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Robin D. Laws

Robin D. Laws - LiveJournal.com

DragonmeetToday

I will be appearing at London’s Dragonmeet, held on Saturday November 29th at Kensington Town Hall. My schedule has not yet been nailed down, but I’ll be doing a couple of panel events. One or both of them will be in tandem with my redoubtable fellow guest, Kenneth (princeofcairo) Hite. When not doing the Q&A thing I’ll be at or near the Pelgrane stand (to use the local lingo), so please stop by to chat.

If panel details are confirmed before I fly out on Tuesday night, I’ll pop in with an update. As always I’ll attempt to blog during the trip, dependent on the vagaries of wi-fi access. I thus complete my 2008 adapter plug trifecta, adding UK power outlets to the previously scored Continental Europe and Australia.

TrivergentYesterday

Other people’s devices might be converging, but mine are proliferating.

For years I’ve been dependent on my (el cheapo) Palm device for tracking expenditures, ideas, making lists, keeping contacts, and so on. Never leave the house without it.

Since I work at home I hardly ever do that. Leave the house, that is. So while I did break down and get a cell phone a few years back, I rarely make or receive calls. Hence, the only plan that makes sense for me is the bare-bonesiest prepaid plan available in my mobile-benighted country. (I take yet another phone to affordably roam for me when traveling to the US.)

In an uncharacteristic spasm of early adoption, I just pooled some gift money and, after extensive rationalizing, succumbed to Iphone fever. Except not the phone part, since the average Canadian Iphone user spends a total of $2500 including data charges over a two-year period. I went for the Ipod Touch instead. The whole never leaving the house thing makes it okay to rely on the wifi setting only.

And oh, is it ever an alluring, wonderful toy. Makes the Palm look like a fusty old aunt.

At first I was frustrated that a handheld computer as sophisticated as the Touch can’t fully replace the functions of a Palm. The most notable example of intentional crippli

Turning Points Hamlet 2: More Than Kin and Less Than KindNovember 19

Act I, Scene IIa1: A) Claudius addresses the court, establishing his authority as king2. He grants Laertes leave to return to France.

These story beats are basically expository, with no real conflict or obstacles overcome. In a game, these would be handled as GM narration.

B) He and Gertrude attempt to mollify a clearly discontented Hamlet. Each employs different tactics. Hamlet’s mother makes an emotional appeal; his uncle lectures him on acceptance and questions his masculinity. Claudius commands Hamlet not to return to school in Wittenburg, but to remain at court.

Hamlet, obviously, is a player character. This is an interaction scene. It plays out at length, and so could be treated as a considered a suspense point. (At first glance it might seem that, by allowing Hamlet a chance to lose this exchange, there’s a danger of derailing the story before it begins. But even if Hamlet immediately reconciles himself to his uncle’s ascension to the throne and marriage to his mother, the upcoming story beat where Horatio tells him about his father’s ghost reverses that result, keeping the narrative going.)

Hamlet’s objective in this scene is to punish Claudius and Gertrude by withholding his approval from them. His goal is emotional, not pragmatic—

The BirdsNovember 18

View series to date here.

Vapor BurstsNovember 17

Looks like advancing technology is again going to force me to rearrange the part of my mental filing cabinet that separates far future science fictiony technology from what could conceivably happen in my life time. When I was a kid visiting the science centre, the lady giving the laser demonstration assured us that we would never see laser weapons in our lifetime. The technology would never be feasible, she promised, and I took that as reassuring fact. Jet packs and food pills might be cool, but laser weapons would be seriously bad news.

This Economist article describes the imminence of various battlefield laser projects. Anti-missile lasers are the source of open excitement for procurers and defense contractors. One of them is considered so promising that its builder, Raytheon, is financing the project itself instead of seeking funding from the Pentagon or another major military . You know that one’s gotta be good.

It’s easy to get behind war technology that prevents people from being hit. They’re more circumspect about the prospect of the laser as a mass-scale anti-troop weapon:

The aeroplane-mounted Advanced Tactical Laser, or ATL, another chemical laser being put together by