| User: |  dr_kromm |
| Date: | 2009-07-11 11:52 |
| Subject: | The Company |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | geeky | | Music: | "Jet Age," Ladytron |
Our July 7, 2009 gang was Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), and Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases). Stéphane ("Jean-Baptiste Dieudonné," a.k.a. "Jimmy Matthieu") was absent, as he's taking a break for the summer.
( Last session's events . . . )
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There was no report last Friday, so "What's moving and shaking for GURPS?" is a more pressing question than usual. Without further ado, then, here's the answer:
• We released Transhuman Space: Personnel Files 3 – Wild Justice, by Phil Masters. It pits an amateur investigator, a dog, and a couple of AIs against a shady criminal conspiracy. Which is to say, it has its finger on the pulse of Transhuman Space.
• GURPS Gun Fu is out of playtest, and S.A. Fisher, Hans-Christian Vortisch, and I are hard at work on the final draft. I've already turned in the majority of my revisions, including notes on gun cults and crossbow fu. The results should be interesting!
• Steven Marsh (waitingforgo) turned around comments on my latest work, GURPS Action 3: Furious Fists, and I made some revisions. How could I have overlooked the old chemical warehouse ploy?
• We're pretty much geared up for the playtest of GURPS Horror, by Ken Hite (princeofcairo). Playtester list finalized? Check. Files ready for download? Check. Mailing list created? Check. Next week, the horror begins . . .
• Those were the big ones, but we also made useful progress on some (non-GURPS Low-Tech) projects by Matt Riggsby (wombattery) and Bill Stoddard (whswhs), and on another shooting-related item by Hans-Christian Vortisch. More on those as contracts are signed.
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... I was dealt A-K under the gun in a $1/$2 NL game at the Mirage. I've got $200 in front of me. To my right is the big blind. From the twenty minutes I've been at the table, I know that he's an aggressive European player in his early twenties, raising preflop and on the flop a lot. I've already noted he likes to raise preflop with suited connectors and one-offs.
I limp with the A-K under the gun, deciding I'd rather have some callers so I can make some money if it hits (and easily toss it if it doesn't), and I'm certainly willing to call a raise behind me with it. Two other limpers to the big blind, who--true to form--raises to $12. I call. Other two limpers fold. We're heads-up.
Flops comes A-7-2, rainbow. I've flopped top-top. Flop is very nonthreatening--no straight or flush draw out. So when big blind leads out with $16 continuation bet, I flat-call it, thinking I can use his aggression against him, let him bet into me.
Second heart comes down on the turn. He checks. This time I bet out for $50 (into a $56 pot) to deny the potential flush draw. He calls after ten seconds.
Third heart comes down on the river. He leads out for $100. I decide I can't lay it down and call, that with such an overbet he might just be trying to scare me off with the flush showing.
No such luck. He shows 7-9 of hearts for the flush, stammers something to me about too many outs. Fist clenched, I get up from the table with my few remaining chips, telling him he had no odds to call my turn bet.
So what did I do wrong? Did I get too greedy? Should I have reraised the flop? Bet harder on the turn? Could I have gotten away from it on the river given that overbet, recognized what he hit?
It's been eating at me for a while. I'd really like some other opinions.
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...being able to respond to the inevitable question of "What are you doing this weekend?" from my co-workers: "Me? Oh, you know. Laundry, mowing the yard. Chasing someone across the mat, reaper-throwing them, and arm-locking them till they cry. Nothing big."
This one's just an exhibition match, so its not a huge deal, but it's good practice. One of my class brothers is fighting this weekend and the dojo that's hosting it is trying to get some interest in women's MMA classes. They were having a hard time finding another female fighter in the same weight class as their junior instructor, so I volunteered. I've never competed full contact against a primarily karate fighter, so we'll see how it stacks up. I'm fairly confident that Muay Thai + Judo + Wing Chun > Karate + BJJ, but it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
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Just had a hand... biggest single win ever... and am not sure I played it correctly. I was nervous because I was playing at a higher limit, .25/.50 NL, than I normally do. I tend to rarely go above .5/.10.
I'm on BB with $29 on the table. I get dealt Kings. Everyone else folds except two players. One calls, the other raises $2.50. I call, the other player folds. I'm acting first, of course. Flop comes out 2 5 6 rainbow. I figure the other guy's hand probably didn't improve either, so I bet $2. He raises to $8.50. Yikes. I almost fold, but something seems wrong. That raise is too big even if he hit trips. A straight seemed unlikely. I've been watching this guy play for a while and he isn't an idiot. He's trying to scare me out. I call.
Turn comes out J. All right, that may have improved his hand, may not have. However, I still think I have the best hand so I bet $3 in hopes of him folding. He calls. River is another Jack. Now I'm nervous he has trips. I think until my time is almost up. Statistically, I'm a huge favorite to win. Finally, I bet $4 in hopes of scaring him out again. He insta calls. I'm screwed, I think to myself. No, I'm not. He had 9's. I win a giant (for me) pot.
Despite the win, in retrospect, I think I played this hand all wrong. What would you have done in this situation?
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We went to Tim's parents this weekend for the 4th of July. By and large, I like Tim's family. His parents are nice and really, now that the shock has worn off, they just seem happy that Tim is finally and at long last married, which means they can rekindled their hopes of adding at least six (or so I'm told) more grandchildren to the horde. But that's a different story. His other relatives are colorful in that sort of upper middle class rural Southern way, and they're at least fun to listen to. His grandfather, though, apparently had political aspirations at one point in his life and seems to have spent the bulk of his retirement from the military (seriously, they guy was in the tail-end of WWII, Korea, AND Vietnam. The only reason he retired was because they wouldn't let him fight in the first Gulf War) writing letters to any elected official that he can get an address for and assaulting people with his collected opinion on government, economics, and world affairs. Many of his observations include a word I can't bring myself to type, but it rhymes with "chigger". For me, sitting through a whole dinner with Tim's grandfather is about as pleasant as being tried by the Spanish Inquisition and bears many resemblances to the latter.
This weekend, somewhere between the usual tirade about Obama being a terrorist and the assertion that America is going to be a Communist country soon if we don't do something, he mentioned that he had bought a new pair of boots from the store and that the sole had come right off a week later. When he looked at the box, it said it was made in China. "Communists." he said, with the sort of venom and disgust most people reserve for Nazi war criminals and telemarketers. "Well," I said, trying to turn the conversation to a lighter tone, "that's actually not too bad, considering they probably paid some Chinese kid eight sesame seeds to make them." "What?" he said, with this expression that was about halfway in between confusion and suspicion (because I'm one of those uppity females that has opinions and things, rather than sensibly letting the menfolk handle it while I make dinner). "Well, a lot of the products shipped to the US from places like Asia and Africa and South America are made by women and children who get paid less than a doller a day." He seemed to consider this for a few moments, before responding, "Well, you know those Orientals, they're so small, it's not like they eat that much anyway." And to think, this man failed to get elected to the Georgia legislature OR the local city council. It's a mad, mad world.
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or at least on either end of my weekend.
Friday night saw the Paramour and I making the trek out to Fergus to stay at my parents' overnight; Mom and Dad are in England and a) like someone to occasionally stay at the house when they're gone, b) have mail what needs to be picked up, and c) had some newly planted flowers that needed to be watered. Since I'm closer than my sister is, and I don't have a 3 year old to be disturbed by routine change, I was it.
We had pizza, watched TV -- including introducing the Paramour to Treehouse in the form of Dragon and the Backyardigans (which was entertainment in itself) -- and we hit the local Zellers where I scored 30 baby wash cloths for 10 bucks. Saturday morning, while he slept in, I did all the errands around the house that we were there for, and then we headed back to KW in the early afternoon.
On Saturday night we attended an absolutely fantastic party to warm the deck of our friends, who are coincidentally neighbours of zanate and the lovely quingawaga. The deck was very nice, I met an old university roommate of the Paramours, and was suitably awed by the host's bar setup and his TV-like presentation skills while mixing cocktails.
When I got home that night, I discovered that a landscaping build day had been called for this afternoon. Since I promised Grover that I'd come out to help once they started the landscaping (that is, once they were no longer working with solvents), I talked to the Paramour about the best way to arrange that into my day... we'd had a date arranged for dim sum today and I didn't want to cancel that, however the build day started an hour before dim sum opened. We arranged to go at 11, so I missed the first 2+ hours of the landscaping, but I had tasty tasty dim sum. And, as it turns out, the restaurant is closing tomorrow for their annual holiday, so I wouldn't have been able to go next week.
The afternoon was filled with helping other people pull up grass, scrape up old mulch, and lay down blackout. It was also filled with more sun than my sunscreen was adequate to the task of, and ended when I started to feel like throwing up. So I called for a ride, came home, and showered and slept for 3 hours. I'm still stiff and sunburn-y, but more human feeling. Thanks to everyone at the build day for being understanding of my slower pace and wall-hitting.
Now I'm making rice and reheating the cheesy tuna mixture for on top of it and I suspect I'll round out the evening with some Dr. Who. Or maybe some Gilmore Girls. Or possibly both.
Tomorrow is my monthly family-doctor-prenatal appointment and tomorrow evening I'll be back in Fergus. After last week, I suspect this one is going to drag a bit.
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It seems that there are some sensible people talking about money.
Some of these sensible people are even writers.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (who writes great fiction) has a series of posts on running your freelance writing business like a business.
...which I found because I followed yet a different link to Jeff Vandermeer's blog, where he has a post about the full-time writing life, which includes this little gem:
...If you’re writing for a living full-time rather than holding or looking for a day job, you’re privileged. You are not entitled to such a life, no one owes it to you–yes, you earn it, and you keep earning it daily, but in today’s world, you are, again, getting an opportunity. You keep it through will and talent and luck, but you try to remember the privileged part as well.
Thank you, Jeff and Kristine, for injecting some sanity in the money discussion. You've warmed my heart and probably saved some lives.
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| User: | dr_kromm |
| Date: | 2009-07-05 11:27 |
| Subject: | The Company |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | geeky | | Music: | "23," Blonde Redhead |
On June 23, 2009, we once again had everyone: Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases), and Stéphane ("Jean-Baptiste Dieudonné," a.k.a. "Jimmy Matthieu").
( Last session's events . . . )
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I'm not going to be able to unsee this.
Look, when the ad link says "Men's bras", I'm not going to be able to help myself. Maybe the know that? Maybe someone's just trying to up their click count?
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There are currently two radio ad campaigns that annoy me to the point of changing the station.
The first is the current series of Michigan Tourism ads in which a smarmy (though I suspect it's supposed to be "soothing") male voice decries the rat race that makes your life suck or how much better things were in the old days, and then presents a solution in the form of a trip to Michigan, where the air is purer, you can breathe deeper, the lumberjacks are taller, and other shit like that.
Seriously, guys.. if your life sucks as badly as the ads are implying, a weekend in the upper peninsula isn't going to fix it. I realize most of modern advertising relies on convincing you that your life has a giant gaping hole that can only be filled by product X, but, man, Michigan Tourism apparently forgot to read the footnote reading "at least *try* to be subtle".
The second is the Shaw* Festival's "what's wrong with you, you shitty, selfish, horrible person that you won't drive the very short distance to our theatre, here, let me pretend to put in your postal code to reiterate how stupid and shitty you are for not buying tickets" campaign. Seriously? You honestly think scolding me is going to get me into your theatre?
Now, my parents are members at the Shaw, and go down a few times a year. Until I heard this ad campaign, I had a generally good opinion of the festival, based on my parents' enjoyment and general reputation. But now? You couldn't *give* me tickets to a show at the the festival.
Ugh. I know that there are some supremely talented advertising/marketing people out there, who make informative, interesting, and/or funny campaigns. But then there are these chuckleheads who make me want to pull out and nuke the bastards from orbit.
*note that this is my assumption, given that it's theatre in Niagara; I generally turn the station as soon as I hear the voice, so details are sketchy.
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The Wave decided to administer the Voight-Kampff Test to the San Francisco mayoral candidates.
TW: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tom, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tom. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that, Tom?
TA: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I’m a Republican?
re-posted from badger. You should read his blog instead of mine, 'cause I just re-post the cool stuff he finds for me.
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American Gothic was a summer series that I remembered fondly. Imagine my surprise when I saw it again on Hulu.com and it turned out to be well-written. Sam Rami was an executive producer, so of course the quality is good (and of course Bruce Cambell makes an appearance).
The whole series is there. Check it out!
Someone's at the door...
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I recently started volunteering at the local crisis call center, because Tim teaches on Wednesday nights and I've decided to keep out of their way for a bit so that the younger guys can be comfortable and not get all macho and weird with a girl sitting in. And even though I decided to stick with my current program of study, I might as well be putting my psychology background to good use where it can help people. It's actually a really good arrangement, because I can go straight from work, do a four hour shift, and get home about the time Tim's class is wrapping up. And, of course, I get to help people and serve the community in some small way, as well as getting a nice little blurb to stick on my resume. Everyone wins, aside from the occaisional call where you just want to reach through the phone and shake someone or at least crack open a bottle of Jack.
Another good thing is that they bring in people from the local social service organizations to do little 15-30 minute classes now and then on various topics, and tonight they had someone come in and talk about helping people deal with grief and loss. The lady gave us a copy of this poem and I thought it was really cool, so I decided to share it with you guys. It's about dealing with grief after a death, but I think it's relevant to a lot of things.
( The Elephant in the Room )
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My company closed today for the holiday, which has split my week up nicely between the "oh good god I think I'm going to have to kill both you, creator of this document, and whoever at MS was responsible for the pain of trying to write large document sets in Word" part and the "getting do New and Interesting documentation stuff" part. Happily, those are listed in chronological order, so tomorrow will involve no user guides from hell.
The only drawback to doing Canada Day on Canada Day, then, is that there is no long weekend in my immediate future.
So today, I slept in, did laundry, and mowed the lawn. That's right, we Canadians know how to do a holiday right...
I also discovered that my neighbour had indeed taken down the laundry line, I suspect to more easily have access to the back yard when he periodically mows it for me if I've been remiss/busy. I hadn't used it up to the point where he took it down, since a) May was stupid rainy and b) I kept forgetting to get clothes pins until the Paramour picked me up some. Thus, he thought that no-one was using it.
It's back up now, and he was kind enough to help me with the back yard by doing the edging with his much-more-butch-than-mine weed whacker. To thank him, I gave him a jar of the strawberry jam I made on Saturday at the_nita's place.
After that, the Paramour and I went up to Waterloo, to hit the Shoppers and Home Depot gardening centre (former to buy, latter to browse), and then stopped for fries at Sonny's, where we saw a big, loud something at the top of a power pole go pop, make a weird yellowy-green flash of light, and smoke a bit. On the way out, we noticed that, unfortunately, it'd killed one of the birds that were hanging out on the power lines.
So tomorrow it's back to work. I was originally supposed to have an appointment on Friday to see my family doctor, but it got switched to Monday. Thus, I have two days to work on the new Flash demo and proposal for the bright and shiny new way of doing documentation that I want to switch to. (Yeah, we will please leave aside any comments on the lack of sanity involved in proposing a wholesale change in the product documentation three and a half months before my maternity leave starts, 'k?)
As an aside, I realize that, to the casual reader, I probably haven't been posting much. I have been, but mostly on the filter I have set up for the pregnancy/baby, which I've figured is of limited interest to most. If I'm wrong about that, and you've been pining to hear about prenatal visits, ultrasounds, and swollen feet, let me know and I'll add you.
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While I'm waiting with baited breath for the details to be ironed out on a certain potential book publication, I've been feverishly working on two other writing projects and laying the groundwork for a third. You know, inbetween work and my dissertation and being married and the job of just being alive in the 21st century. I finally pulled Singularity out again and started to edit it. On the suggestion of melindadansky , I let it sit for awhile before going back to reread it with fresh eyes. The result being that what started out as a 50,000 word nano-book is now creeping steadily towards 100,000. A friend of mine in the physics department is beta-reading it right now to help me with the fiddly bits that are outside my area of expertise. One of the great things about being a space-centered SF writer in Huntsville, is that we have a major NASA installation here, so you can't throw a brick without hitting five rocket scientists who actually do know how a space-vessel would behave under certain conditions because they man the control center for the International Space Station and keep an eye on such things as the various Mars survey projects. Even better, most of them are die-hard SF fans, so they're only too happy to talk to you for hours about it. So, when the fact checking is finished, I will probably be begging for beta readers.
Project #2 is a bit of a departure from my chosen genre. I've talked about it on here a little, but it's turning out to be a much more massive project than I thought. I don't really like what most people call "High Fantasy", like Tolkien and the Wheel of Time series. There are some stories when lots of really powerful magic, strange creatures, and high drama is a good and fitting, but it seems like just about everyone does that now. And I'm annoyed with the number of over the top fantasy novel inspired D&D characters I've had to put up with. Yes, I'm looking at you, Driz'zt clones! I wanted to write something that was a little more subtle. Keep all the good earmarks of fantasy like magic and mythical creatures and powerful villains, but make them sort of the strange underbelly of the world, something that is rare and exciting and difficult to exactly pin down rather than the center-piece of the book, and add to that the edge-of-the-seat tension of a psychological thriller and the in-depth setting and character psychology of a historical fiction. When I first started on it, I was kind of worried it would go the romance novel route, but it's actually shaping up to be something really interesting.
Only now I have writers block, and the best cure for writers block I've found is to read. On that note, one of my class brother's wife is a cultural anthropologist who's guest lecturing at UAH this fall, so I dropped by her office to see how she was settling in today and we ended up going to lunch, where we got to talking about some of her research and I mentioned I was trying to get a reading list together, preferably some books that would help me get a handle on how to write the societies in the books I'm working on. She suggested a few, so now I at least have a place to start:
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussel
The Return of the Player, by Michael Tolkin
Global Woman, by Arlie Hochschild
The Interpretation of Cutlures, by Cliff Geertz
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
The Singularity is Near: When Human's Transcend Biology, by Kurzwiel
Consider the Lobster: and Other Essays, by David Wallace
The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright
If anyone else has suggestions, tack 'em on.
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Some of you might know that my friend, David J Williams, author of The Burning Skies, recently got into a steel cage with Jerry Pournelle (his wording, not mine).
Though the post has sparked some discussion elsewhere, with varied numbers of epithets (my favorite part was when people started calling each other "nutjob" and "communist". That, my friends, is a quality flame war), nobody wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about, so I'm posting my own discussion here.
( Some day, I would like to talk about the things that are under the cut. )
That day is not today. Today, I would like to talk about Hard SF and how difficult it is to write.
First, how do I know? Because in the fall, my alter ego Melinda Thielbar will be publishing a series of "Hard Mathematics" graphic novels through Lerner's graphic universe.
These graphic novels are short. They're aimed at young readers, and they are really hard to write, for some of the same reasons that good hard science fiction is really hard to write.
( Read more... )
If you want to read some hard mathematics fiction with great art, my Manga Math series is available for pre-order at Amazon.
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In this month's New Yorker, Gladwell reviews Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and incidentally demolishes the (deliberate?) misreading of the statement "Information wants to be free".
It's an excellent review. Worth a read.
And ironically, you can read it at The New Yorker's website without paying a thing.
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A little early for a post, but I got to thinking about this while I was in the shower, and I couldn't let it go without some thoughts.
I made the mistake of reading Sandra Tsing Loh's article On Marriage: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off yesterday. While human sexuality and gender issues is something I think about a lot, I tend to shy away from reading feminist and post feminist texts. I don't know why, I think it has something to do with the mystical fear of the liberal arts college that is generally instilled in science program students to keep them from defecting, or it could just be that I don't like the way people sensationalize and manipulate evolutionary biology to prove the theory of the week about why men and women behave the way they do. But, being a newly wed, I just couldn't pass this one up, so I read it. On the whole, I think the article was a little self-indulgent and in poor taste, but some of her conclusions and reasoning have gotten me thinking.
( Rant ahead )
I have to say though that some of her other articles are interesting. I looked them up just to get some background. Every writers puts out a dud now and then, so it's hardly fair to judge her as a writer based on one weird piece. I don't necessarily agree with her chain of logic in many cases, but I think some of her ideas are at least worthy of consideration. Sadly, though, this has only served to deepen my already deeply ingrained aversion to feminist/postfeminist literature.
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So, i was playing some Omaha High/Low tonight. I switch to a new table and everything goes fine for a hand or two. Someone then decides (after bitching and complaining about everyone else) to "make the table slow" ... what does he do? He waits until the time limit on every hand and raised every time to keep the hand going as long as possible. He said this was to "punish" us for "cheating." Real mature. Interestingly, he was raising every time (in a Limit game) regardless of what he held. We were taking his money left and right, it was just a very slow process.
I gave up after 3 or so hands (which took minutes for each hand. Hands per hour when I left for that table was an astoundingly low 11.) ... I get people being jackasses, because that's the way some people are on the net. but this guy was costing himself money. This behavior completely blows my mind.
Anyway, that isn't even why I'm posting, it's just incidental. I've been really liking Omaha recently, but I'm still pretty terrible at it. Does anyone have any recommendations for decent books on Omaha? I've found a lot of books out there, but am not sure which one to get. There's a book that looks decent out there by Shane Smith and Don Vines called "Omaha High-Low Poker: How To Win at the Lower Limits." If I were buying one without any advice, that's the one I'd probably go for. Is anyone familiar with this book? I can't find any specifically geared for online play, though, which is what I really want. There's no way I'd play anything except Hold 'Em in a casino at this point, so advice with online play would be best. Anyway, any suggestions?
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