The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Sebastian:

sjw @ 27 : I've played a handful of two-player sessions so far; one on "easy" (four epidemics) with scientist and medic, which went fairly smoothly. The next three games were set up with five epidemics and we used all the other characters at least once -- we lost every game to cascading outbreaks. I suspect scientist/medic is the easiest combination of players to work with, especially Scientist -- four cards of a colour is significantly easier to get and hold than five with a hand limit of seven. I also suspect Dispatcher is a much more valuable role if there's more people playing: the "move any player's pawn" and "move to any player's location" powers are ... limited ... with only one other player.

On the whole, though, I really like the game -- the gameplay works with the theme to produce a great sense of impending doom and the sense that the closest you'll get to victory is a temporary breather. (please, just one quiet night...)

I write you this comment to have your attention.

("You need to delete that right away, it's a God damned virus." "This is classic Tycho -- it just *kills* you to see me succeed.")

Please, please, please. I'm (here in Edmonton, AB) watching fivethirtyeight every day and hoping that all the signs aren't wrong. It's been such a long 8 years. If conservative Alberta can vote in a (left-wing) NDP MP, then Obama can win -- can't he?

Can't he?

Please?

I'm still making code at work -- same project for two years, and the end is still a ways off.

At home I'm trying to diversity and make pictures with my camera.

For Thanksgiving I'm making a trip to visit my brother in the BC interior, and hopefully combine that with some of the latter as well.

Larry Brennan @ 44: I'm not sure what the situation is like in Windows-land, but I've been using iSquint (http://www.isquint.org/) to convert movie files of all kinds (AVIs, MOVs, Youtube FLVs) for iPod viewing and I've yet to be disappointed. Though they plug VisualHub at you on the website, iSquint remains free and available for download.

Now I'm annoyed -- I can't buy the song because "The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia."

There's some kind of irony here but I can't put my finger on it.

This made me cry. It's in the same spirit as that Discovery Channel ad, but ... damn. I can't think of ways to describe how it made me feel without lapsing into cliches like "this is what humanity could be". It just gets me right there. Well done, Matt.

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see some people wearing Pandemic and Bioware/Pandemic shirts in the Brisbane clip.

I'd say Czech, but I'm not sure...

US detains 'top al-Qaeda figure'.

I'm not sure whether this one is properly filed under "We have top men working on it now... top men." or "al-Qaeda number three detained".

Ginger @396: Jvmneq bs Bm. Gotta be.

With regard to Graydon@32; there are many copies of Reflections on Trusting Trust available through Google Scholar; the link you posted goes to the access-controlled ACM repository. I mention this only because it's one of my favorite papers ever (along with Life at Low Reynolds Number. Go read that one too! It's got nothing to do with elections but it's really really interesting even if you have to skip over the particularly technical bits.)

albatross @ 31:

I've heard in passing of various schemes to allow people to verify their own vote without enabling vote-buying; as you point out, though, most of them are entangled with Serious Math and have usability problems, security problems, or both. The point I was going for is that there is a very good reason fidelio's ATM receipt analogy doesn't apply.

fidelio @ 22: The reason you can't get a receipt for your vote, as I understand it, is that it would enable vote-buying: If there's no receipt, then someone can pay me/threaten me/etc. to vote for Candidate A, but there's nothing stopping me from actually voting Candidate B once I get inside the voting booth. However, if I get a receipt for my vote, Candidate A's thugs can come around to my house after the election and demand to see the receipt.

Further to Mary Dell @ 4: If you are having nameserver problems, try overriding your nameservers with the (conveniently easy to remember) 4.2.2.x nameservers:

4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4, 4.2.2.5, 4.2.2.6

They should work from any ISP -- assuming, that is, that you can send and receive UDP packets at all.

Andy Wilton @207: "Yes," said Queen Lucy. "In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world."

It actually took me a moment to figure out what heavy-handed allegory Lewis was going for here -- I immediately thought "Time Lord technology! It's bigger on the inside!".

Aconite @10: Seconded. I've crash-replaced three bike helmets in the last ten years. None of those were in particularly exceptional circumstances (racing, off-road, etc) -- just something unexpected happened and my head hit the ground.

Or, in one case, the hood of a car. And then hit the ground 15 feet away after being thrown by the force of the impact with the vehicle.

Around here, helmets are becoming more and more the norm rather than the exception, it seems -- though it still irritates me no end when I see parents riding with their kids, and the kids are wearing their (required-by-law) helmets and the parents are strangely bareheaded. Perhaps they simply have thicker heads.

Larry Brennan @84: See, it's foreign aid. We just sent them some energy. It's their problem that they didn't put it to productive use!

I'm envisioning what happens the first time someone *does* come up with a way to put a nuclear warhead to productive use on the fly.

*pop*

"Oh, shit."

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