Time to break-up the monotony of this blog with a picture. Here’s a Trump that Amir Arad has done for my character in the new Amber campaign we both just started playing in, run by Joy Bartov. He (the character) is called Maddoc, and so far the highlight of his career was managing to insult Benedict on their first meeting.
Jeez. All I did was demand that he "Explain!". My players do that all the time to my NPCs…
Last Saturday I had lunch at my parents with my brother, my sister and their family. My brother’s friend, Gillian, a photographer from New York was there. She was in Israel to photograph Sharon for the New York Times (this was the second time she’d come over for that assignment: the last time, after a big hassle with the security checks, she was barred from meeting Sharon because her usual mini-skirt was deemed "inappropriate").
Anyway, as I sat down my mother said that Gillian had just been telling them about going to Boston (where I’m going for a Science Fiction convention), where she had been to take pictures for an article in Newsweek about transgendered people. My mother asked if I’d heard of the word "Hir".
Sure, I said, that’s a gender-neutral pronoun.
Gillian looked at me wide-eyed and asked how on earth I knew that.
Well, I replied glibbly, several science ficition stories have tried to have a protagonist of neutral gender…
Sometimes I love being the geek.
If I’m mentioning Gillian in the blog, and since the New York Times photo will vanish in a week, and isn’t that interesting anyway, I’ll link to her Photo essay on the victims of terrorism (the pictures were also featured in a New York Times article titled The Maimed, which I found copied around the Internet). Everyday portraits touched by abnormal violence.
The New York Times > Movies > Cracking the Color Code of ‘Hero’ – apparently Hero only opens in NY on August 27th. It was released here not long after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I bought the DVD here cheap, but (having lost the remote), watched the whole thing without subtitles. So all I can say is “pretty” and “WTF?”.
The funny thing was that just after watching it, I saw that In the Mood for Love was showing on a cable movie channel, and both movies, the Wuxia epic and the romantic art film, have the same two actors, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as romantic leads. Boy, do they get around.
Searching with PHP and MySQL by Cal Henderson, who has plenty of other programming articles on his site. [ link found via both Kottke and Anil Dash, who are so mighty with The Force that I can skip a link, right? ]
I found a page with photos taken at the August Linux event, and while looking for pics of hot Linux chix I found that my old gaming aquaintance, Marc Volovic, played some role in a previous event of this sort. Apparently, he opened this earlier event with a greeting in Anglo-Saxon, which suits his MO.
Intrigued, I googled him up and found his big contribution to Levantine civilization compiled into the "Marc A. Volovic complete flame fortune file collection" (also available with a web-friendly face on an Iranian chap’s web-site). Also, it looks like he’s been working lately at a small consulting start-up called Ximpo, together with a guy I used to work with (well, in the same company as) called Dotan Shavit.