/var/log/orava

I’m not really happy with Gallery. The built-in themes either look crappy or are full of bugs (or both), the permission system is confusing and seems to work in a wonky fashion, and it has way more functionality than I really need or want.

Anyone know of any alternate software for running a web photo gallery? I’m reluctant to try Flickr, for a variety of reasons, I’d rather host photos on my own server. I don’t need much special functionality, just something that looks at least decent and is usable – both of which are quite subjective things, of course.

Maybe I’ll just have to roll my own, if nothing else surfaces. Or play around some more with Gallery, to see if I can get it to act more to my liking.

“… time, Doctor Freeman?”

While we’re not in Big Brother -ville yet, it’s a slippery slope, as the recent censorship idiocy here in Finland shows. Ah, the good old “won’t anyone think of the children!” argument, where silly little things like freedom of speech and due process get trampled by the obvious demons of “child pornography!”. Of course, if you’re against this censorship, you’re a supporter of child pornography! Sigh. The fact that this is a secret list, which apparently contains lots of non-child pornography pages too, seems not matter too much to some people. History has shown us where things like this tend to lead – but knowledge of history doesn’t feature very high on the list of these people, either. “We have to save the children!!!”

I could write lots about this, but better writers than me have already done so. It should not come as a suprise that so many people are ignorant of the real implications of all this – but the fact that one of those (willfully) ignorant people is our Minister of Communications, Suvi Lindén, is sad. I get some little satisfaction from the fact that as of now, over 10,000 people have signed an address asking for her resignation, while only about 4500 people voted for her originally. The sad fact of democracy is that now and then, utter morons get elected into office. Usually they do no harm there. Usually.

In an alternate reality we’d have a Gordon Freeman clone with a huge arsenal storming the senate and kicking ass. Here and now, we’ll have to do without gravity guns and general mayhem. Maybe that’s for the best.

Speaking of dystopias and firepower…

…yes, I finished Half-Life 2 this weekend. Quite a ride, and the end cliffhanger was nicely done. Now all I have to do is resist the temptation to buy the Orange Box until I have time to actually play Episodes 1 & 2. Not this week, at least – I have an Exalted game to prep and some other stuff to do. Next week, maybe. I can resist. Yup. No problem. Sure.

That took care of Sunday. Saturday we had a VTES tournament run by Teemu; was a lot of fun, and even though my Anarch Daughters voter failed in the first two rounds (in first because of bad table seating, in second because of abysmally bad card draws), it did manage to get me a game win in the third round. Not enough for the finals, but still, a game win is a game win. I have some small tweak ideas for that deck, but nothing major; I suspect it’s close to as good as I can make it, without totally changing some major focus.

After the game I shambled to a friend’s place where a blini party was in full swing. Blinis plus bubbly wine, wonderful combo.

Added a bit later: this post cuts right down to the heart of the censorship debate, tongue-in-cheek as it may be (in Finnish).

On Friday, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield published the first “episode” of Freak Angels, their new collaborative free web comic project. Ellis is one of my favorite comics writers (Transmetropolitan rocks like few things do), and the art on FA looks lovely. Some sort of British post-apoc deal, with the Midwich Cuckoos thrown into the mix – as the protagonists, it seems. Or something. I’ll be following this.

For a change, I spent most of Sunday playing Half-Life 2. I had almost forgotten how fantastic a game this was. I’d previously played this up to the point where you fight a helicopter gunship under a huge railway bridge (on the coastal highway), now I started the game from scratch and actually got past that point by midnight or so. It’s a lot faster when you know/remember what you need to do – but now I’m again in unknown territory.

Good single-player games can be a huge amount of fun. The original Half-Life was one of the very few major games I’ve actually completed. Took a long, long time… but still. HL2 is, if possible, an even better game; I’d venture to claim that it’s currently the best FPS out there. Yes, there are better graphics to be found (though HL2 is very pretty, too), but HL2 has a great story and a huge amount of variability. You don’t get stuck in a rut, mowing down the same group of bad guys on levels that all look the same. Here you go from hydrofoil chases to dune buggies, from whimsical weaponless story interludes and physics puzzles to full-out firefight brawls. Oh, and the Gravity Gun rocks.

Special positive mention goes to the character of Alyx Vance. An actual smart female character in a computer game, and one who dresses and acts like… a normal person. Who’d have thunk. Oh, and can’t forget Dog. Dog rocks.

At the moment, HL2, Baldur’s Gate 2 and System Shock 2 top my personal “best computer games ewah!” list. Maybe it’s the number “2” that does it? Dunno.

Ever since we moved to the new house, we’ve had intermittent problems with our ADSL connection. The connection is a “ServerLink” 8/1M connection from Netsonic (includes static IP, the critical component), with the actual connection being provided by Elisa. In the beginning what happened was that every now and then, the line would drop and stay down until the ADSL box was rebooted – really nasty if you’re running a server. We switched the old ADSL box for a Telewell one, and that one is able to recover from the drops; now all that happens is that the line drops every now and then, and then recovers some 30 sec - 1 min later. For a lot of uses this is quite ok, but since it usually kills ssh connections and (most critically :) kills Eve connections, it’s still a headache.

I’ve tried looking over the ADSL connection settings, and while I don’t understand all the switches there everything seems ok. The logs just say “carrier dropped” or something like that. Hmph.

I finally emailed the other people who life at our house company (“taloyhtiö”, whatever that is in English). As a reply I was told that another guy had also had problems a year ago, he had contacted Elisa and had been told that since our switching center is in Hämeenkylä (quite a distance away), they cannot guarantee an error-free 8M transfer rate. They had reduced the max bandwidth for that guy to 3.5M and the problems had gone away. I’ll have to ask Elisa about this, and if the above is still true then do the same for us. We don’t need the max download rate all that often anyway, and we’d much rather have a steady, slower link than a slightly flaky faster one. A bit annoying, in any case – why do they sell an 8M connection to an area they apparently know can’t handle it?

Serves us right, of course, for living in the middle of the forest…

In other news: spent Sunday playing VTES at a friend’s place along with lots of other people, was fun. My Lasombra combat deck sucked on all too many levels, it’s going back into the redesign pile. The Samedi deck is doing ok-ish, but is having flow problems – have some ideas about that. Daughters of Cacophony anarch voter is starting to work nicely, but is suffering from master jam (understandable, since it had a ton of them). Will have to figure out what to cut.

Oh, and I have to note that even though the recent Superbowl left me cold (I’m not much into watching organized sports, and have no idea how football rules even work), I’m finding another sports event very entertaining: the US presidential race. He’s running for the finish line! But no, she has him tackled, there’s only a pile of flailing hands and feet visible! Who’s that mystery man, sprinting past the defense line? And now for a word from our sponsors!

I’m personally rooting for Barack Obama. He’s smart, has lots of views I can agree with (not all, of course), and is an excellent public speaker. For example, check out this speech about religion and atheism (40min video stream). Besides the fact that it takes balls to talk about religion’s role in politics at all in the current climate, the fact that he talks about atheists and evangelists both in a non-confrontational manner (barring some pointed and deserved digs) is a big plus. Something about his measured call for discourse, reason and moderation on all sides strikes a chord with me. As an atheist, this is a sensibly religious person I feel I could have a real talk with. Which is something.

This is all from the sidelines, of course, since I can’t vote in the U.S. elections. To be honest, all three of the current main candidates (Obama, Clinton and McCain) seem to have something to recommend them, none of them feels like an idiot. So for the first time in 8 years, there’s a real chance the U.S. might get a reasonably good president. Whoever that ends up being.

In any case, most of the world is watching.

Woot, I just got the news that Greg Stolze has confirmed he’s coming to Ropecon as GoH this year. Seriously cool news, Greg is the mastermind behind the new “rpg.net darling” game Reign, as well as co-author to the best modern occult game I know of, Unknown Armies. In addition to that, he has contributed to lots of gaming books during his career, written a pile of novels, and in general been a creative powerhouse. Will be nice to meet him in person.

The thing with Greg is that he’s a very good and engaging writer, in addition to being good at rpg design. His books are good reads, in addition to playing well. After chugging through some game books that are great as games but read like school textbooks, that’s something I really appreciate.

With the other “major” GoH being Chris Pramas from Green Ronin, this looks to be an interesting Ropecon (at least from my point of view). I love what Green Ronin are doing with the new systemless Freeport books, I hope that becomes a trend.

Oh, and the latest Reign supplement (#6, “The Popular and Unique”) came out of ransom today. A download link will probably appear on the supplements page soon, in the meantime here’s a direct link to the zip file. Greg has also said that he’s working on publishing the supplements in some kind of collected and printed form for those of us who would also like a printed version. Nice.

We’re playing a small test game of Reign at the moment and it’s working well. In addition to exploring how the Company rules work, we’re trying to deal with a table that apparently is actually a demon egg, rival guilds, old enemies, and the general hassle of trying to run a black-market “mercantile” operation while studying magic on the side. Good stuff.

I’ve been reading some Antarctica-related stuff lately, centering around Chaosium’s massive Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign book. I’m about halfway through at the moment, and… wow, it’s quite something. Insane amount of detail, and very inspired expansion on the original short stories “At the Mountains of Madness” (Lovecraft) and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (Poe). I’m still not sure I’ll be up to running this at any point – it would take a lot of time, and a group of players willing to put up with lots of 1930’s period detail and a fairly slow, deliberate pace; not all that much pulp-style heroics here. It’s something I’ll have to think about some more.

In any case, the sheer amount of background detail in the campaign book is mind-boggling, the appendixes themselves take up about 150 pages. It’s also very well written, and shows a deep love for the subject material. As an adventure, it also feels like it should play well – there are some bits I would tweak and some railroady bits, but on the whole it has a nice flow to it, with lots of plot twists. It’s no wonder that this thing is often nominated when talking about the all-time best roleplaying campaigns; it’s right up there with Warhammer’s “The Enemy Within” and other classics of the genre (with the caveat that I haven’t actually read Enemy Within yet, I’m just told that it’s really really good).

In order to get even more background detail, I’m also reading The Lost Men, the real-life story of Shackleton’s ill-fated Ross Sea supply expedition of 1914-1916. Fascinating stuff, and in parts unbelievable; it seems a miracle, and testament to pure human spirit, that there were any survivors considering all the poor planning and supplies. The whole “we don’t need to prepare, we’re British gentlemen!” thing seems quite alien to my modern mindset, especially since I’ve done a bit of traveling in difficult conditions myself. The thought of going into a virtually unknown, utterly deadly locale with piss-poor planning and sad lack of proper supplies seems suicidal. And was, apparently.

Another sort-of game prep book I’m thinking of getting is Mountains of Madness: A Scientist’s Odyssey in Antarctica, an account of a modern-day paleontologist’s journey to the real-world site of Lovecraft’s story. Might be interesting.

It would be nice to visit Antarctica one day. So many other interesting spots to see also, of course, so hard to say if I’ll ever get around to it – but I’ve always had a fascination for the more barren and hostile areas of the world.

In other news… we had another Exalted session, a bit dungeon-crawly but that was by intention, and was fun for a change of pace and as a chance to get more to grips with the combat system. We still didn’t get it quite right, I forgot about minimum “ping” damage and about natural soak values. Duh. Oh well, next time…

This weekend had me in Turku again, at yet another knife technique seminar. This time time around we spent the weekend practicing the care and feeding of the bali-song (butterfly knife). Apparently the damn things feed on blood, judging by the amount of nicks and cuts we accumulated – at one point we joked that we should have a “sponsored by Hansaplast!” sticker somewhere. Had fun, though. As a weapon the butterfly knife is not that hot; it’s sadly lacking in speed and ease of use compared to modern folding knives, and offers no real benefits of any kind technically. Sure, you can use some of the opening techniques as secondary attacks, but that’s pretty borderline. On the other hand, in more primitive times it was a folding knife that you could (with practice) open with one hand, something that’s quite a feat without modern-day mechanical production skills and tolerances. In the modern day, its main point is “it looks really cool”, and it acts as a fun stress toy and finger nimbleness exercise. One that needs focus to play with, of course, unless you actually like the sight of your own blood.

Considering that I had never played with one before, I’m pretty happy with getting some (very basic) proficiency in ten or so of the basic opening styles over the weekend, and with only getting one cut that required bandages during the process.