Thu Feb 07 2002 10:54:
Hey hey! We finally did a release of Eyebrowse!
Thu Feb 07 2002 10:54:
Hey hey! We finally did a release of Eyebrowse!
Thu Feb 07 2002 14:11:
Envelope Watch II: Day One! I sent off an envelope to Mike's new place in Maine, containing a gift I've been meaning to give to him for over a year.
Thu Feb 07 2002 14:36:
Everyone at work is in a really good mood: we just had a great pep talk in the form of a conference call from an employee of a new client. For years, their software development had been done with little coordination or cross-department communication, and the resulting mess was recently exacerbated by an attempt to use Rational's suite of apps. They switched to SourceCast and cleaned up the mess within two months, and now they're ridin' high. It felt really good to hear about their success with software I helped write.
Thu Feb 07 2002 18:45:
Wow, my day stayed good. I implemented an awesome new feature (project and category tree display) which
was much easier to implement than I'd thought it was going to be, and
which gave me some good ideas for a redesign I need to do.
Thu Feb 07 2002 19:31:
"Someday soon I'm gonna tell the moon about the crying game."
What the hell does the moon care about the crying game?
I have a couple souvenirs from my trip to Texas. I have a little
beanbag-type penguin which my mother bought me. I have
some books I bought at Half Price Books (more of which anon). I have a
Nutra-Grain bar Andy's mother gave me which I still haven't eaten (not
technically a souvenir). I have a garter which I caught at Kristin's
wedding (it was the second garter they threw; they kept shucking
garters off of Kristin's leg and throwing them into the crowd, which
was pretty funny).
I also have a reciept from HEB (a Texas supermarket) which I've
been hanging on to solely to mention it here. Our first day in Texas
we were at a hotel which offered a not very impressive continental
breakfast, so we went across the corner to HEB, bought a bunch of
food, and invited the aunts and cousins over to partake. I fed about
10 people for $33, which was pretty good. Reproduced below is the list
of food from the receipt:
QUAKR GRANOLA BR CHOC PNT In particular, I would like to draw your attention to this item:
HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR
It was a block of cheddar cheese. It cost $1.95. It was shaped like
the state of Texas. My mother decided that she had to have it, so I
bought it for her. For all I know she has it still.
Robert had earlier expounded his hypothesis that Texas is the only
state in the union in which the citizens think of themselves primarily
as citizens of their state (as opposed to American citizens or
citizens of a particular city). He siezed upon the Texas cheese as
evidence of this. Yup, everyone wants a piece of the Texas cheese to bolster his or her own personal argument. Not for any other reason, though--it's mild cheddar, and what fun is mild cheddar?
Thu Feb 07 2002 19:43:
DANNON LA CREME STRAWBERR
HEB HEAVY WT. CUTLERY COM
*B* HEB PRINTED PLATE 6 7
TROPICANA PURE PEMIUM WIT
PHILLY SFT CRM CHEESE REG
PHILLY SOFT CREAM CHEESE
MICKELBERRY HAM 8OZ PKG
SMOKED TURKEY BREAST 8OZ
INGLEHOFF MUSTARD SWEET H
HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR
205 BAGELS TX ONION 2953_
BABY SWISS DELICO SLICED
LARGE BUTTER CROISSANTS 6
Palladium has a lot of interesting features. It comes with a
campaign setting which looks fun and full of variety. The alignment
system is really great; it captures the way people act a lot better
than the AD&D system does.
The book describes about five different magic systems; they're all
pretty interesting, though most of them seem not to be very
powerful. The main one (generic RPG wizard/priest magic) looks really
well designed, and the instructions indulge in some great bashing of
the annoying AD&D magic system:
Most of my complaints have to do with the book itself rather than
the game system. The sections are organized haphazardly, as though the
book were written as hypertext and then the hypertext were
automatically traversed to create a book.
The writing style is florid, sometimes, hilariously so, as in this
masterpiece of redundancy:
And the Tonight's Episode-y:
There's a new edition of the Palladium rulebook out, which
allegedly fixes the stylistic problems; if that's so then my main
complaints would be the paucity of supplied monsters and the seeming
weakness of most of the magic systems. But no one's making you play a
diabolist.
Thu Feb 07 2002 21:44:
Another Texas-related entry. At Half Price Books in Houston, I made
quite a find: a copy of an old 1983 manual for Palladium, a
role-playing game I'd vaguely heard of. It cost $10, which is a lot
for a Half Price Book, but it was in good condition so I bought it.
Nor does the wizard forget a spell upon casting it. This is his
life, spell magic and study... To forget a spell could mena his death
and is a fairly ludicrous idea. This is his occupation, his
livelihood, he is no longer an apprentice... To suggest that he would
forget a spell is like saying a soldier might forget how to use his
sword.
"Generally, dwarves and elves treat each other with an air that is so
cold that it could freeze an iceberg."
"The assassin, like the mercenary fighter, is a sword for hire; their
specialty: death."
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