Caraig's Journal

( Cut for a spoiler -- but if you see the clip, it won't be a spoiler, now will it? )

I've so got to make an icon of that last second or so....

Okay, folks. I need to find some straight-up, no-BS, direct information here. No sugar-coated, not made gentler, not padded with 'maybe nots' or 'unlikelies;' but also not doom-n-gloom, or apocalyptic meanderings, or such. Essentially, not looking for opinions; hard facts and numbers. Not only for myself, but for all of us.

Are we going into a new Great Depression?

Basically, what is the economic outlook for the next five years? More of the same? Getting better? Getting worse? I really don't know, and I don't know whose word to trust right now. Much of what I'm hearing has been dishearteningly silent on where the economy is going, or outright doomish.

So I'm trying to get a better sense of what we're up against and what we can expect, and what little financially insignificant individuals like myself can do to brace for the theoretical storm. More to the point, if there is such a storm about to whack us all.

Thanks in advance.

Oh... my... gods....

This... this is gonna be worth watching.

Helen Arellanes of Los Angeles was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in September 2007 and later left her job to go on disability. She takes five medications for pain, including Lyrica and Cymbalta.

"I call it my fibromyalgia fog, because I'm so medicated I go through the day feeling like I'm not really there," Arellanes said. "But if for some reason I miss a dose of medication, I'm in so much pain."

A single mother of three, Arellanes sometimes struggles to afford all her medications. She said she is grateful that a local Pfizer sales representative occasionally gives her free samples of Lyrica "to carry me through the month."

This was in this article which discusses how drug companies might be trying to push treatments for a not-quite-real illness called fibromalygia.

On the one hand, it's good to know that a rep for even a company like Pfizer can help out the folks who are struggling. On the other hand, this sounds creepily like what a street dealer would be doing.

I'm all for letting drug companies make a profit on life-saving and quality-of-life-enabling medicine, but sometimes the companies just strike me as being far more predatory than we should be allowing in society. I dunno, maybe that's just me. What thoughts do you have?

Some time ago, a study was made of the personalities of the leading executives of several major corporations. It was found that their personalities closely match those of sociopaths. Wether you believe in the scientific rigor of the study or not, it does raise some interesting questions. The main one I'd like to hear from folks is this:

Do you feel that sociopath-like behavior is necessarily a preferred attribute, or should be a tolerated attribute, or should be a thoroughly undesired attribute, in the persons of executives of corporations? Is that mindset or personality type desired in the person of a corporate executive, when the corporation in question is either "too big to fail" or whose actions can dramatically affect the economy of the nation and the globe?

EDIT: Let's see if this poll code works....
EDIT2: For the sake of this discussion, we will use the definition of sociopathy being a deprecated term for 'antisocial personality disorder,' which according to DSM-IV is diagnosed by "a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood." Possibly a little vague, but there are further definable symptoms (not repeated here for brevity and to avoid copyright issues. In particular, the Hare PCL-R Factor 1 schedule gives what most psychiatrists consider to be the symptoms of sociopathy.)

Banks give America the bird.

I hope someone out there -- besides these CEOs -- are glad that the banks got this money. Because right now I could chew through beryllium steel. What an arrogant industry!

Once again, any industry that can crush our economy, and then have the gall to tell us to go screw ourselves when we ask what they're doing with our money, deserves to be regulated to within an inch of their profit margins.

More CEOs need to be cold-cocked in their company gyms, apparently. I'd really like it if someone made these institutions, you know, a little more responsible to the people they're sucking money from.

You've probably never heard of him, you probably don't know his music, but Ronald Kenkees is a pretty good musician. Actually, I don't care if he looks a little funny or talks a little funny or whatever. This is pretty good electronica, and more than that? He's having the time of his life doing it and you can hear it in his playing. Enjoy =)

Pax.

Sometimes I wish the US Congress was more like this. I'd be getting cable just to watch C-SPAN!

And almost as an aside: I've finally found employment, as an IT consultant. I will know more soon when I meet with my (new) boss as to what pay, benefits, etc. will be.

This... is a great, great relief.

Lately, CCP, the makers of EVE Online, have been doing an ad campaign for their new expansion (QUantum Rise) as well as trying to drum up new subscriptions.

I liked EVE when I played it, for the most part. It was interesting and different, and it had some good things about it. (You can read one of my earlier comments about EVE Online here.) But I've noticed something about their big events and what frustrates me about them: I never got a chance to see any of this in the game. The current event is this massive invasion of Gallente space by an Amaari faction, with thousands of ships jumping in and having at it.

Very cool, even if they didn't use thousands of ships in the game, but it's still something I would have loved to have taken part in. But for players, really, the only options were: Find a corp. Actually, make that option. All this stuff going on really didn't mean anything; you had to join a major corp, and frankly, the choices for doing that were 'bad' and 'worse.' Plus add in a completely explitable and laissez-faire in-game economy and, well. Yeah, nothing to recommend it for me. =)

I'm actually looking forward to Star Trek Online, to see how that will be. Though it will probably be, at best bland, and at worst either dumbed down to an incredible degree or filled with PvPers. I don't know how, but they'll find a way.

... is there something that we should know about?



(For those who do not know the Wom, or the Horror that is Funky, check here.

( Fanfics -- wait, what? )

Pax!

In writing up that mass of stuff earlier, I missed one noteworthy title in the realm of RPGs, and that is Wraith Recon.

In WR, the players are not dungeon-delving, monster-looting adventurers, but rather highly-trained, dedicated professionals in the kingdom's army. They are well-equipped with the best magical equipment that the kingdom can provide. And they are outfitted in all the ways that we, long ago, looked at all the magic item lists and thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool, if...?'

Enhanced crossbows with telescopic sights. A lens that drops over the eye and not only provides darkvision but also telepathic communication with your teammates, and sends the images back to Spellcaster Command. Elven cloaks and boots are standard issue. Wraith Recon gets all the best gear, but they also get the sort of jobs that Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon (gee, I wonder if that's a coinkidink?) get sent on.

Wraith Recon is Tom Clancy meets Ed Greenwood.

In a way, this is a really refreshing take on typical RPG fantasy settings. Seriously, we all have wondered at some point why these kingdoms -- with treasuries filled with filthy lucre -- haven't outfitted their own 'adventurers' and put them on their payroll as special forces. it just takes the plethora of all these random treasure types and brings it to a logical conclusion.

It's also rather refreshing because the goal of a WR campaign is usually not killing as many enemies as possible. There are serious political concerns, and stealth and subtlity wins out more often than outright combat. In fact, not being stealthy will tend to blow the mission, and not merely by your characters being killed.

WR's setting is atypical of fantasy, though I do take issue with Mongoose believing that most fantasy campaigns are hack-and-slash. That being said, I have to give props to Mongoose for coming up with a concept that's different from the stereotype of the genre. I would call WR almost 'post-classic fantasy' rather than high fantasy, in that it takes its cues from the modern world situation. As they say in the book, you're not likely to rescue the captive princess from the dragon; more likely, you're going to be preventing a dragon from becoming a medieval WMD, and possibly kidnapping the princess yourselves, if not taking out her terrorist hostage-takers. The book relies on D&D 4th Edition -- and is one of Mongoose's first forays into 4th Edition -- but the basic ideas are easily adaptable to any game system.

I would recommend Wraith Recon to anyone who would like some 'military action thriller' of the likes of Dale Brown or Tom Clancy in their high fantasy. Most of the book, though, is setting and mission types, and some crunch as to what gear each class might get. There's very little in terms of special equipment; most of what a Wraith Recon team will be issued is basic and 'standard,' and has been described elsewhere in other supplements, and really, what do you do with all those plain-jane +2 swords? What is unique is the approach of it. And that might appeal to people looking for something decidedly different in their fantasy game.

So I thought I would make a brief comment on a couple of games I've been playing lately and other things.

( Cut For Length -- Commence Primary Ignition )

Not much else going on here, really, so I'll leave it at that! Pax.

Moire: "Here, take a few RadAway packs! My way of saying 'I'm sorry I twisted your DNA like a kitten with a ball of yarn!'"

Source: Fallout 3

It's days like these, when one has been jerked around, up and down, like a puppet on strings, just for a little bread and butter, that you really start to see how Sith happens.

And so, to assuage the sweet, sweet schadenfreud....

Most of you know Lehman Brothers. Lehman Bros. filed for bankruptcy last month. They also sent out notices to their front-line, non-executive employees who were getting severence packages that those packages were being axed. Meanwhile, CEO Richard Fuld walked away with his $300 million severance package.

A few weeks ago he was exercising in the Lehman corporate gym and someone up and cold-cocked him in the face.

While I generally feel that violence is not an option, and it is inappropriate to urge or approve of violence upon another human (we're getting all too many rabblerousing and incitements to violence from certain political angles of late)... I can't bring myself to feel a whit of sympathy for this robber baron. I know that makes me a hypocrite and a bad person in some ways. =(

Maybe it's the late hour, but I thought I would plug a fanfic that's been around for a while. Children of an Elder God is a Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic, which has half the angst, three or even four times the sympathetic characters, and 100% more Cthulhu Mythos than the original, and is pretty decently well-written, too. There's some fairly well-written meta-humor in there, which adds to the entertainment. And there doesn't seem to be any Mary-Sue or Gary-Stu that I can see. There are a few parts that I'm concerned about, where the author might simply not have the emotional experience that the scene would require to write properly, if at all, and one part might be triggering.* Without dismissing that part, the rest of the story is engaging and fairly entertaining, and probably one of the better story mashups I've read.

And frankly, nothing made me splort like Nyarlathotep unexpectedly getting dream-smacked with both Carrie and the truck from Maximum Overdrive.

Some good stuff in here, an excellent addressing of the Elemental theory put forth by August Derleth (and torn down) and an excellent blending of the many disparate traditions of the Mythos, including the Xothian Cycle. If you can deal with fanfic, then this might be of interest to you.

EDIT: Unfortunately, the series stops one or two chapters before the climactic battle. As recently as earlier this year, the authors have said they have the last chapter outlined out but one of them las lost his writing mojo. Unfortunate, but you can't force writing to come out. Well... I guess you can, but the output doesn't always mesh well with prior work.

* - If you are interested in reading this, please, let me know and I will discuss it and provide suitable warning..

I saw this picture of Joe Biden and I just couldn't resist....



Is it just me or does he look like "Smilin' Bob" from all those Cialis ads here?

Before the assembled -- gamers, journalers, writers, geeks, priests and purveyors of ObCultRefs, and the like -- I would like to make a proposal.

WHEREAS September 10th, 2008 is the day on which the Large Hadron Collider is fired up for the first time at CERN; and

WHEREAS, as Half-Life has taught us so very well, any experiment involving large scientific machinery that goes beyond 'bunsen burners,' will invoke some sort of Powers Beyond Mortal Ken; therefor; and

WHEREAS, as Hollywood has taught us so very well, any scientific experiments conducted underground invariably result in Something Bad;

THUS shall 10 September 2008 be hereby declared Resonance Cascade Day. In honor of this day, the serving of lambda-shaped cake is encouraged. Unless of course there really is a resonance cascade or such. In which case the cake would be a lie.

In all seriousness, I'm curious as to what views, if any, you folks have about the LHC experiment and if it's going to spell the doom of the world, if it will open up new frontiers of SCIENCE!, or if it's Satan's stargate and instead of Half-Life we get Doom. That's a rather grim prospect. I think I'd rather have Charlie Sheen in glasses trying to save the world with a crowbar, than The Rock blasting everything in his path (albeit with reasonable tactics) with a BFG.

And just for the record, yeah, I know the first collisions of the LHC won't be until sometime after October 21st, but the dates of the collisions probably won't be published. So September 10th is as good a day as any! Plus, the RHIC has been running just fine for quite some time without causing the end of the world (as we know it) (and I feel fine) so any fears are pretty well unjustified. We haven't been made extinct from quark-gluon plasma and collapsar-like gravitational micro-anomalies yet; hadrons and the Higgs boson aren't going to suddenly finish the job. =)