So we’re driving NY–>San Diego with a car full of crap and I am pleased to find that in the middle of the scary Great Iowan Corn Wilderness I can tether the PC to the Sprint phone and get broadband Internet (EvDo) on a laptop plugged into the 12V socket in the car. So while Lisa is driving, I can be watching skateboarding dog videos on YouTube. The Singularity is Near, oh yes.
Many months ago I emailed a friend in Google, peeved that it was impossible to get the US version of Google Maps to print out distances in metric. Apparently, someone eventually fixed this and now there’s a cute, little “km” button:
Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.
The thing I liked most about Gygax’s fantasy stuff was that it was so obviously not based on wishy-washy English pastoralism in the Tolkien vein, but was always darker and edgier and unabashedly pulpy, in the spirit of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Robert Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. *Especially* Leiber and Vance. Of course, since Gygax’s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, a couple of generations of fans reared on Tolkienism have infected D&D with Tolkienistic tropes, but Gygax’s original D&D world, Greyhawk, is a crucially interesting reflection of both timeless fantasy archetypes and 1970s/1980s anti-establishmentarianism… and a kick-arse adventure playground of endless orc-infested dungeons and elf-infested forests in a classic vein. Gygax’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is one of the best mindfuck roleplaying scenarios I’ve ever been killed within.
There’s still Glorantha, which has also remained relatively Tolkien-Free.
Mainstream media is amazed to rediscover, every few years, that white fluffy clouds are in fact basically enormous migratory reproductive organs for bacteria super colonies.