Gaming Update

My Setite in the SoStL game is still trying to be a good Harpy and a good Setitie, we’ll see how long that lasts.

My Gangrel, in the CiET game, Mirakatsu continues to get more and more short tempered with pointless talk. His beast pounds at its cage and he wants to kill things, but he fights to keep control of it.

Feodor Dracovich, in CiET BC, continues to try to hold his pack together by Will alone. The attendance of that game makes it quite difficult to do so. Honestly, that game has been playing so infrequently that I have to work to find the character every time I go and I never remember what happened the previous game. No continuity of plot for me.

Foxglove and Dashiel are mostly Dormant up in Decatur. In both cases I lost my pack and I don’t feel like finding another one of making another PC. I don’t even know what’s going on in that game at the moment.

Rahymond Rahim, my Milwaukee PC is so dormant that I suspect the Milwaukee staff doesn’t even know he exists. If I ever get to make another Midwinter, I may drag Ray up and show him to Anne Z.

R.K. Heade, my Ashes of Night PC, is doing his Nossy thing and getting ready for the big war in April. Lots of combat work there plus keeping my Masktroika going. Cinda is playing my child, Knox, which is a lot of fun.

And then there is Oliver Markstone/Oliver Wu/Little Wu/Wu/Morning Crane of Mist, my Halfling Paladin/Monk of Yondalla who is called Salona in Rune/Jahr’s D&D World. Say that ten times fast. Never played a monk, so this will be interesting. Currently, I woke up about ten game days ago with my last memory being in a bar over 500 years ago. The great war raging when I last remember ended and all kinds of major things have happened since then. We are on our flying air ship headed towards a city that is built entirely of traps in order to deliver a package to a guy. Of course, we don’t know what’s in the package, only that the guy who gave it to us really wanted to send it on its way. To the North, things are stirring in the land of ancient evil gods and war has broken out to the West. We’ll see what happens in two weeks.

Other than that, I’m getting back into miniature painting. All my Citadel paints dried out though, so I had to go and get new paint. Guy at the Miniature Market recommended Valejo paints so I’m trying them.

My L5R card twitching has died off, mostly because my Wednesdays and Fridays are booked. Sadness. I need more days in my week.

Super dooper ultra mega critical

Remember back a few months how I mocked the BBC for calling the New Hampshire primary “critical?” On All Things Considered last week they had to mock themselves a bit for the same thing; it was mahvelous dahling. The announcer observed that if they had called the New Hampshire primary “critical” back in January, then the (then) upcoming Texas and Ohio primaries would have to be called “super critical.” I wonder what that makes Pennsylvania next week?

Life expectency dropping....

Why don't people think about what they say? It's one thing to say something stupid off the cuff, but I don't see how you can write ad copy that's... ill thought out.

So I'm driving home tonight and I hear an add for the Hilton Frontenac. They wanted people to come there fore their Easter buffet.

They called it a "once in a lifetime opportunity."

Say what? Easter breakfast is a once in a lifetime opportunity?

Ah, Minnesota

I’ve been away from Minnesota for too long; I forgot how stupid the liberals there can be. They have come up with a solution to the mortgage crisis; they are going to put a one year moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. I have a lot of responses to that.

It infringes the freedom to contract which is guaranteed under the constitution and by common law. It is a basic freedom and basic to a free capitalist market. The mortgagor AGREED to the terms and while you can make forward looking legislation, it can’t be retroactive.

I don’t see how it’s fair to the mortgage holder who would not have lent money, or at least not under those terms, had they known they would not be able to foreclose. It is their right and the fact the interest is SECURED by property is what makes the loans happen in the first place and keeps the interest rates low. If you take away the ability to level on the security, the risk to the lender drastically increases and they GET TO CHARGE FOR IT.

I think this is “a taking.” Legally speaking a taking is when the state comes in an commandeers a piece of your property. Think when they condemn land for building a highway. The state has the right to do so, but IT MUST PAY THE PROPERTY OWNER THE FAIR VALUE OF THE PROPERTY TAKEN. Since, if the Minnesota legislature does this thing, the value of a loan made to a Minnesota person will PLUMMET, and that means the State of Minnesota should owe the mortgage holder the difference in value.

If I were the banks of the United States, upon passage of this act, I would immediately suspend making ANY loans in Minnesota backed by mortgaged security. Period. The market there is clearly too risky because the crazy government might decide to screw me. All OTHER loans I made in Minnesota would have their interest rates doubled to cover my risk of loss if the State decided to meddle with them as well.

Suspending foreclosure does not stop the problem. The mortgage is just security for an existing debt and the debt can be sued upon without foreclosing on the mortgage. Were I the bank, I would simply sue on the overdue note and then, when I get my judgment, execute on the home anyway, and the car, and the bank accounts, and the personal property, etc. Further, because this costs more to do, I get to recover my costs from the executions which means in the end the home owner ended up losing more than they would have had I foreclosed.

The goal of this brainchild is to introduce stability into the home loan crisis. (I knew we should not have called it a crisis, because you have to take drastic steps to fix a crisis. If we called it a tragedy or a scandal, we wouldn’t have the linguistic baggage to deal with.) Somehow the State of Minnesota misses the fact that the crisis was caused because with all the foreclosures, the banks did not know how to evaluate the value of their bundled mortgages. I fail to see how introducing an inability to foreclose on those non-paying mortgages will do anything other than introduce EVEN MORE UNCERTAINTY into the banks valuation calculations.

Finally, if Minnesota does this, I can a huge wave of foreclosures being filed a year and a day later which will swamp the system AND all those homeowners will probably be in a bigger hole than when they started. This “crisis” will not end until those homes can be readily sold for a value that represents at least breaking even for the home owners. That requires the old inflated housing market to return and won’t happen soon. Until then, someone gets to take a bath on this and all the Minnesota solution does is put the entire loss on the bank instead of spreading it out.

It would make just as much sense to allow people to draw on IRAs, pensions, and Social Security benefits to make up their house payments. It would not solve the problem for the couple who has to move and has discovered that they can’t sell the house for the amount of the debt they have on it, but neither does the Minnesota plan. Likewise, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul by worsening the Social Security situation in the future and making it even more unlikely that these folks will be able to live on their Social Security payments. However, it would stabilize the situation by keeping people from being foreclosed without introducing more uncertainty into the bank’s value calculations. It’s a better, or at least a legal, solution than the Minnesota plan, but I’m still not advocating for it.

Gary Gygax 1939(?)-2008

Yesterday Gary Gygax died. Gary was one of two creators of Dungeons & Dragons or D&D to those of us who do that sort of geeky thing. It felt a lot like when Gene Roddenberry died back in the mid 1990's. It hits closer to home than when a famous athlete or actor dies for some reason, maybe because science fiction and RPG's are more a part of who I am than baseball is. I dunno, it's weird.

Gygax was 69.

I have a couple of responses to that. First, that is only a year older than my Dad who just had his birthday yesterday. My Dad's not old and people his age have no business dying.

Second, the creator of the game that got me into all of this, that I was playing and painting miniatures for when I was 12, was my Dad's age. That rather changes the perspective on things. It would be like having your Dad be a rock star. Intellectually, I know that there are, in fact, rock stars who are Dad's age or older. Jagger isn't a spring chicken anymore. Still, I don't think of rock stars or gamers as being... in their late middle age.

To add a little levity to this otherwise dark topic...

Carbondale craziness

I went to a Pepsi vending machine in the SIUC student center. Soda $0.75 and I put in a dollar and pressed the button for Pepsi. The machine gives me a Diet Coke and $0.50. I hock that off on someone and try again, feeding in another dollar and hitting the button for a Coke (Don’t ask me what a Pepsi machine has a Coke selection). I got my Coke… and a quarter, a dime, and a PENNY. WTF? It was like the machine was apologizing to me (and it doesn’t even take pennies).

If only I could win the Lottery

Apple has new Macbooks out. Wish I could afford one; they look pretty sweet.

Bureaucracy at Age 4

NPR ran a piece last week about a special school/program of educating children. The researchers noted that in old style play (read pre-1980) the children would get together and design their play time such as you be the mommy, I'll be the daddy, and Jake will be the dog. Then the children would have to role-play those things which means they would have to follow the "rules" for mommy behavior if they were the mommy and so forth. This apparently teaches then "Executive Function" which helps them regulate their behaviors as they grow up (such as not punching out Tom's lights when he runs off with your ipod). Sounds good so far right? The Researchers further noted that the more modern childhood experience is lacking in a lot of these so called Executive Function learning play since kids spend their time watching TV or playing video games. They wanted to create a school program to fill in the blank. Still sounds okay, right?

So this school does things like requiring the children to fill out play play forms where they have to describe the play activity, draw it, and so forth before they can. That's right, at age 7 we are teaching them/enforcing bureaucracy! They interviewed a teacher who said that when she first came into a second grade class that had been following this program she was astonished at how well behaved they children were. She then explained that they weren't acting like normal second graders, but instead were working and talking quietly in groups.

I don't know about you, but this gives me Orwellian flashbacks. Or maybe Huxley. Hell, even the movie Demolition Man. Maybe The Dead Poets' Society is a better example. Either way this seems kind of scary and ominous to me. the problem is that class performance also goes up and that is a good thing. Usually. But I'm not sure about the cost here. Do we want children to be trained from early years to be bureaucrats and robots?

I should also note that other activities seemed less ominous such as a game similar to Freeze except you didn't just freeze when the music stopped but you had to assume a specific pose shown on a card displayed by the teacher.

Motorola makes shit for phones

So I heard last week or maybe the week before that Motorola was experienced a sharp drop in the sales of their products. They had some corporate doubletalk statement about it saying they were going to evaluate the market and adjust or some such. I know why.

When I last endured purchasing a cell phone, I needed two things, bluetooth and vibration ability. At the time Cingular only offered that in the Motorola RazrV3 so guess what I got. I was switching out a of a Nokia and figured that one was as good as the other. Was I ever wrong.

Since the day I got it, the Motorola has been a piece of shit. The battery compartment is not well sized and the battery knocks around inside meaning it occasionally just turns itself off. But that is not the really annoying part to me. It also apparently does not have a tight enough slot for the SIM chip because it randomly sends me the message to "Insert SIM." Mind you, I haven't taken the SIM out. So I have to open up the phone, take out the battery, slide the SIM up and down, re-boot the phone and hope it doesn't happen again for a few days. And, just to frost the cake, when it goes into "Insert SIM," the battery goes into hyperactive seek for signal mode and drains like a flushed toilet. So by the time I realize my phone is screwed up and fix it, I have no battery left.

I'm writing this for several reasons. First, I want to warn everyone away from Motorola generally and Razrs specifically. Second, maybe someone from Motorola will read it and it will do some good. Stranger things have happened. Meanwhile, I will sit with glee, wondering if my phone is working, and relish the fact that maybe Motorola is getting some comeuppance for making it in the first place.

Next time though, I'll probably get an iphone.

A good dig?

As you might have guessed, it has been a busy few days for me. Tomorrow they are expecting 6-10 inches of snow.

Anyway, NPR today had their normal candidate watching report what with tomorrow being an election day and all. I got disgusted enough at it to shut it off and here's why: They started with the Hillary report and the embedded reporter began by observing that there had been empty seats at the Hillary rally he was reporting about (which might just be newsworthy), but he quickly transitioned to saying reporting about how the crowd cheered when Clinton "got in a good dig at Obama." They then began to play the sound bite of the "good dig" at which point I shut off the radio.

Excuse me? Political reporting has sunk to talking about the good digs candidates take at each other? What is this? Politics a la Rikki Lake? Or when you are trying to compare two democrats who have damn little to say different from each other on policy, you feel the need to further trivialize their contest because you can't find anything else to report on?

Come on NPR, I expect better of you.