July 4th, 2009
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mytholder:
deli & I will be selling our comic at Edition Book Arts in Temple Bar in Dublin. If you're around Dublin, pop in (entry is free) and support us!
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) editorialtoons:
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/72648/  TITLE: Coach K's Roots </br> KEYWORDS: Durham, North Carolina,Duke University,Coach Mike Krzyzewski,roots,LA Lakers,US Olympic team </br></br> PUBLICATION DATE: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 </br>
editorialtoons:
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/72624/  TITLE: Special Session </br> KEYWORDS: albany, state senate,paterson,governor,special session,stalemate,padded room,insanity,ny,new york,politics,state </br></br> PUBLICATION DATE: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 </br>
editorialtoons:
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/72536/  KEYWORDS: Fourth of July, parade, diversity </br></br> PUBLICATION DATE: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 </br>
editorialtoons:
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/72531/  TITLE: Philosophie.fr Bulletin Board - 1936 </br> KEYWORDS: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism,Simon de Beauvoir,Internet,Usenet,Chat Rooms,Trolling,Trolls,Bulletin Boards,Philosophy,Technology,Intellectua lism,Computers,Glasses </br></br> PUBLICATION DATE: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 </br>
officialgaiman:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/07/death-wish.html posted by Neil
I went to Los Angeles, had a sort of a working holiday, came home, and am writing. Working out a lot with the trainer, got a new trampoline. The cherry tree is covered in cherries, and the wild raspberries (red and black) are out in the woods, and I find them when I walk the dog. Nights here are filled with fireflies. Steve Brust came over for dinner tonight and brought his puppy, and we talked about stories and writing until late. It's a good world.
That's about it for excitement at this end. Lots of people have written in asking stuff about me and Amanda, and I don't really know how to answer them. Either they're really nice and pleased for us and encouraging and don't need answering, or they're the kind of things that leave me deeply puzzled, and to which the only responses are "Isn't that a bit personal?" or "Probably none of your business I'm afraid," or even "Why would you write things like that?" Hello Neil,
Why don't you blog more often?
Just a death wish I guess. Your blog is a wonderful thing to read.
I have a rare case of skin cancer and your blog cheer me up!Mostly because I have less to say right now, I think. Or at least, I hate repeating myself. The blog's eight years old, and over one million three hundred thousand words long. That's a lot of things. People write me lots of questions still, but so often they're questions that have already been answered on the blog, usually at some length -- the kind of things that make me think that I should spend time I could spend writing again (say) how you get an agent in, instead, organising things and getting a really useful FAQ up and running, or just a way of finding things, particularly advice on writing. Obviously, I'm sorry you have a rare case of skin cancer, and I would be just as sorry if it was a common sort of skin cancer. So here, to cheer you up and fulfill your dying wish: a blog, and a link to an interview http://www.wmagazine.com/w/blogs/editorsblog/2009/06/29/neil-gaiman-on.htm and also to an amazing Daily Telegraph piece in which a bunch of writers and artists suggest books for younger readers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5720639/Summer-Reading-for-Children-Adventures-to-enchanting-worlds.html. Todd Klein, letterer extraordinaire has the fourth in his series of prints out. The art is by J. H. Williams III, and you can see it here. Back in November I was interviewed by Chip Kidd at the 92nd St Y. ( I talked about it on the blog at the time.) The whole talk, with Karen Berger's introduction and all, is up now on YouTube, and is embedded here for your pleasure. It's an hour and a half. And finally, there are now more than 666,666 people following me on Twitter. So we had a party. It's still ongoing, the party, over at http://bit/ly/666party and to join in all you have to do is upload a photgraph of you and a Balloon. And once 600 people showed up at the party, the webgoblin made this: a mosaic.
outoftheboxipr:
http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/outofthebox/2009/07/03/nibbled-to-death-by-mice-origins-2009-con-report/ http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/outofthebox/?p=79 This weekend is Independence Day, which used to be the weekend I’d spend in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins Game Fair. But this year, it was last weekend, if that makes anything clearer.
There are two big stories out of Origins this year: First, my game Trail of Cthulhu was beaten for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game by Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard RPG. Second, so was Dungeons & Dragons 4e. Now, I play 4e (when my DM can manage to schedule a game for a quorum of us) and enjoy it very much, and I absolutely believe observers like Joseph “Goodman Games” Goodman who say that 4e is showing strength not only in the mass market (its new corebooks reliably make, for instance, the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists) but in the hobby channel. But for it to lose Best RPG to a (brilliant, beautiful) game about talking mice is not business as usual.
Possible explanations include, in no particular order: 1) Since every attendee at Origins could vote for any award, the card-floppers and lead-pushers and chit-flippers voted against D&D for the same reason that I (had I not lost my ballot between bars) would probably have voted against Magic: Version Whatever for Best CCG: sheer cussedness. That said, Magic won for Best CCG this year, so obviously that explanation only goes so far. 2) Same set-up as #1, but the voters were seduced by a beautiful cover full of cute li’l mice. Seems shallow, although there are (Origins-Award-winning) publishers who claim to believe it. Of their own products, even. 3) My columns are amazingly powerful, and my love for Mouse Guard (strategically unveiled right before Origins) hoist me (and 4e) with my own petard. Let’s just say that the science on this question is not settled. 4) Mouse Guard had huge buzz, because it’s an awesome game with a better network of mavens and connectors in today’s wired con-attendee community. Possible, but — beating D&D? Really? 5) It was just the best game up for the award, so of course it won. This has the advantage of being true, but not of explaining very many other Origins Awards.
Really, the best possible news out of this contretemps is that there were three nominees (two were withdrawn after the nomination process as ineligible) that all could be said to deserve the Origins Award that year, and that I and Wizards of the Coast just got caught in a perfect storm of design excellence.
Don’t worry about me too much, though: I did win an Origins Award, for Best Non-Fiction Product, for Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales. Other, non Hite-related results can be seen here: Wizards wound up winning three all around, and my minis friends were generally pretty stoked about the quality of those awards, too. The “deck building as game” card game Dominion won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award, so that’s hard to argue; Pandemic was an SdJ nominee, and won for Best Boardgame. In short, a really good run for the Origins Awards.
Not such a great run for the Origins convention: it was smaller and bereft of some major players in the dealer’s hall: Wizards, White Wolf, Paizo, Games Workshop, AEG, Green Ronin, and Fantasy Flight all skipped the show (though Wizards and, I believe, Paizo, ran some events), which can’t be where the organizers wanted to be even in these times of global economic brouhaha. It’s still considerably bigger than a regional con, and the game rooms were still pretty full, so there’s a foundation to build on — but there’s some load-bearing beams that could use a look-see first, methinks. That said, the new GAMA Executive Director has run a juvenile detention system and a Gulf War POW camp, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for running a game convention as I understand it.
So what was at the show that was any good? The games, of course. For my money, the single best new game at the show was Darren Watts and Jason Walters’ Lucha Libre Hero, which is even better than it sounds. Other standouts were Mike Fiegel and Jerry Grayson’s Hellas (literally a “space Odyssey”), Z-Man’s remake of Eric Goldberg’s “choose your own adventure boardgame” Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Gareth Hanrahan’s Hammer’s Slammers mod for Traveller. So there was good games to be bought, and even more good gaming to be had, at Origins on Not Independence Day.
Just stay away from the mice.
 Out of the Box is made possible by Indie Press Revolution. Please show your support for Out of the Box by shopping at IPR.
©2009 Hite for Out of the Box with Ken Hite |
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daily_kos:
http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/UeaVzVjVtlk/-Green-Diary-RescueOpen-Thread For nearly four decades, since environmental legislation was first enacted, ecp-groups have found the Supreme Court to be more or less favorable to the cases they have brought before it. Not so with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the helm.
Adam Liptak writes at The New York Times
| Environment Groups Find Less Support From Justices</p> The Supreme Court heard five environmental law cases in the term that ended Monday, and environmental groups lost every time. It was, said Richard J. Lazarus, a director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, "the worst term ever" for environmental interests. The court allowed Navy exercises using sonar that threatened whales off California. It limited the liability of companies partly responsible for toxic spills. It made it harder to challenge Forest Service regulations and easier to dump mining waste into an Alaskan lake. And it allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to use cost-benefit analysis to decide how much marine life may be killed by cooling structures at power plants. Business groups expressed measured satisfaction with the decisions. "The court does seem to be bringing more common sense back to environmental law," Robin S. Conrad, a lawyer with the United States Chamber of Commerce, said at a recent news briefing. |
= = = The rescue begins below and continues in the jump. (The next Green Diary Rescue appears Sunday at 9:30 p.m.) = = = The Cunctator informed us that DK GreenRoots: ExxonMobil Is Still Funding Global Warming Denial Groups!: "From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil directed almost $16 million to a group of 43 lobby groups in an effort to confuse Americans about global warming. After being criticized by the Royal Society in 2006, Exxon promised to end funding to groups questioning climate change. In May 2008, Exxon again issued a public mea culpa and pledged to cut funding to groups that ‘divert attention’ from the need to develop and invest in clean energy. Yet, in 2008, while cutting contributions to the most extreme groups, Exxon still funded the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, all groups which publicly question or deny global warming."
DK GreenRoots sarahnity, whose Saturday Frugal Fridays series is always green, went a little further in Saving Some Green by Going Green: "Too often, we think that it costs money to be environmentally friendly. While that can be true, the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of things you can do every day that take little effort and often no upfront costs. There are lots of ways you can change your home or your lifestyle to reduce the amount of energy and other natural resources you consume, but in this diary I want to focus on some of the easiest (and cheapest) changes you can make that will still make a significant difference. The most important thing to keep in mind if you are looking for places to save resources is to first look to where your biggest usage is and try to trim that. If you can save just 2% of the power on something you use 40% of the time, that is going to be a much bigger savings than if you save 50% of the power on something you use 5% of the time. Your goal should be to stop the hemorrhaging before you start worrying about the skinned elbows."
DK GreenRoots = = = The Overnight News Digest is posted. Included is the story
Education secretary challenges NEA on teacher pay
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