WIZ WAR ETA 2 YEARS!

BEST NEWS EVER:

Tom Jolly posted some great news for the future of Wiz-War, a game I dearly love. Briefly, he's had some sort of contract with Chessex (the dice manufacturer) for them to produce the game. As I understand it, they've held this contract for more than eight years- and still have not produced the eighth edition. He's finally in a position to cancel this contract, so the Wiz-War property is going to be snatched up by a currently-nameless company which is probably Fantasy Flight Games.

This means that the game will be back in print after a decade, the property will be in the hands of a game company that has a long-established relationship with the designer, and that it will be dripping with theme.

Huzzah!

Industrial Canal

For the record, the scary footage of water coming over the Industrial Canal is a mile or three from NOCCA. This Google Map shows the area in question; I'm not 100% positive which bridge Geraldo televised from, but it's either the Claiborne bridge or the St Claude one.

The State Street Coffee facility in this image from CNN is here.

Quick Gustav update

Woke up this morning around 5:30, watched some news. Went back to sleep, woke up again around nine.

We've been watching Fox News and streaming WWL. So far, we are cautiously optimistic and hopeful. A little worried about the loose vessels in the Industrial Canal and for the cities of Houma and the rest of Louisiana.

So far, this looks like normal, pedestrian, everyday hurricane damage — a world of difference from outright devastation. I'm hoping that we're jsut going to have power outages and expected wind damage.

Currently, NOCCA still has power. I expect to hear more about the situation at work this evening.

I'll blog more about our journey later, but so far, I honestly feel like this is a regular hurricane. We're trying to do regular out-of-town vacation-style stuff- go to the grocery store, a coffee shop, check out the local food, gaming, and thrift scenes.

Gustav sitrep

I don't know what we are doing yet. NOCCA is closing until Wednesday, PJ's is closed for about the same.

Depending on where the storm goes, we may stay here, we may have a mandatory evacuation, we may go to my mom's in Metairie, we may drive to Memphis or to Austin.


Life is uncertain. I don't want to leave my home again, just when we are about to rebuild our lives.

Pie and times

My lovely wife has made a pie of strawberries, blueberries, and either raspberries or blackberries or both. I have not eaten the whole pie; I am eating the last piece. It is tart, cool, and refreshing.

Big events in the last few days. Most notably, we're moving forward on buying a house. It's been just over a year since we came home after the storm and we are overdue to have a place of our own. On some level, I feel like we've reset to three (!) years ago. Yay, mortgages.

Some new games in the mix, most notably Agricola, which is proving rather popular in the local group.

I did not go to Gen Con, so I've had to live vicariously through my distant friends' posts about hip new RPGs and bleeding-edge boardgames that I've not heard of. I don't like being the guy not in the know, and it's hard to prep, schedule the time and assemble players on the same mental page.

Stranger than fiction

Two guys claim to have found a Bigfoot corpse... in Georgia. They have a picture of it.

So on the one hand, I can't seriously believe it's not a hoax of some kind. On the other, the coelacanth really does live. The fellows will have a press conference in about twelve hours, so either someone will prove it a hoax or an otherwise misidentified creature, or we get to rethink a few of our assumptions about science and nature.

It's still the Georgia aspect that troubles me. I mean, Bigfoot lives in Oregon or Washington state, right? I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

George Carlin, dead today

It's a terrible thing, and an awful way to start the day.


I need something to make me laugh.

Jon Stewart explains a series of tubes

I haven't seen this clip before. I knew the phrase "a series of tubes" came about as a congressman explaining the internet; Heck, there's even a Wikipedia article.

Series of Tubes

(Direct link)

Another one gone

Gary Gygax died today. I grew out of D&D by the time I went to college, but I'm still into role playing games. I don't play as much as I'd like these days.

Say what you like about the man or his games, but you can't deny his influence on the gaming industry. Really, who hasn't played D&D or known someone who has?

I don't like this trend of death lately.

Dargin tribute video

The Australian has a good photomontage with audio of Alan Dargin's memorial service in Sydney.

Four minutes.

Alan Dargin is dead

The wikipedia, along with other Australian news services, have the news. The famous Mills list broke the story for me.

This news had me feeling pretty low over the last two days and really quite sad right now. He was one of the first didj players whose name I knew, and his Bloodwood album was first didj CD I ever bought, back in the day of record stores, before the days of MP3.

The man was forty. I've never been to Australia, I never had the pleasure of hearing him in person.

I sat on the porch for a time tonight, cold and beset upon by strong winds- how very appropriate, I felt. I brought out my didjbox and played, in time with the wind, in time with my own heartbeat, playing a little for Cat to listen, more for nobody to hear.

YouTube provides:

Dogs and cats, living together

First Castro steps down. Then they find an alleged Oswald-Ruby transcript. What will tomorrow bring?

Bobby Fischer is dead

How troubling that a true chess genius died at only sixty-four (coincidence?) and that the end of his life so wrought with madness and taint. I'm suddenly reminded of Alexander, weeping for he had no worlds left to conquer. I expect to see chess solved within my lifetime.

It's cold and raining where I am now. I just ate half of a dry cheese sandwich. Earlier today I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road; bleak and moving, Pulitzer or no.

How things are doing down here

Chris Rose, a local columnist for the Times-Picayune, has a good article written with the mindset after a trip to Seattle. He saw a post-Katrina play, got to talk with some folks, and got asked the famous question: So, how's New Orleans these days? I usually answer non-natives with an optimistic "Could be better, could be worse; in some places, it's like the storm never happened. In others, it's like it happened yesterday." For me, yesterday I walked back from lunch and I passed a house that looked like it needed to be gutted. The National Guard's still-visible searching glyph had a zero in the bottom of the X: no corpses found. But spray-painted over that zero was a two.

If you want some numbers on how many people are back, the Picayune can help you again. The best numbers evidently come from households receiving mail, itself an interesting data collection point. Short answer? Around 80%, give or take.

News of the morbid

Maybe we've been watching too much CSI lately, but this story about finding an infant skeleton in a suitcase seems like a television plot-of-the-week.


UPDATE: Updated findings from a pathologist.

These things come in, er, fours

What a week. I've got one friend going in for gallbladder surgery today, another friend sliced his mouse finger open and needed five stitches, another friend of mine's father went in for a quadruple bypass earlier this week, and my grandfather was admitted for pneumonia yesterday.

Don't run with scissors, yall. There's something going around and tonight's a full moon.

Harry Lee, dead at 75

The sheriff of Jefferson Parish died earlier today. The Picayune has some good coverage. Hell, his Wikipedia article is worth reading.

He held that office for almost thirty years, nearly as long as I was aware of the word sheriff, and certainly one of the first times I ate Chinese food at their family restaurant.

UPDATE: The New York Times paints an unflattering picture, NPR also weighs in.

What's next, zombies?

Seriously, I think this opened up one of the Living Dead movies.

I swear I am not making this up, but USA Today is reporting"Peru blames meteorite for strange illness." The Beeb and the AP also have the story.

Austin garage sale today

My brother's film production company is having another garage sale to raise money for their next film project.

If you're in Austin, you should swing by:

Today, 8am-2pm

5210 Martin Avenue, in North Central Austin.

Weird news of the King

Elvis plus Finland plus Latin equals huh?

I use Gmail and love it. (If you need an invite because you're still using some archaic webmail service, shoot me a message.) I usually get my weird news via the Reuters "Oddly Enough" feed which shows up in my RSS clips in my email. This time, I got my weird news via A.Word.A.Day, which you really should subscribe to if you remotely care about language.

AWAD has a weekly theme for its words; this week was Latin-derived English words, prompting a subscriber to send in this weird little tidbit about Latin-speaking Finnish Elvis Fans. (Finns?)

Doesn't make sense, but you gotta love it.