Blackmoor Vituperative

I received a Harmony Ultimate from Logitech because I own several Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote remotes and have recommended them highly. I was looking forward to the Harmony Ultimate, since I had given an unfavorable review to the Harmony Touch, and I was hoping that the Harmony Ultimate would correct the design deficiencies of the Harmony Touch. It does correct some problems, but it also introduces new ones. Here are some good things and bad things:

Good things:

1. The removal of the number buttons to make the Harmony Ultimate a more convenient size was a good move. The on-screen numbers are easy to find, when they are needed.
2. Overall, the size of the Harmony Ultimate is convenient and comfortable.
3. Most of my settings were successfully imported from one of my Harmony One settings, so that saved me some time during set-up.
4. Having a dedicated button for the DVR and for the four colored buttons is a great addition.
5. The remote comes with a “hub” and a pair of “IR blasters”, which one could place in a cabinet to control concealed electronics. That’s nice, I suppose.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few things that make the Harmony Ultimate a bad fit for my living room experience.

1. The location of the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons to above the screen makes using the Harmony Ultimate more awkward than using the Harmony One, even though the Harmony One is significantly larger. Using the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons on the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote can be done one-handed. On the Harmony Ultimate it requires awkwardly shifting the position of the hand, or using two hands. This is a significant step backward in usability. However, what’s worse is….
2. Putting the touch-sensitive screen between the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons and the up-down-left-right buttons is a terrible design. I was constantly hitting the screen when trying to use the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, causing all sorts of mayhem. This rendered the remote useless.
3. The addition of “favorite channels” is a needless complication. Every DVR has favorite channel lists built in.
4. The Harmony Ultimate itself does not control a Roku box. The remote *only* sends commands to the Roku box through the “IR blaster” widgets. For me, this would require putting the Harmony Ultimate “hub” in my already crowded entertainment cabinet and re-arranging it so that the Roku box can face one of the “IR blasters”. Why not just have the remote itself send the commands? That’s what the Harmony One does,and it works perfectly. Even the Harmony Touch was able to get this right. This is a bad design.
5. The Harmony Ultimate does not have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”. To activate those frequently-used commands, you have to hold down the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons. This is a bad design.
6. There is no obvious way to access the commands for Devices, in order to send a command directly to one of your components. On the Harmony One, the “Devices” button is always easily accessible at the bottom of the screen. On the Harmony Ultimate, the Devices button is hidden in an on-screen sub-menu.
7. After the activities are set up, they are listed on the screen, much like they are on the Harmony One (a great improvement over the Harmony Touch). However, the on-screen button for the bottom-most activity is located *behind* the on-screen “Menu” button for the remote itself (this menu is where the “Devices” menu is hidden). This makes accessing that fourth activity … difficult.

Conclusion: in a world where the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote had never been invented, the Harmony Ultimate would be a nice addition to any living room. However, the Harmony One does exist, and has existed for years. That being the case, there is really no excuse for the flaws in the design of the Harmony Touch.

Suggestions for the Harmony Two, or the Harmony Ultimate Plus, or whatever the next version will be called:

1. Put all of the physical buttons, including the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, below the screen, where the user can reach them with one hand.
2. Have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”, located beneath the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons, as the Harmony One currently does.
3. Do not put any physical buttons above the touch-sensitive screen.
4. Eliminate the “Favorites” screen and replace it with a list of the user’s “Devices”.

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Sorcerer (7th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-11
Dexterity-11
Constitution-11
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-13
Charisma-13

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Warning: this video is graphic. It shows dead people. You’ve been warned.

Now for my thoughts:

The first segment, on the Philippines, illustrates the scenario that I think motivates some of the anti-gun hysteria in this country. Ironically, I think that divisive rhetoric and attempts to infringe on other people’s civil rights makes that scenario more likely rather than less. I hope, really hope, that Americans wake up to that and stop with the attacks on each other. Ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear are poor foundations for public policy.

The second segment, on the Taliban and Afghanistan… that’s almost too tragic. I have trouble even wrapping my head around it. It would be easy to blame religion, but the suicide bombers aren’t even being told what their own religion says. They are lied to and manipulated by their Imams and Muftis, who are distorting their own religion to use these children as weapons. The horror of it baffles me.

I am so grateful that I live in a relatively safe, relatively sane country. I hope it stays that way.

I love this Todd Rundgren song. It reminds me a bit of early Rick Springfield.

What do you mean, who is Rick Springfield? He played a vampire in the movie Nick Knight, which was later retooled as the series Forever Knight, with Geraint Wyn Davies playing the vampire detective, but Rich Springfield played the part first. He was also on a soap opera, the name of which escapes me, and yes, he was also a pop star for a while.

P.S. Here’s another great Todd Rundgren song.

I spent this weekend at RavenCon, a SF&F convention in Richmond, VA. RavenCon was started by Michael Pederson, Tony Ruggiero, and Tee Morris (who, like Tony, left the staff a few years ago and has gone on to a successful writing career). I didn’t start it, but I am old friends with Mike Pederson, and I was there helping out at the beginning. This is the first year that I’ve attended that I haven’t been on staff. For the first few years, I helped design, print, and hang the large schedule signs, and I ran the movie room for a year or two until it was decided (and I agreed) that the room could be put to better use. For the past couple of years I did the programming, taking over from the previous program director, Tony Ruggiero (who was already a successful author, and is now even more so).

I had a couple of reasons for stepping down from being the programming director after RavenCon 2012. The main one is that, like Tee and Tony (or so I hope), I want to focus on my own writing. Setting up the programming for a convention is not terribly difficult, but it is ridiculously time-consuming. There’s also the matter that Susan and I have moved away from Richmond, so driving an hour or more each way for meetings was no longer something I really wanted to do.

While I did twitch a few times at things I would have done differently, it was nice not working during the convention. I could actually attend panels from the beginning to the end, and if I was having an interesting conversation I didn’t have to cut it short to go put out fires.

If you find yourself a convention volunteer some day (everyone on staff at a con is a volunteer), I have a suggestion for you: be gracious. Be gracious to the attendees, who pay good money to be there. Be gracious to the guests, who are doing the convention a favor by attending (often at their own expense), and for whom this is their livelihood (or at least an aspiration). Be gracious to the other volunteers who do the real work of the con — sitting for hours at the registration desk, or keeping the con suite supplied, or pushing carts full of audiovisual equipment from one end of the hotel to the other — all of whom are sacrificing their weekend, not being paid for their time, and who usually aren’t even able to enjoy the convention they are making happen because they are working the whole time. Be gracious, try to do a good job for the attendees and the guests, and try not to take criticism personally.

I’ve started watching Stephen Fry In America (on Netflix). I’m scarcely 13 minutes into the first episode (there are six episodes, I believe, and each of them an hour long), but I am already charmed by Fry’s affable approach and his obvious affection and admiration for what is best about the people and places he visits. In a world with so much cynicism and so many reasons to be bitter, it’s really quite lovely to see someone visit the USA and find reasons to like it.

He says, while visiting Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont, “In a hard and harsh and unpleasant world, we need ice cream. That’s my feeling.” Well, in a hard and harsh and unpleasant world, I think we need Stephen Fry.

Here are ten tips which you can use to drastically reduce the quantity and increase the quality of your television viewing:

1. Do not watch “reality” shows unless you have a friend who is on the show.
2. Do not watch game shows unless you have a friend who is on the show.
3. Do not watch award shows unless you have a friend who is on the show.
4. Do not watch sports unless the broadcast is live.
5. Do not watch television shows that have a “laugh track”.
6. Do not watch television shows that feature musical numbers.
7. Do not watch movies that have been “formatted to fit your screen” (i.e., pan and scanned).
8. Do not watch movies that have been “edited to run in the time allotted” (i.e., butchered).
9. Do not watch movies that have been “edited for content” (i.e., censored).
10. Do not watch movies that are interrupted by commercials.

Susan and I just finished watching a movie called The Skin I Live In. I want to discourage you from Googling it or looking up too much about it, because there are some twists you may not see coming, and that’s a pretty rare thing. Better not to spoil it.

I will share some things that won’t spoil it for you. First, it’s in Spanish with English subtitles. Hopefully that won’t put you off too much. Now for the plot: Antonio Banderas is a mad scientist. He has a young woman locked in a room in his mansion (and wow, is that some mansion!). He appears to be using her as a Guinea pig for his artificial skin experiments. She doesn’t seem seem to be there willingly, but at the same time, she doesn’t seem altogether unwilling, either.

That’s as much as I can say without potentially ruining it for you. It’s a weird, weird movie. As Susan would say, “Why are foreign films so foreign?”

I do recommend it, though.

Susan and I had a conversation earlier about Sherlock Holmes, and whether the 125-year-old character was in the public domain (it should have been in the public domain before either of us were born, but that’s another topic).

In process of researching our discussion, I turned up this article regarding a suit filed recently in federal court in Chicago. A top Sherlock Holmes scholar alleges that many licensing fees paid to the Arthur Conan Doyle estate have been unnecessary, since the main characters and elements of their story derive from materials in the public domain (as of 2004, only 9 of the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle are still covered under US copyright).

I have been watching Sling & Arrows, a Canadian show about the theatre. It’s like Glee, but with better writing and no musical numbers (which also makes it better than Glee). It reminds me a great deal of Smash, although it has no musical numbers (which, again, makes it better than Smash). Here’s the thing: that camaraderie the cast feels on the completion of a successful show… I have felt that. Not often. Not after the conclusion of a successful convention (I was on the staff of a local SF&F convention for most of its history). The last time I felt that esprit de corps was probably back in the late1980s, after a successful performance of Rocky Horror (in which I was a cast member for a few years). I imagine (rather, I assume) that it’s the same feeling that members of a sports team feel at the end of a good game. It’s a good feeling. Even then memory of it is a good feeling.