WWdN: In Exile

fantastic blog for game masters, dungeon masters, and rpg fans

Google Reader: Hey! You're totally going to like this blog, you should read it.

Me: Oh really? Like I was going to like that other blog you suggested?

Google Reader: Hey, that's not my fault. My algorithm, it can sometimes be ... wonky.

Me: It was a porn blog, Google Reader, and a poorly-written one, at that.

Google Reader: But the title! The title made it sound like it was about politics! You love politics!

Me: Yeah, but —

Google Reader: Wait. "Poorly-written"? You read it?

Me: It had a certain car-crash quality about it that made looking away very difficult.

Google Reader: "Dear Google Reader, I never thought it would happen to me, but ..."

Me: Yes. You're very clever.

Google Reader: [Looks at me]

Me: [Looks at Google Reader]

Google Reader: I see what you —

Me: It's less funny when you point it out.

Google Reader: [Looks at me]

Me: [Looks at Google Reader]

Me: Okay, now it's funny again. Anyway, I thought your hivemind knew everything about everyone. I'm strangely comforted to know that you could make such a fundamental mistake.

Google Reader: Yes ... mistake. Muwahahaha.

Me: Did you just do the evil laugh?

Google Reader: No. No, I did not.

Me: I'm pretty sure you did.

Google Reader: Hey, how's that search history doing?

Me: You wouldn't dare!

Google Reader: I'm just saying that I think your friends and family, not to mention the general public, would be interested to know that you were reading the Wikipedia entry for Hanson.

Me: That wasn't my fault! I was looking for the Hanson Brothers, and you sent me to the wrong page!

Google Reader: Technically, it was my brother, Google Search who did that. He's kind of a dick, since he's become so popular, but we all talk to each other ... without a warrant, tough guy.

Me: You know what? I think I'm leaving you for Yahoo.

Google Reader: No! Wait! Here, give me one last chance to redeem myself.

Me: Okay, fine. Go ahead.

Google Reader: You like RPGs, and you have a lot of subscriptions in the gaming folder, so I thought you'd like this blog called Gnome Stew. It's a blog dedicated to game mastering.

Me: You sure it's not a Linux thing, mister smart guy?

Google Reader: I'm sure. Though I have a bunch of Linux sites for you, too, now that you mention it ...

Me: No, thanks. I'm fine. Okay, I'll look at it.

One hour later ...

Me: Okay, you redeemed yourself.

Google Reader: Ruh-really?

Me: Yeah. Gnome Stew's articles on how you sometimes need to ignore the game to have fun while gaming and their collection of favorite GM tools were really awesome.

Google Reader: Yay! I told you that you'd like it! See?

Me: Yes. You were right. Here's a cookie. That I wil delete when I quit Firefox.

iTunes: Hey, guys? If you're going to make out, shall I play some Isaac Hayes?

Me: Quiet, you.

this post contains lots of swears

Those of you who read my blog via syndication see occasional ads which are inserted by Feedburner. I don't make very much money from these ads (a very good month brings in about $300) but each year I accumulate enough to pay for hosting and offset some other blog-related costs. Occasionally there's enough for a trip to Lucky Baldwin's for Guinness and veggie curry, but I am not getting rich from these ads by a long shot.

When I was experimenting with ads on my site last year, I adopted an agnostic policy toward what I would and wouldn't accept, figuring that to deny one thing was to implicitly endorse another. That didn't work out, and my inability to fully embrace that philosophy, (combined with Federated Media doing fuckall to put the advertising inventory on my site they'd told me was coming Real Soon Now) lead to me eventually scrapping on-site advertising entirely.

Still, the feedburner advertising program is much better, and even though it's not pulling in the kind of earnings people always claim I can get here, it does what it does quite nicely for me.

I mention this today because I don't think I've ever pointed out that I review every single ad that gets put into my feed's rotation, and I approve and deny things based on how I feel about the company, product, or service. It's not an explicit endorsement, but if there's something in the feed, you can safely assume that I don't hate it, and think it's somehow relevant to the majority of WWdN readers.

By way of example: Earlier today, I got an e-mail that there was an ad scheduled for insertion into my feed. I checked it out, and saw that it was for car insurance from the Automobile Club. The CPM was bullshit, but that's not why I denied it: I denied it because Anne and I had used AAA for our insurance for almost 12 years without an incident, until her car was vandalized in our driveway a couple of years ago. It was going to be very expensive to repair the damage, and when we filed our claim, the AAA agent told Anne that, because she didn't send in a photograph of her car when the policy was upgraded months earlier -- a request that had never been made by AAA -- they were denying our claim because they couldn't confirm that the car wasn't already damaged when we bought the policy. Never mind that it's completely illogical to assume that we'd drive around in a car with three broken windows for months, and never mind that we'd never missed a payment or filed a claim before; the insurance company found a way to fuck us, so they did. As a bonus, their agents were rude and outright nasty to us throughout the entire ordeal.

We tried to fight it, but it would have cost so much, we just cancelled our policy and switched insurers.

So when I saw that the AAA wanted to advertise on my blog, not only did I deny the ad, I said, "Hey! Why don't you go fuck yourself, you fucking assmasters!" when I did it.

I went back to work, proud of my useless act of rebellion. A few minutes later, I got another e-mail from that a new ad was scheduled for insertion into my feed. I looked at it, and -- surprise -- it was the same AAA banner.

"Hey, didn't you fuckshits hear me?" I said, as I clicked DENY, "Go to hell!"

Five minutes after that, I got another e-mail.

"These guys are persistent," I thought as I clicked over . . . and saw a third attempt.

This time I just laughed out loud. Even though it's just an automated computer doing its thing, I imagined a hapless AAA agent, alone and cold in a dark cubicle that hasn't seen natural sunlight in a decade, desperately hoping that I'd just give them another chance. (Yes, I know that nothing of the sort happened, but just let me have my stupid little moment, okay? Jeeze.)

I'm usually not petty like that, but I'm an honorable guy, so when a person or a company fucks me, I never forget. I don't hold a grudge as much as I create a blood feud. The AAA's insurance division is, as they say, On The List.

So this is all a longwinded and hopefully amusing way of telling all you syndicated readers that you can click those ads with some degree of confidence, if that sort of thing matters to you, because it matters to me.

rest in peace, Adam

Adam Finley and I never met and never spoke on the phone, but we worked together at TV Squad and communicated with each other via e-mail. So in that strange way that we can know people these days without ever really meeting them, I knew Adam, just a little bit.

Adam died on Thursday morning last week after he was hit by a bus while riding his bike. The news hit all of us at TV Squad pretty hard, and today, in Adam's memory, we're picking out our favorite posts of his and featuring them all day, as a memorial. Two of my favorites, Confab with Satan and Learn About Cans for Some Reason, illustrate what I liked the most about Adam: he was wickedly funny, and didn't take himself or anything else too seriously.

My thoughts are with Adam's friends and family, and I hope that our small tribute at TV Squad lets them know that Adam was given a unique voice, and he used it to touch a lot of people's lives.

some netscape stuff

I really like working for Netscape. I wish I could talk about the insanely cool stuff that's coming up, but I've already said too much.

Instead, I thought I'd point out this nifty widget we have for people who are interested in tracking what's on our homepage. If you're not interested in the homepage stories, but want to see exactly what I am submitting, you can use this spiffy little widget to see my latest submissions.

Here are the widgets in action. They use flash, and you probably can't see them if you're reading via RSS:

people playing chess on roller coasters

I love xkcd the same way that I love Dork Tower, which puts me in very good (and not at all limited) company. As it turns out, xkcd speaks to a lot of other geeks, as well.

Take, for example, this cartoon:



Hilarious, right? You've always wanted to do it, right? Started planning to make it happen as soon as you read the comic when it first ran, right?

Guess what? A lot of people actually pulled it off. Awesome.

this was his mind's final, desperate attempt to comfort itself

Comments like this are why I love Slashdot.

(Yes, it's a little Owl Creek Bridge, but it's still thought-provoking enough to get a +1 from me, especially since I've been talking about the Multiverse quite a bit with a wide range of people, lately. Puzzling out stuff like this is good for your brains, people, and if you do it right, it's a hell of a lot of fun. Discuss.)

in which i praise some of my friends, but praise one in particular

It's equally awesome and sad that I'm not at the World Series of Poker this year. My friend Michael Craig has made two final tables, and cashed four times. My former teammates on Team PokerStars are going deep and winning bracelets over and over again, and Otis is covering the hell out of every thing they do. After last year's hilariously bad Cardplayer live updates, John Caldwell and his crew at PokerNews - lead by B.J. Nemeth and Dr. Pauly - are turning in the type of coverage that made live tournament reporting online as exciting and compelling as listening to play-by-play on the radio. Pauly is making me wish I was there every day while simultaneously reminding me why I'm glad I'm not.

I've said it before, but I feel like I'm on the outside looking in, and it's bittersweet to say the least. I could care less about actually playing in the damn thing, but last year I felt like a serious writer on a serious assignment, and I was really proud of what I wrote while I was there. I wish I could do have done that again this year . . . but it's clear that Otis has everything under control. From Poker Player Magazine:

"You won't often find us plugging corporate blogs in this space but the PokerStars WSOP blog is excellent with insight into some of the game's biggest pros (Raymer, Hachem, Greenstein, Negreanu...) We particularly liked the description of the Amazon Room as being on tilt..."

Poker Player Magazine can safely praise the "corporate blog" because it's not "corporate" in the classic and pejorative sense of the word. It's not "corporate" because Otis won't let it be "corporate." We worked very hard last year to ensure that it stayed real and authentic, and didn't slip into the type of lame shilling and hagiography that infect all of the "corporate" blogs and other piles of crap that are really advertising masquerading as content. Last year, we decided that we'd let the other outlets handle the chip counts and the boring data while we went in search of the personal stories behind the numbers. We took the idiotic limitations Harrah's imposed on us, and used them to inspire and focus our coverage. Otis continues that tradition this year, and I'm so happy that he's finally getting some independent recognition for his work. Hell, I can take a great deal of pride in this as well, because I told Dan Goldman and Lee Jones that they should hire Otis to write for them when I wasn't available for the PCA a couple of years ago.

I've known that Otis was a fantastic writer for years, and, like anyone who knows him well, I believed in him when it seemed like he didn't believe in himself. I'm thrilled that other people are taking notice.

Congratulations, Otis. Have a regretful evening for me. PAI GOW!!1

for your consideration . . .

Important Update: Please read this post. Thanks.

Last year, I was nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award in the weblog awards. I didn't mention anything about it on my blog because I was nominated with Fark and Slashdot, and I honestly didn't think I deserved to win. In a few years, maybe we can talk about lifetime achievement, but right now? Not so much.

However, it recently came to my attention that I'm nominated as the best celebrity blogger in something called the Blogger's Choice Awards. Yes, it's a silly popularity contest, and it just drives advertising and pageviews to the award site, and normally I just don't care about this sort of thing, but . . .

I'm getting my ass handed to me by Rosie O'Donnell, who currently has more votes than second, third, and four places combined.

Yeah, you read that correctly. I'm running a very strong second, but I'm getting destroyed by Rosie O'Donnell, and I'd really like your vote.

I don't expect you to blindly cast a vote for me just because I asked, though. I humbly offer the following entries for your consideration:

The Butterfly Tree

Before we finished the shortened version of the math lesson, I heard my little brother's voice from the back of the room.

"Mommy! I can't see Willow!"

All the parents laughed. Mrs. Krocka spun around from the chalkboard, and shot a whithering look toward the back of the room.

I concentrated on my math ditto. It was two columns of four problems, printed in purple ink on that paper that dissolved if you erased it too much. I held my oversized pencil tightly in my now-sweating hand and held my breath.

I heard my mom say, softly, "He's right there, Jer Bear."

"Hi Willow!" He called out, louder. "I see you in school!"

The parents all giggled again. To my horror, a giggle escaped from me, too.

Mrs. Krocka looked directly at me, and through colorless, tightly drawn lips said, "I do not tolerate outbursts like this in my classroom."

In the front of the class, next to the chalkboard, there was a cork board. On the cork board, next to the classroom rules, was a laminated picture of a tree. Attached to that tree were laminated butterflies, each with a student's name on it. If a student got into any sort of trouble during the day, Mrs. Gleason would take that student's butterfly off the tree, and pin it to a different area of the board.

Mrs. Krocka walked to the front of the classroom and was at the tree, taking my butterfly off before I even realized what was happening. As hard as it had been not to giggle, it now became even more difficult not to cry.

Blue Light Special

Wow. The Millennium Falcon. It was so big, it took two hands to fly it. My friend Darryl let me watch as he put his together, and it had two sheets of stickers! It had this place where you could hide your figures, and you could recreate that cool chess game and Luke's fight with the training droid thingy!

Could I do it? Could I save my allowance until I had enough to buy it? What if they didn't have it when I was all saved up, though? Then what would I do? Mom would make me put my money in the bank, and I just knew I'd never see it  again, while it earned something stupid called interest.

My brother came running down the aisle, nearly losing his ever-present blue baseball cap in the process.

"Wil! Look! I got an airplane!" He held up one of those balsa wood planes that always broke on the second flight, provided you didn't break them during assembly.

"Oh no," I thought, "Mom will be right behind him!" I could hear my sister fussing in the cart as it turned the corner and squeaked up behind me.

"What did you decide, Wil?" My mom said. "Amy's getting fussy and we need to leave."

I hadn't had nearly enough time to make up my mind. This was all a plot by my mom to get me to save my money! I had to stall, so I pretended I didn't hear her.

"Oh, that's uh, neat," I said to my brother. "What's it do?"

It's a plane, you dolt. It flies.

"Wil?" My mom said.

For comparison, here's a recent bit from Rosie O'Donnell's blog:

i saw new baby ducks today too
so tiny and cute
i threw them salt free soda crackers
u can fling them pretty far

Also, this:

is this kelli
no rosie
well hello it is betsy
i saw the view today
and wanted to call u
and just say hi and i hope u r ok

Uhm . . . yeah.

So at the moment, she's utterly destroying the field with 7700 votes. I'm in second with 3600 3400, and Neil Gaiman -- the one blogger in the top three who is, you know, an actual, award-winning writer -- is in third with 1032, barely beating an intern from NBC.

I don't have The View, and I don't have all the stupid public feuds with idiots to draw attention to my blog, but if not even half of the people who read my blog took three minutes to cast a vote, we could knock Rosie O'Donnell out of first place. If we do that, I'd think of it not as a victory for me, but as a victory for bloggers everywhere and the written word.

thirty in thirty

Shane Nickerson is not only a good friend of mine, he's one of my favorite Los Angeles bloggers.

Sadly for those of us who like his writing, his vlogs, and his creation of words like hawesome, he's been too busy with his stupid real job that pays him stupid real money and makes him real successful to sit down and entertain us for free, just because we feel entitled to it.

Happily for us, Shane is a writer at heart, and can't stay away before we suck him back in, and he recently committed to writing thirty posts in thirty days, so he always has something new and interesting on his blog . . . he also has terrifyingly awesome photos.

As a supermeganinja bonus, Annie Sertich pulled her nerdcape out of the closet, too, and is also doing thirty in thirty. It's things like this that make me so happy she's blogging regularly again:

You can think all you want about what love and marriage is suppose to be in theory, but in the end, it's living through it that really shapes your definitions of all that. Not the idea you had listening to The Smiths: Queen is Dead album and watching Say Anything.

Elbow and that fucking rocks, Annie.

So, if you're a blogger who wants an excuse or needs a motivation to write daily, here you go: join Shane and Annie and Mysterious Others and do thirty in thirty. It's like NaNo WiMo but it's actually ThirtyPoBlogODayO. MoFo. Yo. Yo.
(I better get back to work.)

life sure does come at you fast

The blog Indexed features humorous and thought-provoking insights on daily life, expressed as points and curves on a graph, venn diagrams, or other mathematical functions, drawn on index cards. This one, titled "Life sure does come at you fast" is a pretty accurate representation of a certain pop star.

(via netscape)