Mike Ford is gone. The cause of his death is not yet known. Elise Matthesen found his body around two o’clock this morning. She said it looked like it was fast and easy, whatever it was.
He’d been in poor health for decades. This still comes as a terrible shock.
I keep thinking that Mike would know the right thing to say about all this. There’s a hole in the universe.
As a result of online discussions of roleplaying games, I've had it borne in on me that my approach, which I always took to be the obvious and straightforward way of doing things, has a number of peculiarities when compared with how a lot of people game. This is about one of them.
It appears that a fairly common social pattern among gamers is the 'gaming group.' This is a set of people small enough so that they can all play together in a session of an rpg, who meet—most often weekly, but sometimes biweekly, monthly, or irregularly—for the purpose of doing so. The meetings continue indefinitely, either as one long campaign, or through a succession of new campaigns. If a new campaign is started, it's because a member of the group offers to run it and is accepted; and depending on the group culture, either the nature of the new campaign is presented in advance and must receive group approval, or the GM throws the players into it and may face dissatisfaction, resistance, or open sabotage if it's not what the players want—and the player may feel entitled to engage in such sabotage. Players hardly ever face expulsion from the group, even if they do actively sabotage a campaign or make it not fun for other players; keeping the group together is a higher priority. New players can be introduced, but it takes some effort for them to fit in; most player groups don't actively seek new members.
I describe this in such detail precisely because it's not at all the way I do things, and when I first heard about it it struck me as eccentric, if not outright weird.
A distant, icy rock whose discovery shook up the solar system and led to Pluto's planetary demise has been given a name: Eris.
The christening of Eris, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, was announced by the International Astronomical Union on Wednesday. Weeks earlier, the professional astronomers' group stripped Pluto of its planethood under new controversial guidelines.
Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things. This is to document that phenomenon. This page isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it is designed to show the 'worst-case' result of people attaching so much importance to some trivial detail that they are willing to engage in the lame pastime of edit warring over an even lamer cause.
Fans of Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM) will be thrilled to learn that the 3rd Edition of this award winning role playing game will be released by ArtHaus in January 2007.
Previously published by Guardians of Order, BESM is designed to be a multi-genre anime and manga game and can accommodate nearly any setting or time period. The rules are simple to use and thus do not include an overwhelming amount of specific detail, with the task resolution system and combat engine designed to capture the fast-moving nature of anime and manga action. This element is one of the central strengths of the game, making BESM ideal for either the novice or experienced role-player.
Television star Steve Irwin has been killed while filming an underwater documentary in Queensland.
The 44-year-old, who was dubbed 'The Crocodile Hunter', was killed by a stingray barb through the chest while diving off Port Douglas.
Local diving operator Steve Edmundson said: 'Steve was hit by a stingray in the chest. He probably died from a cardiac arrest from the injury.'
Police confirmed that paramedics were flown to nearby Low Isles, where Irwin was taken to be treated, but he died before they arrived.
Irwin, who runs the world famous Australia Zoo, is survived by his wife Terri and their two young children Bindi Sue and Bob Clarence.
Speaking to Sky Television, Queensland Tourism Minister Margaret Keech said: 'It's a dreadful loss for the tourism industry and for nature conservation.'
'Everybody who met Steve was impressed with his energy and his enthusiasm,' she said.
Irwin made almost 50 'Crocodile Hunter' documentaries, which earned him worldwide acclaim for his dare-devil stunts with animals.
From indie comics icon Brian Wood (Demo, Channel Zero, GLOBAL FREQUENCY) and up-and-coming Italian artist Riccardo Burchielli (John Doe) comes the first volume of DMZ, collecting the first 5 issues of the series about the ultimate embedded war journalist trapped in a most unlikely war zone: the streets of New York City.
In the near future, America's worst nightmare has come true. With military adventurism overseas bogging down the Army and National Guard, the U.S. government mistakenly neglects the very real threat of anti-establishment militias scattered across the 50 states. Like a sleeping giant, Middle America rises up and violently pushes its way to the shining seas, coming to a standstill at the line in the sand — Manhattan or, as the world now knows it, the DMZ.
Matty Roth, a naïve young man and aspiring photojournalist, lands a dream gig following a veteran war journalist into the heart of the DMZ. Things soon go terribly wrong, and Matty finds himself lost and alone in a world he's only seen on television. There, he is faced with a choice: try to find a way off the island, or make his career with an assignment most journalists would kill for. But can he survive in a war zone long enough to report the truth?
An animal found dead in the United States may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.
The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 near Turner, Maine, on Saturday. It had apparently been struck by a car while chasing a cat.
The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.
Sorry about my late posting for the final day of Gen Con. Anyone who's gone knows that the post-Gen Con crash can be brutal, and mine was no exception.
Here’s a trivial summer project to keep me and you occupied. Take a picture of bottled beverages, include where I was drinking, and blog them. I like to drink different kinds of drinks, and bottled drinks are usually 100 yen to 170 yen. There are varieties and they’re cheap enough to try all these different varieties. I’ll make a post with five drinks each.
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.
By the third day of Gen Con, the fatigue is really starting to show for some folks. But for most, it's a happy sort of fatigue, a daze offset by the combined momentum and energy of tens of thousands of other people still meeting, gaming, exploring, and having fun.
We’ve got plenty of more coverage from today, but let’s go to the big topic first: without further ado (a phrase I have heard many times in the past few hours), I’ll give you your 2006 ENnie winners.
I know, I know...it's been nearly a week since I said that I would write about my trip to Wizard World Chicago on here. So enough of this waiting around shit...
Well, Day One of Gen Con Indy draws to a close, and what a day it was! We’ve got plenty of pictures (more of which will be added quite soon--don't worry we've got plenty more from today) to share with those of you who couldn’t quite make it (captions to come later), and a nice recap of the day’s events.
"When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there's a general pattern: sending files. That's one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also 'send' requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It's the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it's getting really vague and nobody really knows what they're talking about any more. Blah.