland offensive machine. All other things equal, Defense usually beats Offense in the NFL...even if, these days, the offenses are ascendant (one of the reasons for higher ratings lately, its easier for casual fans to get into high scoring "exciting" games than 13-10 defensive field position slugfests)

So even though the Raiders are favored by oddsmakers, I am going to stick with last week's forecast and predict a Tampa Bay upset of the Raiders in the first ever "Pirate Bowl". I think it will be close, and, fingers crossed will be as exciting and intense as last year's (one of the best Super Bowls ever). I foresee that despite Oakland's persistence and offensive juggernaut, Tampa Bay will slow them down just enough to pull off the upset victory.

Prediction: Tampa Bay 26 Oakland 23.

Fossil find in China:

Four-winged dinosaur fossil found.

More of a glider than a flyer, probably, and likely an evolutionary dead-end...but this definitely shows us we are still in the dark about the evolution of class Aves from the Dinosaurs.

Dual headed apology

First, I would like to apologize for ever thinking, ever imagining that the difference between the two major candidates in the last Presidential Election was slim enough to vote for the third, notably minor choice. Although my vote, in NY, was in a state that the FVPOTUS won handily anyway, my Carrollian reduction of the two candidates to "tweedledum and tweedledee" now proves to be horribly incorrect. I was wrong, dead wrong, the difference between the current President and the alternative becomes more clear each day.

Second, I'd like to apologize for the somewhat excessive political fulminations as of late. I think its a reflection of #1, and the loathsome feeling that the country is not merely on a wrong track in the way that the country has stumbled, but a more fundamental change is taking place. The best analogy and I don't remember where I saw it, refers to what happened to republican Rome around 230 BC and thereafter. The war against Carthage put Rome on a path that, now in retrospect, lead from Roman ideals of a (relatively) free and open society to the rule of the Ceasars. Oswald Spengler predicted such a thing for us, but he thought it was going to happen soon, back when he wrote his book, in the 20's. I am not saying Bush wants to be an American Imperator...but then, the accumulation of power by the top of the social pyramid in Rome, and its military following the annihilation of Carthage wasn't intended to produce Julius Ceasar 200 years later, either.

We've been incredibly lucky in America, dodging the bullet, so to speak, many times. The nuclear threat of the Communists, the threat of the Fascists, the near-disintegration of our country in civil war, and other, less well known possible derailments...the two impeachments, the near-election of the very aristocratic Aaron Burr...America has done well in its history. I am getting a sense that we are in the rapids of yet another of these points of divergence and anyone who tells you what is going to be the outcome of this 20 years hence is a fool. But some of those possible outcomes, the thought of them, has touched a nerve in me...and that's why the excess of such entries as of late.

BJS was always intended to be a forum for my interests that I want to share with my friends and everyone else. I do try to be moderate, after all I could fill a lot of space talking about the potentially awesome Super Bowl matchup. But I am trying to balance things out. If I've tilted too much on political matters lately and given you a bad taste, I apologize.

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

I leave the attribution of this as an exercise for the interested reader, it shouldn't be hard to find. And if I did reveal who said it and when, well, I just think its a good quote, and I am not making any comparisons or allusions. Just some Thursday Food for Thought.

On the House of Cards Blog, Ginger has been thinking about the size of Kolvir and Arref has put in his thoughts as well...

Hmmm....I've never thought that the distance up Kolvir to the Castle was THAT large. I've had PCs walking up and down the mountain often now, I think I've ruled out, by play, it being that much of a distance.

Judging from how the walks down to the Castle have gone...maybe half of that. I've judged it takes a little more than an hour to go from the Castle gates to actually getting into the city....so maybe a 4 mile long trip. 21,000 feet...which suggests, thanks to our architect friend, that Castle Amber is 2100 feet above sea level. If I am conservative and put Castle Amber halfway up Kolvir, then the top of Kolvir in SB is 4200 feet. That's not so bad.

Referenced thanks to Arref:

"One to Grow on #3: The Afterlife"

Everyone has their own idea of what the afterlife could be, or should be like. If you could choose the form that the afterlife takes, what would it be, and why?

My vision of the ultimate afterlife that I would want is a concept that i've called the Infinite Library. Think of the Library of Babel in the famous Borges story, only better. Beautiful, barqoue decorations, endless shelves of books, reading rooms, places to talk with other readers. And the best yet, if you want, every book is a portal, a passage, or if you want to use the Amber term, a trump to the world depicted in the book...to see that world and meet the characters within (think of the old Gumby cartoons).

An afterlife, like Arref's, that you could never tire of exploring, for there would be no end.

Nine Princes in Carthage
The Guns of Achaea
The Sign of the Griffin
The Hand of Dido
The Courts of Rome

Here's another set:

Nine Princesses in Rebma
The Guns of Atlantis
Sign of the Dolphin(Kraken?)
The Hand of Moire
The Court of Amber

A line of thought that occurred to me the other day...

Nine Princes in Byzantium
The Guns of Anatolia
Sigil of the Unicorn
?
The Caliphate of Chaos
---
Nine Princes in Memphis
The Guns of Alexandria
The Sign of the Serpent
?
?

Two possible alternate Ambers that I've described here before, of course. Amberites in Byzantium and Amberites in Egypt.

Woohoo! They upgraded the IE on the computers here to 5.5, I can see webpages much better and with a lot few errors. Arref's elegant GAME Wish windows now display properly.

Lucky Duckies

Happy MLK day, everyone!

He might not have been a saint (who is, anyway?) , but definitely a man we can aspire to be more like.

A couple of new gaming Blogs have popped up...Roll the Bones, and the game-designer gathering point, Rock Scissors Blog.

The former has come up with a weekly question much akin to Ginger's WISH. I've decided to give the current Roll Call a shot.

"Everyone has played, or does play, D&D. It's the game of games, the undisputed king of roleplaying, whether one likes or dislikes it. Bearing that in mind, what's your favorite class to play, and why?"

The other class is the magic-wielder. I am keeping that vague, since between the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons and sourcebooks. In Third Edition terms, I like the Sorcerer a little more than the wizard, because of the flexibility of spell-casting. Too many times a magic user can't memorize anything but combat spells, because how would he know that other spells might be useful, and "wasting" a slot on a non-combat spell can be deadly in a martial sort of dungeon.

Although they aren't core classes, I like the Psion from the Psionics Handbook. They are even more "flexible" than the Sorcerer, using a point based system which some people have criticized for being too weak, and others too strong. I know Bruce Cordell has a bunch of variant and extended rules for Psionics in "If thoughts could kill" but I haven't felt the need to pick it up--after all, I am not actually playing a 3e D&D game right now and I have to draw the line somewhere on buying RPG stuff.