So far, Google Wave looks intriguing - it certainly has potential. It reminds me of forums with tree structures - i.e. forums where replies to a specific post are added below that post instead of at the end of the thread. But its superior editing features allow Google to be far more flexible, and make it possible to successively make a particular Wave (discussion/document) more streamlined and coherent.

To my mind, the main drawback of Google Wave is that it becomes both slow and unwieldy once it grows beyond a certain size - let's say 150 individual posts (or "blips"). It takes a long time for the entire Wave to load, and at some points when I tried to add new text I watched the words appear at a rate of one letter per 5 seconds. Hopefully they will add more servers to the system in the future to make it run more smoothly.

I think Google Wave is ideal for relatively short and focused brainstorming sessions involving multiple participants - especially since everybody always has access to the document later on and can edit it as time progresses.

Oh, and speaking of which - I have created a Wave of my own which is dedicated to the discussion of Urbis. If you have your own Google Wave account and are interested in gaming, check it out!

A recent RPGNet thread (login required to view) has made me contemplate how to make the Cthulhu Mythos work in a modern-day or near-future term. Some claim that the Mythos loses its horror as notions of living in a vast, uncaring universe become common. I disagree, and thus I present two approaches through which the Mythos can be brought into a new focus for modern times.


One approach is to emphasize the concept of memes. Let's say that the human mind is an emergent phenomenon arising from the memes which have "infected" the relevant brain - something which some proponents of the concept of memes have actually argued. The memes someone has accumulated over the span of one's life determine one's behavior to a large degree.

And the influence of some of the Great Old Ones also spreads as memes - and they are detrimental to the human mind, either rendering them into sociopaths or causing highly atavistic behavior. This is how cults arise and spread. This is also why Mythos tomes are so dangerous - they cause Mythos memes to propagate.

Now, it's possible to have some measure of resistance to Mythos memes, depending on your current personality (=current accumulation of memes) and the strength of exposure. However, being an open-minded person actually weakens your memetic defenses. If you readily accept ideas and concepts from other cultures, then Mythos memes have a far easier time to get a hold of you.

The implication is clear: Being a close-minded reactionary is actually your best defense against the Mythos! This seems to be in line with the original stories, since Lovecraftian horror was always a reactionary one - with the added advantage that we can ignore the blatant racism in his stories.

And now, thanks to globalization and the spread of democracy and the internet, the whole of humanity becomes more and more open-minded - which in turn makes the Mythos memes easier and easier to spread. By being progressive and tolerant, we are only embracing the End Times faster.


My inspiration for this was the introductory fiction in Delta Green - the final transmission of (retired) Major General Reginald Fairfield. In addition to warning of the dangers of the Mythos and its willing patsies, he also rants about MTV and "filth on television". And this doesn't make the fiction any less evocative, even if you disagree with his politics.

I think my point is that to truly effective, the implications of the Cthulhu Mythos must offend our sensibilities and values in some way. In Lovecraft's time, this worked via invoking a vista of a vast, uncaring universe and denying humanity the status as a special snowflake. But today, among many of us with a non-religious bend, a vast, uncaring universe where humanity is nothing special is already pretty well established and thus loses its horror.

But a lot of us pride ourselves in being tolerant, progressive, and open-minded - open to new ideas. Thus, it is these values that the Cthulhu Mythos must show as being wrong and dangerous to be effective in a modern setting.


Another approach works via Transhumanism. Old Castro said that as the End Times approach, "mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy". This could represent not only a merely behavioral change - perhaps mankind is changing itself on a more fundamental level.

We might think now that we can modify humans a bit to become stronger, smarter, and longer-lived yet still remain essentially "human" like we understand it today. But what if this isn't true? What if even small modifications radically alter human thought patterns, and turn them into something altogether... stranger?

We needn't even turn to genetic engineering. After all, aren't we already pumping our bodies full with drugs to be more "competitive"? And giving our children medications to make them more docile - accepting or ignoring the fact that their brains might be permanently altered in the process? And just what will the pharmacorps come up with next to "improve" us?

Imagine that you are an old man who once had a happy family, but whose wife and children died and most of whose grandchildren don't visit any more - and those who do visit do nothing but throw parties at his house with their gangster buddies, wreck his furniture and mementos, and mock him for his old-fashioned ways. And he can't keep them out of the house because they have keys and simply break in even if he changed the locks. His mind is fading, and he only survives on the meager scraps left by them, and he lives in filth and vermin because there is nobody who cares about him enough to keep him clean and fed and healthy. He contemplates suicide in his few moments of lucidity, but he has become too weak for even that.

This old man represents normal human beings as the End Times approaches and more and more humans are changing into something else.


So, what do you think? Do these approaches for the Cthulhu Mythos work for more modern times and settings?

Now I have to figure out what to do with it...

In this RPGNet thread, poster "Bailywolf" had an interesting concept for a game setting.

Imagine that there was some powerful entity offering various people vast power with which to change the world - but in return it would transform them bodily into grotesque monsters. Furthermore, it will tell those it makes the offer to that there is a fixed total number of people it will transform - so if you refuse the offer, it will go to someone else instead who might be less inclined to use his power ethically and responsibly.

You were going to use your power responsibly - right?


This kind of campaign framework could be very interesting for a supers campaign, as it can come with a lot of pathos. The characters might start out with noble intentions - accepting the transformation so that the power won't go to outright villains who could wreak devastating havoc with it. But they will be shunned and rejected by society for their appearance and for the crimes of their brethen who are monstrous in mind as well as body - and how long can they maintain their nobility under such circumstances?

For some further ideas, maybe the power of the transformation works like the Essence shards in the setting of Exalted - there is only a limited number of them, but they are basically indestructible and when one carrier dies it immediately seeks out the next host. Thus, there will be a race to kill the "bad guys" in possession of this power so that the power can migrate to "worthier" hosts - while the "bad guys" will want to get to newly-erupted monsters in order to recruit them to their side for protection.

Some time ago, I read "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and enjoyed it a lot. However, their new book "SuperFreakonomics" has attracted some rather devastating critiques on their chapter on global warming, such as this one.

I guess they jumped the shark the same way Michal Crichton did with his State of Fear.

Article on Wired:

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

Basically, there appears to be a rather large movement of people convinced that vaccination causes autism, despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence supporting their claims. And their refusal to vaccinate their children causes plenty of children to die - not just their own children, but also others they come into contact with.

I guess I can put this up in line with "Evolution is a Fraud", "Global Warming isn't happening", and "Abstinence-Only Sex Education works!".

Continued from this post.

Now we come to the major ongoing projects the city has running. With a solid base of 25 seeds, I choose the maximum of 5:

• Peaceful Nuclear Explosions
  
• Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program
  
• Chinese Say They're Building 'Impossible' Space Drive
  
• RAK Convention and Exhibition Centre by OMA
  
• The Army's Totally Serious Mind-Control Project
  

( Read more... )


Well, that's it for the basic framework of ideas and concepts that the generator has provided - and I have plenty of material now that I can flesh out further now. I hope you enjoyed the ride - and if you have any ideas and suggestions for the Random Nations Generator, I am all ears!

This series of posts is intended to demonstrate how to use the Random Nations Generator at the Arcana Wiki to flesh out a locale. My goal is to both show the usefulness of this tool as a source of inspiration and to encourage others to contribute to the Arcana Wiki by adding new entries which feed into the generator.

For this demonstration, I will use the city-state of Nimdenthal as an example, which I developed for my own Urbis campaign setting. For the record, Urbis uses many of the tropes and elements of fantasy - especially D&D - but combines this with social and technological elements of Industrial Age Western Europe via a magical industrial revolution which continues to transform the world.

So far, I have written the following about Nimdenthal:

"Population: 723,510

This city is infamous for surrendering to the invading armies of Negroth the Doombringer without a fight, and is still hated by the citizens of the other Flannish cities as a result, which suffered far more under his brief reign than Nimdenthal did. That the army of Nimdenthal was hardly able to withstand the might of Negroth's forces on their own is conveniently forgotten. Many other cities still levy large tolls against the goods from Nimdenthal, or boycott them outright. As a result, the people of Nimdenthal take an almost perverse pride in being self-sufficient."

"Negroth the Doombringer", for the record, was one of the last of the stereotypical Evil Overlord types in the setting, and his defeat resulted in a shift from the traditional pseudo-medieval feudal society to a more modern one - complete with revolutions that chased the aristocratic rulers away. However, all this was more than two hundred years ago within the timeline of the setting, and the other people in the region likely wouldn't be able to keep a grudge against Nimdenthal for so long if the city hadn't found new ways of aggravating them - and thus reminding them of their earlier "transgression" of being cheese-eating surrender monkeys against an overwhelming military onslaught. I'll keep this in mind as I interpret the results of the generator.

( Read more... )

To be continued...

So this is what happens when you add robotics to pillows...

Technically, it's not NSFW, but it certainly has some rather disturbing implications...

Story here.


I have to admit, this decision mystifies me. I mean, as much as I like the guy, he's only been in office for nine months - and his most important foreign policy accomplishment is that he's not George W. Bush.

Which is a huge accomplishment, don't take me wrong - but still, is it really worth a Nobel Peace Price? Shouldn't they have waited a few more years of his work in office before making such a decision?

On the upside, Amazon is finally making the Kindle available around the world.

On the downside, people outside of the USA apparently have both a more limited selection and have to pay significantly higher prices for Kindle ebooks.


Oh, and for anyone who lives out of the USA and has used the old gift certificate trick to get around the geographical limitations: That trick does no longer work. As I've discovered this morning.

So say hello to a more limited selection and higher prices...

Interesting article from the year 1900.

All in all, fairly accurate too. Though it's a shame about the pneumatic tubes...

The Tangency Open RPGNet sub-forum (which requires login to view) has recently started using a new tag for certain very special topics:

Pleasing To The Ebon Dragon


This amused me greatly, though you have to be a fan of the Exalted RPG to understand it...

I have it.

I bought it yesterday afternoon in a local bookstore. And today I'll be going on a 7.5 h train trip as I cross Germany from West to East. Plenty of time to read it...

As a followup to this entry:

Well, the preliminary results are in, and they are about what I expected - though I'm not exactly happy about them. The results break down as following:

CDU/CSU: 33.8% (of which the CDU gets 27.3% and the CSU gets 6.5%)
SPD: 23.0%
FDP: 14.6%
Linke: 11.9%
Grüne: 10.7%
Piraten: 2.0%

Let's look at what this means for the individual parties (again, compare with my previous entry).

( Read more... )

Today, there are federal elections here in Germany. But somehow, there isn't any excitement about them in the air. I mean, electoral campaigns in Germany tend to be much, much shorter than in the USA - only 8 weeks or so, although politicians tend to make potshots at each other long before that. Even so, the whole campaign seems subdued this time. Heck, the German media had far more comprehensive reports about the American elections than about ours.

Part of the reason is that the two largest parties - which usually drive the election - have actually been together as a government coalition in the last four years. So they can't criticize each other too harshly, or else others will ask: "Why didn't you do anything about this issue, then?"

But anyway, let's look at the parties involved in this election:

( Read more... )

This article on the Russian apartment bombings of 1999 was originally published by GQ magazine, but they decided not to publish it on their website. They are also not selling their current issue in Russia. Understandably perhaps, as it has quite a few allegations that the current Russian government can't be glad to hear aired in public.

Is it just me, or does Vladimir Putin seem more and more like a supervillain from a James Bond movie?

Continued from my previous posts on this topic.


- I've discovered that the iRex makes a noise while it is on - a very slight noise just at the edge of hearing, but a noise nonetheless. It sounds somewhat like the noises of an operating fax machine, only at a much lower volume. It drove me nuts during a few evenings when I wanted to sleep and couldn't figure out where the noise was coming on. My alternate theory was that somewhere in my apartment there was an old bottle of juice with a not-quite-closed cap whose contents were slowly fermenting and generating gases...

- Yesterday, I tested how long a full battery charge lasts, and I discovered that it lasts not quite long enough for a lengthy conference - you need to plug it into a power source. I had bought an USB charger for this purpose (the device recharges via its USB port), but wasn't able to do that for long enough during the conference. So on the train journey back to Aachen, I plugged the iRex into the laptop to recharge it (which I had been able to recharge fully), and probably looked pretty silly doing so.

Ironically, the conference was about a major German research initiative about improving the performance of Lithium Ion batteries - the same type of batteries the iRex uses. So you could say I have a direct personal stake in this project. And the iRex made for a nice conversation piece at the conference...

- It is likely that one of the reasons the battery discharges so quickly is its stylus-sensitive surface. You can switch that off, but you have to muck around with the settings to do that. It would be much more convenient if you could do this with a simple button click in the main menu...

- A "standby mode" would also be nice to have. The Kindle has this - you press two buttons simultaneously, and it doesn't react to any input until you press those two buttons again. You can leave it in this way for days without its battery charge decreasing significantly. The iRex is either on or off - and in the "on" mode, its battery drains like crazy...

- One very nice feature of the iRex is that you can open several documents simultaneously - they appear as tabs on the right side, and a simple click with the stylus (or with some further clicking in the main menu) you can switch between them. The Kindle doesn't permit that - if you want to switch between two documents, you have to close the old one and then find the new one in the main document list on your Kindle - which, as I have mentioned, doesn't permit you any way of organizing them into subfolders. And if you want to switch back to your previous document, you have to do all that again.

- Unfortunately, you need this feature to deal with a rather annoying bug. When I try to open relatively large documents (I have tested this frequently with the 41 MB Eclipse Phase RPG), then after the device attempts to load it it simply returns to the folder without displaying it either on the screen or on a tab. The only way around this which I have figured out is to wait five minutes or so, and then try to open one or more smaller PDFs. Eventually, the large PDF will show among the tabs as well.



I've pointed out a large number of problems with the iRex in this and my previous posts. Does this mean that I regret my purchase?

In a word, no. It is still highly useful for reading all sorts of documents which I use both at work and in my free time. The stylus-based annotation function is very useful indeed. But I can only recommend this device to others if you can not only justify purchasing this device now, but also believe that you will have the available budget in two years or so to purchase a newer, better model.

Perhaps iRex will address some of these issues with future software updates. But right now, potential buyers need to be aware of them before making their buying decision.