Gladwell on Basketball (and defeating Goliath)

I always enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s topics, and his latest New Yorker article “How David Beats Goliath” is no exception.

I think it also explains why I don’t find basketball as interesting as say hockey. Only half the time is spent doing something interesting — the game is played on about 48 feet of a 94 foot court.

RPG Technology

Ran into an interesting post "10 Useful Pieces of Gaming Technology" and just had to call out the Abulafia Random Generators. These sorts of tables are always fun (where else would you learn that Bruce Schneier once factored a prime number?), and often quite useful to spark creativity.

HeroQuest blog

Moon Design has started a blog in support of their HeroQuest line. It’s a good place to read about release schedules (the worldwide release of HeroQuest is July), upcoming products, and designer notes. I’ve been writing some of the latter.

HeroQuest 2nd Edition

The paper & dice roleplaying game I was project manager for is finally nearing release: the second edition of Robin Laws’s HeroQuest. It’s due to be released in June.

I’ve run lengthy campaigns with this edition and the previous, and find this version to be even more flexible and easy to run than the last. It gives you plenty of tools to run games that follow a dramatic flow. My players all found it easier as well, but lost none of HeroQuest’s flexibility.

HeroQuest is now generic — suitable for running games in any genre. (Previous games were tied to Glorantha, so you needed to do a little adaptation if you wanted a different setting.) But Glorantha fans take heart — I’ve also been helping edit The Sartar Book, which has rules for Orlanthi magic and plenty of information on the inhabitants of Dragon Pass in general and Sartar in particular. It also includes an epic campaign suitable for characters of any level (though I recommend a little player experience). The Sartar Book is still in the editing phase, but while you’re waiting, Glorantha fans can use the appendix in HeroQuest to play (though you’ll have to provide your own cultures and scenarios).

I’m perhaps biased, but I really like the new HeroQuest rules, and The Sartar Book is shaping up to be pretty darn good as well.

Apple Keyboard

I think I’ve requested a rationally sized keyboard several times over the years, so when Apple finally came out with one, I figured I needed to put my money where my mouth is, and buy one.

I plugged it into a KVM, and it works fine (typing on either a 20 inch aluminum iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.6, or a G5 tower running 10.4.11).

As with my MacBook Air, I missed the Enter key. So I installed KeyRemap4MacBook. Despite the name, it works fine with the Apple Keyboard as well as the MacBook Air.

The only problem was that for some reason, I wanted to put my right hand too far to the left —apparently I’m too used to positioning it away from the right side of the keyboard.

It’s really nice having all that desk space back!

Small At Last!

Hallelujah! Apple is once again offering a keyboard that doesn’t take up excess space on your desktop, and will work without draining batteries! 

Welcome to the Anti-Social

So I was on the bus today, and noticed someone was flipping through something on his iPhone. Turned out it was his playlists. And once he picked a song, I could easily see which album it was from, because of the album cover (easy to recognize because I too have some Vampire Weekend on my iPhone).

To me that’s just as valid a music sharing experience as whatever the Zune is supposed to do. And we didn’t even have to cooperate.