Avram's journal

OK, found a way to keep links from opening new windows in Safari. Here it is:

Step 1: Install GreaseKit. (GreaseKit is the Safari port of Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that lets you run arbitrary JavaScript code to modify web pages as they download.)

Step 2: Install _blank Must Die, a userscript that strips the target="_blank" attributes out of link tags.

Step 3: Quit and relaunch Safari.

Step 4: Sigh with relief when Twitter links no longer spawn new windows.

Note for Firefox users: That userscript in Step 2 ought to work for you as well, but you don’t need to bother, since you’ve got some useful features baked right into your browser, no add-ons required.

Microsoft Internet Explorer users, I dunno. If you guys cared about your web experience, you wouldn’t be using MSIE.

Update: Just discovered that the GreaseKit _blank Must Die hack will mess up Google Calendar. The fix is to disable the hack for Google, like so:

1. In Safari, from the GreaseKit menu, choose “Manage Scripts…”
2. In the Manage Scripts dialog, select “_blank Must Die” from the list on the left of the box. (Don’t turn the check-box off, just click the name “_blank Must Die” to select it.)
3. See the “Exclude” box? Click the “Add” button next to it.
4. In that new line that was just created in the Exclude box, type:
   *.google.com/*
5. Close the Manage Scripts box. Maybe you need to quit and restart Safari, too.

I’ve just got an account on Dreamwidth:
http://avram.dreamwidth.org/

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I wanted to grab my name.

Zvi has been doing a good job of preaching the Dreamwidth gospel:

• What it is and why it’s better than LJ
• Some info about OpenID
• Introductory guide to Dreamwidth
• How to follow someone who has moved to Dreamwidth
• Crossposting and locked posts

Looking over the Hugo noms, I’m a bit grumpy over the “Best Graphic Story” category. Two out of the six nominees are other-media tie-ins (Serenity and The Dresden Files), which, well, given the relative sizes of the book, TV/movie, and comics fan bases, I can’t help but suspect that those two were nominated not so much for their quality as for the popularity of their franchises.

Still, I can’t really complain, since I didn’t bother to fill out the nomination form. I’ve fallen woefully out of touch with the current SF scene (I’m currently in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s latest, but before that I was reading Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration from 1982 1967). I am pretty good at keeping up with what’s going on in the indie comics (even if I don’t buy very much) and webcomics scenes, though, so I figure I should make an effort this year to keep track of my reading for next year’s awards. So here’s what I can remember of what I’ve bought recently:

• Angora Napkin by Troy Little.
• Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe (aka Scott Pilgrim vol 5) by Brian Lee O’Malley.
• Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil by Jeff Smith. This came out in floppies last year, but I just got the paperback collection.
• In the Flesh by Koren Shadmi, a collection of shorts stories.
• RASL: The Drift by Jeff Smith. Again, the collection just came out in January, but the floppies came out last year.
• Platinum Grit vol 1 by Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy. Yet another case where I don’t know if it’ll be eligible. The webcomic’s been up for years, and there used to be a self-published (through Lulu.com) dead-tree edition, but this collection just shipped this month, and I think it’s the first time all this material is available under one cover.
• Update: And on Friday, I picked up North World vol 2 by Lars Brown, which is also a webcomic.

I also just bought Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole last week, but it came out in 2008.

Oh, and anyone reading this who lives in Brooklyn, specifically Prospect Heights or northern Park Slope? Let me recommend Bergen Street Comics, Brooklyn’s latest high-class comics shop. Like Rocketship, it makes space for weekly floppies but is mostly there to sell books. And Bergen offers a loyalty program ($20 store credit for each $100 spent), which I don’t think Rocketship does.

What would happen to Frankenstein’s Monster during a Romero-style zombie plague?

Looking through some old Alarums & Excrusions zines, I found the following in a comment I wrote back in May 2002:

Actually, I’ve got some ideas about running a Ranma-like game, and they require some different mechanics. […] At the core is a token mechanic, where each character has disads that he can trigger (or that can be triggered by other characters). Triggering your own disads gains you a token (I’d probably use poker chips) in the GM agrees that your PC was actually disadvantaged, or it was funny. Triggering someone else’s disad requires you to give that player a token. Some special powers might also require paying a token to use for advantage. This mechanic simulates the stupidity of the Ranma characters — they often fail to do simple, rational things because they lack the tokens to pay for them.

The Aspects mechanic from Fate and Wheel of Fate would work well for this.

I could swear I saw a martial-arts Wheel of Fate game out there somewhere on the web a few weeks ago, but Google hasn’t found it for me.

Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm is here! I mean, literally, I just picked up a copy at the Complete Strategist this afternoon.

What’s in the box?

• Pieces for a fifth player — turquoise action cards (seven regular plus the two extras for a two-person game) and 12 points worth of victory chips.
• Four new starter worlds, bringing the total to nine, including:
  • Damaged Alien Factory, an alien production world that requires you to discard a card to produce.
  • Doomed World, which is worth -1 victory points, but you can discard it to settle a non-military, non-alien world for free.
• A new version of the Gambling World card to replace the old one, I guess with a new table to reflect the new card distribution. I think they’ll have to do this for each expansion.
• A third copy of the Contact Specialist development.
• 18 more new world and development cards of various types, including:
  • Improved Logistics, a development which lets the owner settle a second world in the Settle phase.
  • Imperium Worlds, a 6-cost development which lets you draw a card in the Produce phase for each military world in your tableau.
  • Space Mercenaries, a development that lets you discard up to two cards from your hand for +1 temporary military strength per card.
• Goal chips, which give you extra victory points for being the first to meet some goal, or having the most of something.
• A set of components for solitaire play! This playmat, chips, and pair of custom dice let you automate the actions of an abstract robot player, against which you can play the two-player version of the game.
• A bunch of blanks for designing your own cards, including a contest blank you can send in with your best card idea for possible inclusion in a future expansion. Sadly, the printed deadline is this Saturday. Since the set just shipped this week, I expect they’ll somehow publicize an extension.
• Rules for a “drafting” variant, where players (after seeing what their starter worlds will be) divvy up the deck to each create a personal deck to draw from.

This review on BoardGameGeek has photos of most of the new stuff, and describes the solitaire game. I’ll be bringing my copy to the party on Friday, and up to cthulhia’s on the weekend. (I’ll leave the solitaire stuff at home, though.)

Arg, no thanks to John Gruber, I spent some time this afternoon perusing Eric Raymond’s blog. No, he hasn’t gotten any better.

I was amused to see a few election-related posts — all dating from that brief period around the end of August and early September when McCain’s numbers looked good — gloating about how Obama’s campaign is doomed, doomed. Not a single election-related post later than Sep 18th, though.

Not that Raymond is a Republican, he hastens to remind us. But, like most guys in the lowbrow right-wing branch of the libertarian movement, he’s motivated primarily by ressentiment towards liberals, rather than a love of actual liberty.

(No, not all libertarians are like that. Honest, I know some good ones. The bad ones just tend to stick out more in my mind. Maybe that’s my own ressentiment towards right-wingers speaking.)

But far worse was “The Post-Racial Hall of Mirrors”, where he starts off talking about how he had to drive through a Delaware slum, and was revolted by all the black people around him. Not because of their skin color, he assures us, but because they were so fat and sloppy. How he deals with hanging out at SF cons, I dunno. He goes on to explain that he can’t possibly be a racist, because his belief that blacks have lower IQs is based on real science, and besides, he used to bang this hot black chick.

I take Raymond as a warning — that being a smart guy doesn’t keep you from being an idiot. I can easily imagine myself having turned into the same kind of idiot that he is, given different life experiences.

Just noticed this today on the subway:

Isn’t that weird? The Os are sideways, all of them. The N in lean is slightly shaved off on the right edge; compare it to the N in not. And the letters in lean don’t seem to have the same baseline.

What the hell is up with that? I thought it was some kind of pranked-up fake sign at first, but all of the Do not lean on door signs were like that.

Update: Here's a sharper photo on Gothamist earlier this year.