Month: May 2004

Categories
Oddities

Dothan flavoured chips

Intel’s Dothan sets sail (CNET): Apparently, Intel’s next generation mobile chip design shares my name (yeah, yeah, the spelling is different. Americans).

Intel on Monday formally launched three new laptop chips and outlined a push to equip more consumer-oriented notebooks with wireless networking.

As expected, Intel launched three new Pentium M processors–the 735, 745 and 755, running at 1.7GHz, 1.8GHz and 2GHz, respectively. The chips are the first to bear a new naming scheme focusing less on the clock speed and instead taking into account other performance characteristics, such as cache memory and bus speeds.

The chips are also the first produced with a new 90-nanometer manufacturing process. Intel originally hoped to launch the new design, known as Dothan, in February, but delayed the launch because of glitches.

Categories
Roleplaying

Real Men Don’t play GURPS

Real Men Don’t Play GURPS (or Vampire, for that matter), an adaptation of the classic
Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal to gamer culture. Probably only properly entertaining if you liked the original, which I read as a wee tot, in a kid’s computer course (advanced Basic, I think it was), back in the days all the programs were typed in.

Categories
Comics

Comics Blogs in Profusion

I dug up a lot of Comics blogs this weekend (and today), following a chance link from Matt Rossi. I think he originally linked to this one, but from there I wondered about and found The Forager, Peiratikos
Cognitive Dissonance, and Grotesque Anatomy. This in addition to Ninth Art (which the others make fun of), and LinkMachineGo and BugPowder. And all of these I added to my subscriptions in Bloglines, which is my latest news aggregator.

From Peiratikos, I got a link to a review of Ministry of Space that describes Warren Ellis as in many ways a deeply conservative person often mistaken, on the basis of subject matter that embraces the omnisexual, the ultraviolent and the futuristic, for an upholder of the avant-garde. It’s clear that Ellis has a solid core of middle class decency behind the juvenile facade of hard bastard he reflexively adopts. Both of these make him well-suited for working in commercial comics and appealing to the kids. I also agree with the reviewer’s assesment of him as a good writer, but not a great one.

And also, Jonathan Lethem on Jack Kirby’s seventies Marvel comics. Link from Andrew Rilstone and LMG.

Categories
Roleplaying

SuperHeroquest

Bruce’s Glorantha Page includes various Heroquest/Glorantha stuff, including ideas and rules for using Heroquest to run superheroes and Buffy the vampire slayer games.

Categories
Software and Programming

GM’s Second Brain

GM’s Second Brain

is a Java application for writing notes in a web format (not a web page, but a set of nodes with hyperlinks – a graph – Although you can export te results to HTML).

It’s sort-of like an outliner, except that it eschews the tree-structure outliners are so keen on, in favor of a messier and more freeform network.

The programmer, John Ughrin, explains:

This Program is designed to help Game Masters keep their heads, and to
allow easy access to information in play and to allow them add to that
information easily during play.

Basically, you can think of a campaign or adventure as a web of ideas
and thoughts. You can define the nature of each "node" in the web as its
"type". You can define your own types, and little icons to go with them.

…snip…

I was inspired to write this program after folks on the Fudge mailing
list kept mentioning how its hard to keep writing adventures/stories in
a campaign where a combat wouldn’t take up most of the session. It
occured to me that the format most of us use for writing campaign
information isn’t the most efficient. This is what my brain wanted, so I
whipped it up.