Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Mac Moyer's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, December 14th, 2008
7:49 pm	Holiday breakup I made some peanut brittle with the Good Eats recipe this evening, and I declare that recipe to be full-scale awesome. Peanut brittle + cayenne pepper = world domination. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
11:37 am	When beavers attack! Our smallest apple tree was chewed down completely a couple of nights ago. As soon as I can, I need to get out and wrap some hardware cloth around all five four fruit trees on the property. The second-smallest apple tree has already been nibbled a bit. I hope my castorific friend lets it live until the weekend. I really like that tree. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
11:48 pm	Information imbalance at the heart of horror? I loves me some Trail of Cthulhu. I ran a one-shot for Halloween that I think was pretty successful. I'm thinkin' of writing up the scenario for some form of publication, I liked it so much. But that's not what this post is about. ( What is it about? Click to find out! ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
11:37 pm	Sweet light Man, it's been a long eight years. It sure feels good to turn this corner and see some light at the end of the tunnel, and not just more tunnel. The next president has his work cut out for him, but I'm just looking forward to a president who can use the English language. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
10:40 am	Arab, Muslim... fear, ignorance... tomayto, tomahto A troubling bit of video was in rotation at CNN and CNNHN last weekend, John McCain and a supporter named Gayle Quinnell at a rally. The exchange goes like this: Quinnell: I can't trust Obama. I— I have heard about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, um.... He's an Arab. He is not.... McCain: No, no. No, ma'am. No, ma'am. Quinnell: No? McCain: No. No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a, he's a, he's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on, on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not. Thank you. ( Now, there's a lot that troubles me about this, but I'll strip it down a layer at a time to get to what really bothers me.... ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
2:44 pm	It's the sort of thing you'll like, if you like this sort of thing I really dig the Mountain Goats' album Heretic Pride. You should check it out. Yes, you. They have a song about Lovecraft. Or sort of about feeling like Lovecraft. When he lived in Brooklyn. It's called "Lovecraft in Brooklyn." It's a good name. And a good song. You can't go wrong with lyrics like: Woke up afraid of my own shadow I mean, like, genuinely afraid Headed to the pawnshop To buy myself a switchblade Someday something's coming From way out beyond the stars To kill us while we stand here And store our brains in mason jars (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
9:56 am	What does Indie Press Revolution bring to the table? EDIT: I've received some very helpful responses from folks who work at IPR in the comments. Some points: Publishers set prices at IPR, and IPR takes a 15% cut, which is smaller than a typical bookstore model. I've personally had very good experiences buying directly from indie RPG publishers, but that's not always the case. IPR is providing professional customer service so you don't have to take a risk working directly with the guy who wrote a beautiful little RPG, but can't seem to offer customer service worth a damn. They're out there. IPR's slightly-higher-than-usual S&H fees reflect more expensive packaging to better protect their books. I can vouch for this first-hand: they do use better packaging, and it does work. drivingblind points out ways to keep S&H-cost-per-book lower... see the comments for details. Even folks who work at IPR aren't 100% pleased with the e-commerce software they're using. The answers to my core question -- what does IPR do for me? -- has a lot of answers, and many of them are publisher-oriented. But the fact that I got so many thoughtful, rational responses from folks who work at IPR indirectly answers the question better than anything. It's clear these guys care about their business and want to serve consumers. They're making a quality effort in a challenging sector of a tough industry, and that deserves some support. I'm going to leave the post below as originally written, but be advised that my mind has changed. In my continuing fascination with indie RPGs, I've noted that in the last year or so most indie publishers are moving to Indie Press Revolution to handle their mail-order sales. I don't know a lot about their operating model or the economics of their unique product range, but I do know that as a consumer I don't care for a lot of things I'm seeing at IPR. First, their prices aren't good. Now, these are indie RPGs, and I accept that I'm paying a premium for buying from small presses. But it seems to me (my memory may be faulty) that I paid less than $22 for my copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I bought it directly from the publisher's web site (which isn't an option anymore, now that the publisher only sells it online through IPR). And it seems to me that IPR is a middleman taking a cut of the money I'm paying... but what am I, as the consumer, getting for my extra dough? Second, their shipping fees are awful. Perhaps I'm too coddled by Amazon's free shipping deals, but I'll point out that independent sellers through Amazon charge only $3.99 for shipping a single book. IPR charges $5.79 for shipping a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard," and even more for bigger books. Now, "Dogs" is a great game, but it's a tiny little book. Why so much for shipping? It's only a couple of bucks, but on top of their already high product prices it gets amplified. As a fan of indie RPGs, it's hard for me to feel good about selling my friends on a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I know it will cost them nearly $28 for a 160-page, digest-sized book. Worse yet, I already own and love "Dogs," but I'm reluctant to buy any games I'm less familiar with from IPR, because I don't feel comfortable with the value I'd be getting. Finally, the web site is hard to use. It's hard to find stuff, even with the search function when you know exactly what you're looking for. Do a search for "spirit of the century." The game "Spirit of the Century" is the ninth entry on the page! WTF? Making this worse is IPR's habit of posting a full entry for each available format for a product. There's an entry for the print edition, an entry for the PDF edition, and an entry for an option that includes both. All for the same book. It makes much more sense to me to put up just one entry per product, and show a column with the available buying formats and corresponding prices. It sure would be easier to browse the results of my search if there weren't three nearly identical entries for every project, producing a list so unnecessarily long that it extended over three pages. I know IPR is scraping out a niche for itself in a hard-to-sell area of an industry that isn't exactly the place to go for profitability to begin with. And they must be doing something for publishers, or so many indie publishers wouldn't be using them. But, as a consumer, I'm not seeing the benefit of using IPR. I never like to be a complainer, especially about a small-fry operation that's serving the gaming community, but IPR needs to do a better job of telling me why I should support them. So far I avoid it as much as I can, but if they continue to be the main outlet for small RPG presses it's going to be hard to follow indie RPGs without them. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
1:29 pm	At the hospital, vaguely I'm staying at Sacred Heart Medical Center for a few days. I'm reluctant to post details, because detailed medical information posted in public could be used against me or my family in the future, but it's not because I don't want my friends to know. Feel free to contact Joellen and me directly, and we'll do what we can to fill you in. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
9:22 am	So long, George, and thanks for all the F-bombs When I was in high school, Nick-at-Night started showing classic ('70s) SNL episodes edited down to half-hour best-of shows. (I bet NBC would have a hit on its hands if it did this with current SNL episodes... but I digress.) My favorite of all of these was George Carlin's appearance. Other comedians go for the laugh first, and a few good ones occasionally make you think. Carlin's comedy always went for the thinking first, and the laughter came as a result. I never looked at the world the same way after I first saw George Carlin's standup. We've lost a great American hero, a guy who fought hypocrisy and never ran out of enemies. And I can't help feeling we lost him just when we need him most. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
9:47 am	No Play NW! Last year, I wanted to go to Go Play NW, but we were on the verge of Riley, so I didn't. As Riley's first birthday approaches, I got to thinkin', "Hey, I bet Go Play NW is coming up soon." So I looked it up, and it was almost a month earlier than last year. It was May 31st through June 1st. Man, I need to get on some kinda mailing list for this thing. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
11:28 am	SCIENTIFICTION! I'm reading The Skylark of Space, and for some reason this passage struck me as especially iconic: For forty-eight hours the uncontrolled atomic motor dragged the masterless vessel with its four unconscious passengers through the illimitable reaches of empty space, with an awful and constantly increasing velocity. I don't know why that passage strikes me as so representative of pre-Golden-Age science fiction. The elaborately stumbling rhythm? The lengthy description without a drop of imagery? The awkward pairing of the emotional adjective "awful" with the factual "velocity," in a sentence already weighed down with numbers? Above all, I can't figure out how you would build a sentence like that without a word processor. It's like the Stonehenge of sentences. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
3:53 pm	Science fiction in academia A bit ago, I commented about science fiction not being part of the academic canon of literature. Today I stumbled across an exception, a collegiate course on science fiction, by Dr. Courtney Brown at Emory University. And it's a podcast. (Scroll down a bit, or track it down on iTunes.) It's called "Science Fiction and Politics," and it's a social science course, not a literature course, but... whatever. It's close enough. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
9:37 am	Trail of Cthulhu player's guide = smart Trail of Cthulhu is nifty and gorgeous. It's also a $40 core rulebook. And Cthulhu campaigns are notoriously short. So Pelgrane Press has done something I think is very smart. They're selling a player's guide for $11. Now, for most systems, a player's guide is extra material... an extra expense. But in this case the player's guide is a subset of the core rulebook. Just what the players need to play the game, but not something extra for the GM to buy. Pelgrane also offers PDFs of the ToC rulebook. I've seen from experience that, when a PDF is available for an RPG, especially a short campaign, the GM will often buy a copy of the core rulebook and spread the PDF around among the players... who never buy the book for themselves. With an inexpensive player's guide, I think Pelgrane is opening up a way for non-GM players to support the company and the product line, and they're not overcharging for it. In other words, I think many players who might otherwise be inclined to violate the copyright now have a very reasonable alternative. It's good for everybody, and it's smart. I would sure like to see this model catch on. Way to go, Pelgrane! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
9:32 am	Geek affirmation I'm feeling a little ungeeky today. It's because of podcasts. I listen to the Butcher Block podcast, which is dedicated to Jim Butcher stuff. At least, I did until yesterday afternoon. While I enjoy the Dresden Files books very much, and I liked the SciFi Channel show, I was seriously outgeeked by the last episode of the podcast. After the speaker got very worked up about a new Dresden Files graphic novel and the cover art for some upcoming books... I turned it off and unsubscribed. I just couldn't share her excitement. I just can't get that revved up about those things. Somebody let me know when the next Dresden book comes out in paperback... other than that, I don't have the mental bandwidth to spare. I'm listening to the GeekDad podcast this morning, specifically the second of their "HipTrax" episodes. The first song was about Harry Potter (which I don't pay any attention to), and the second was about World of Warcraft (which I don't pay any attention to). *sigh* I didn't immediately turn that one off and unsubscribe, but it was a sharp followup blow. I'm feeling very out-of-touch, geekwise. So pardon me while I affirm my geekiness. I once watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, extended editions even, in one day. I self-published a board game. I started a local science fiction reading group. I go to at least one game con a year. I know the name of that guy with the weird nose who threatens Luke Skywalker in the Mos Eisley cantina in Episode IV. I refer to the first Star Wars movie as "Episode IV." I wear glasses. Once a week, I am a Dungeon Master. On alternating weeks, I play a Japrilian diviner named Abu Zayn Mahdi ibn Asad al-Ragush al-Guluq. He was trapped in a crystal sphere for seven hundred years, after finding said sphere in the enemy palace his side captured at the Battle of Korhan. His sister Hafsa, a batulifaizah (virgin battle-priestess), was a crucial leader in the battle, and Mahdi had received word the night before he entered the palace that his wife had given birth to their first child, a son. He has seven levels in wizard, and five in the geometer prestige class. His Intelligence score is 21. He does 24d6 damage with his Disintegrate spell (26d6 if he uses a spellglyph), if his target fails a Fortitude save (5d6 if the target succeeds), and he usually casts True Strike first to get +20 on the hit roll. Okay, I feel better. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
10:19 am	Laying a foundation My friend shadroe and I started up a local reading group for classic science ficion. We settled on the Classics of Science Fiction list to guide us, a compilation of several critical lists of the best and most important science fiction novels. While I consider myself a science fiction fan, I went through the list and checked off only about a dozen titles I'd read, out of almost two hundred. Why so few? Because I studied English literature in college, and science fiction isn't really in the canon. You can often take a course on science fiction, but in one course you won't read enough novels to give you a solid foundation. And colleges don't generally offer more than one. So my fiction reading bandwidth was occupied with lots of non-scifi. It's been a great journey for me. After the last year of reading almost nothing but strong scifi classics in my spare time, I have a new understanding of the history of the genre, and I feel like it's just barely a first glimpse. But it's already been such an amazing view, I'll be on this path for a while. As we reached the end of our last reading cycle (all the members of the group pick a book from the list, and we read one every three weeks before we pick another batch), I read far enough ahead that I decided to independently read the three volumes of Asimov's anthology Before the Golden Age, stories that appeared in the magazines when Asimov was growing up in the '30s. I'm halfway through the collection now, and it's a particular eye-opener. I kind of knew science fiction magazines were more important in the early days of science fiction than they've been in my lifetime, but it's a new experience to actually read some of the best short stories from the early days. It's like I've seen the mountains for my whole life, I'm finally trekking out to climb some of them, and I'm finding the beauty of the valleys and rivers below them. I've already made a point of picking up some of the other short-story collections on our list, Campbell's 1952 Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction, and Adventures in Time and Space. I'd like to read all of these before I get to the new-wave Dangerous Visions anthologies. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
8:37 am	An open letter Dear CNN Headline News, "American Idol" results are not news. Please devote the time you are planning to spend on this "story" in the future to instead covering meaningful world events. If you find yourself facing a slow news day, there's always a couple of wars you could mention now and again. Thank you, Mac (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
10:24 am	Transmitting John Williams directly into my skull I admit it. I want this toothbrush. It says it plays the "Star Wars Theme Song." But from which movie? After the initial fanfare (maybe that's the whole two minutes?), each movie varies quite a bit. What I really want is the Imperial March. If I could start every morning with the Imperial March, I would be a better man. Y'know, maybe I just oughta get one o' them CD alarm clocks to start my day off right. To start my day off like Darth Vader. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 21st, 2008
5:19 pm	4th edition blues Went to Just-a-Game Con on Saturday, and played in a D&D 4e demo. I won't go into details (if you want details, this is a good rundown), but in short I like it. A lot. My first-level wizard was way more fun to play than any first-level wizard I've ever seen, and it feels like the fixes are systemic and smart, with a real focus on making the game friendlier, faster, and funner. I'm very confident 4e will be a much better game than 3.5. I'm running a 3.5 game that I'm ready to shut down in the next couple of months (expect a post-mortem post here in 6-7 weeks). I won't be re-tooling that game to 4e. But I'm playing a wizard in another 3.5 game I really enjoy, and which appears to have the legs to go on indefinitely. And the GM has no intention to switch to 4e. I think that's a real shame. I'd prefer to play 4e, but I see her point. The period of learning could really disrupt her story-focused campaign. It's a mature game, and our characters are at 12th and 13th level. Most of us are built out of a variety of splatbooks. The characters would play much differently if they were converted to 4e PHB-only rules. And I don't want to play another D&D game. I've said before that I'm not that much of a fantasy fan. I'd rather my second game was something different (Trail of Cthulhu is new and shiny). I especially don't want to play a 3.5 game and a 4e game at the same time. If I can't needle the GM into switching -- and she was pretty adamant that she won't -- I'll be sticking with 3.5 for a while longer. Ah well. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
8:11 am	Crib notes Riley slept overnight in the nursery for the first time last night. We've got her into a pattern of being rocked to sleep every time. As sweet as it is to hold a sleeping baby in your arms, she needs to get into a pattern of going to sleep in her crib... so she can get herself back to sleep again when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Tuesday night's adventures in imposing new sleep patterns left her so tired that she slept much better last night. Let's hope that pattern continues.... (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
6:27 pm	My Darling Fire Hazard I TiVo'd My Darling Clementine on TCM or AMC or something, and watched it this morning. I've seen it twice or thrice before, but this is the first time I remember noticing that two fires get set in the course of Wyatt Earp stopping violent drunks... and nobody seems to notice. These fires get set, and seem to go up pretty quickly, and the scene just wraps up with nobody so much as grabbing a bucket of water or... saying anything. Seems like a bad policy when your buildings are all made out of untreated, desert-parched timber. I wrote a paper in a college film class about the use of fire in a later John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Fire was used as a sort of icon of the John Wayne character's violent courage, the smooth way he lit his cigarette in the chimney of a lantern while he held it in his mouth, and later it transformed into self-destructive fury. I can't decide whether there's a connection, or John Ford just decided it would be fun to put fire on film in a couple Clementine shots. At the time, it just seems like the chaos of the moment... but both instances in Clementine happen under nearly identical circumstances. Ah well. Burn, baby, burn! (Comment on this)