Blackmoor Vituperative

The US director of national intelligence, a retired Air Force general with 47 years in the intelligence business, with access to the $80-billion American spying bureaucracy, made more than a few politicians upset today. What did he do? He answered their questions, and didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Watching the video of the exchange gave me flashbacks. I am glad that I no longer work in the government arena. I may not have as much responsibility, but what I do now is a lot less stressful, and a hell of a lot more honest.

There are a lot of people asking about this, and a great many sites which tell you how to set it up. They all entail copying DLL files and registering them, etc. Sadly, these methods do not work on 64-bit Windows Vista/Windows 7 or Windows 8. Here is what works:

• FastPictureViewer Codec Pack

It costs money ($10, as of this moment, but it’s usually $15).

Anyone who has taken an English class in the last fifty years knows how ridiculous the rules are for capitalizing titles in English. First word, sure. Proper nouns, sure. Pronouns? Why would a pronoun be capitalized? “In” when it is functioning as an adverb, but not when it is functioning as a preposition. Uh… yeah. Prepositions aren’t capitalized, but sometimes they are if they are longer than four letters, depending on whom you ask. And it gets worse; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So here is my rule for capitalizing titles:

A title is capitalized as though it were a sentence.

Either capitalize every word in a title, or capitalize it as though it were a sentence… whichever you think looks better.

That’s the best I can do.

Charlie Sheen is my new favorite person. He is so unapologetically, enthusiastically demented. I can only wish I had the balls (and the money) that the Sheen has. Banging seven-gram rocks and “models” half my age in rapid succession. Tossing out brilliantly insane bon mots like they are confetti.

Confetti at a parade for my awesomeness.

“I’m a grandiose life, and I’m embracing it.”

Stay gold, Charlieboy… Stay gold.

This is not urban fantasy

We are home, safe and sound, from MystiCon 2011. We had a good time, and we are glad we went. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

I liked Brinke Stevens. I can’t recall (offhand) ever enjoying a guest of honor as much at a con. I wish her luck with her writing.

It annoys me that “horror” is apparently no longer a genre, and that all of these vampire romance novels are called “urban fantasy”. WTF. I have an easy test for anyone wondering if a book is “urban fantasy”: if the protagonist or antagonist in your novel is one of the Universal Studios classic movie monsters, it’s not fantasy, much less “urban fantasy”. Storm Front is urban fantasy. Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is not. War For The Oaks is urban fantasy. Dead Until Dark is not. This is not rocket science.

We really enjoyed hanging out with Carla and Brian. Fun folks. I hope they come to RavenCon some day (although they won’t this year). We met several other fun people, as well, but I am terrible with names, so I can’t tell you theirs.

The character sheet for Greg Porter’s new Verne game is simply amazing. Also, CORPS has been replaced with EABA… as of eight years or so ago, which shows you how out of touch I am.

The podcast thing worked out pretty well, I think, but I have learned something in the process: I am painfully tedious. There are some people who are so tedious that I can barely stand to be in the same room with them when they are talking. I am one of those people. I don’t know how anyone else stands me. Aside from my annoying nasal voice, I combine the worst aspects of someone who can’t string together two coherent thoughts and someone who appears convinced of their own brilliance. If I was in the audience for a panel I was on, I would probably just leave. No accounting for taste, I guess.

I need to find a way to tether my phone to my laptop, so that I won’t be dependent on a malfunctioning hotel internet connection. I know that there are Android tethering apps; I am just not sure if my phone can do it.

I would like to play in a superhero LARP some time. We were too busy for me to participate in one this time.

Having pizza in the con suite Friday night was awesome. Having a hotel room across the hall and one door down from the con suite was doubly awesome.

In general, I am glad we went.

Note to self: Don’t write blogs at four in the morning when you are so drunk you can barely stand.

I filled in on this panel at the last minute. Susan and I did run a LARP at SheVaCon back in 2003 or so that went really well: “The Hotel On Haunted Hill”. It’s where we met our friend Bob. But I am hardly an expert or anything, and honestly I did not expect the panel to be interesting at all. I was wrong about that: it was very entertaining, and packed with people.

This is my second “podcast”: myself, Rod Belcher, Bob Flack, Dave Lystlund, Owen Anderson, and Jestin Jeffries, on the Running a LARP panel at MystiCon 2011, 2011-02-26 @ 13:00.

Running a LARP podcast (mp3, 50 MB)

I had another panel at 15:00, on Game Publishing, but no one showed up. It was just me, Greg Porter, and John Meagher. John and Greg chatted about fonts and pull quotes for a bit, then I took off. I did not bother recording it.

RSS podcast feed

Oh, I nearly forgot: I was interviewed for a few minutes last night by Bethany Halle, of “Fire of Fantasy and Darkness with host Bethany Halle”. I am not sure why she thought I would be interesting, but since she appeared to be having technical difficulties (did I mention how badly the internet at this hotel sucks?), there probably wasn’t much harm in interviewing me rather than someone genuinely interesting.

My portion of the interview starts at one hour and twenty-five minutes (1:25) into the podcast:

The Fire of Fantasy and Darkness with host Bethany Halle – Highlighting the World of Fantasy

RSS podcast feed

The last few panels have been really interesting. One was “Costuming on a budget”, which was fun and interesting. The other was not really a panel, but rather a Q&A with the guest of honor, Brinke Stevens. She was really interesting. She had a perspective on the changes in the film industry wrought by technology in the past several decades, and some insightful observations about how the business of selling movies has shifted in response to changes in technology. That was an unexpectedly interesting discussion, and I rather wish I had recorded it. Then she went on to talk about her current work, books she is writing, her interest in the environment (she has a masters in marine biology, was on track to study dolphin communication as she was working on her doctorate before she got into films). The whole science-environment part of her talk was fascinating.

I am really glad that we got to meet her: she is genuinely interesting. I bought one of her DVDs in the dealer room, Dead Clowns. She autographed it for me. 🙂

I am at Mysticon, listening to a panel on costuming photography. One of the panelists is a photographer — an evil photographer. She went on and on about copyright, and how the people she photographs have the gall to think that they have some right to the photos of them.

Then she turned around and talked about having models sign releases, so that in case the photographer asks them to stand on a glass table, and the table collapses, cutting the model to ribbons, that the photographer won’t have any responsibility. That was her example: a real model really got cut up because a photographer had her stand on a glass table, which broke.

While I was typing this, she started in again on the copyright thing.

I don’t care if she is right or wrong about the letter of the law. It’s disgusting.