Avram's journal

According to someone on RPG.net, Margaret Weis Productions is discontinuing their Battlestar Galactica and Serenity RPGs, and you can get the PDF versions massively discounted on DriveThruRPG.com, but only if you buy today. I see that the Serenity main rulebook, for example, is now $10 instead of $40. (Isn’t $40 kind of a lot for a PDF?) Anyway, I decided not to buy anything, but I figured other people might be interested:

• Serenity products
• BSG products

Oh, wait, the BSG Quickstart Guide is free (usually $10). Might as well snag that….

It’s happening faster than I’d thought:

Look like I’m decently well-read in the genre up till the mid-’80s.

( SF book awards meme )

31 of the 53 Hugo winners
13 of the 41 Nebula winners
13 of the 35 World Fantasy Award winners

My numbers would have been like 20% higher if I’d read Robinson’s Mars or Card’s Ender books.

(via jry)

I’ve been thinking for a while that nerd culture — SF fandom, gaming fandom, comics fandom, hacker culture — are taking over the world. Traditional nerd passtimes (big fantasy novels, comics) are now major smash movie hits. Computer games are a major business. Important politicians (Al Gore, Newt Gingrich) are SF enthusiasts.

So I was reading (thanks to Jim Henley) this essay about Al Qaeda by Marc Sageman (fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, former CIA case officer in Afghanistan, now a forensic psychiatrist), and noticed this profile of Al Qaeda’s membership:

[... T]hree quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority—90 percent—came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.

Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

Sound familiar? How about these:

At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. [...]
Eighty percent were, in some way, totally excluded from the society they lived in. Sixty-eight percent either had preexisting friendships with people already in the jihad or were part of a group of friends who collectively joined the jihad together [...]
There is no recruitment, really. In my sample, I have found no case of a recruiter. They’re all volunteers.

And then there’s China Miéville’s speculation that the name Al Qaeda comes from Asimov’s Foundation books.

Makes you wonder what Claude Degler might have wrought in some parallel universe.

OK, convention, yeah. That was more fun than I’d ever had at a Worldcon, and less time spent in the filk room than ever at (maybe) any con. There’s probably a causal relationship there — the filk room has become the place I go when I’m bored.

Spent my evenings party-hopping, and managed to get into many more interesting conversations than I usually do, including some with people I hadn’t previously known. It’s almost like I’m developing social skills.

A lesson I ought’ve learned long ago: When picking which panels to attend, ignore the topics and pay attention to the panelists. Any panel with Patrick and/or Teresa Nielsen Hayden on it will probably be fun. Same goes for Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Gavin Grant, and others I should have made note of.

I checked out the art show, something I often forget to do. I went around with Teresa and Ctein’s guided tour, and that’s just about the best way to see an art show I can think of. Afterwards I looked up the Frank Kelly Freas art in the Retro-Art section. There’s stuff that guy does that you’re just not supposed to be able to pull off. I picked up his book As He Sees It later in the dealer’s room.

The con had wireless Ethernet (802.11g), but for some reason it didn’t jibe with the WiFi card (802.11b) in my Clié. This isn’t the first such trouble I’ve had; the Clié seems wonky on this score. I was able to connect with the free WiFi in the Marché Mövenpick in the big Habitrail, so they wound up getting a lot of my eating business, helped along by the food being really good and varied. The free dessert they gave bugsybanana and me when we first had dinner there was also an encouragement. That first Worldcon post I made? I typed it up at the panels (with a folding keyboard) and posted it while waiting on line for some pasta. So cutting-edge you could slash your wrists!

Oh, another lesson: I should spend more time in the hotel bar. Even if I can’t always manage to do it with papersky, John M Ford, Elise Matheson, and Jordin and marykaykare.

From Tapped, a story about Illinois GOP Senate candidate Jack Ryan. His wife’s suing for divorce. Why? Because — she says — he three times took her on “surprise trips” to sex clubs and she didn’t wanna:

Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. [...] People were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me and said it was not a ‘turn-on’ for me to cry.

His unlucky wife’s name? Jeri Ryan. Yes, that Jeri Ryan.

Sex, politics, and a sci-fi angle; it’s the ultimate weblog post!

Just saw the trailer for the upcoming I, Robot movie, and it looks terrible. I don’t just mean that the trailer depicts a movie that seems to miss the essence of Asimov’s stories, although that’s also true. (A better trailer in that respect would have spent a little more time emphasizing how important the Laws of Robotics are, and how dramatic it is that a robot seems to have killed someone.) It’s also just chock full of really stupid and unfunny character bits, attempts at comedy that just fall flat. The movie’s clearly not a comedy, so why do they have to spend so much time telling us (badly) that Will Smith’s character is a funny guy?

The trailer for Van Helsing makes it look like it might be stupid, but it’ll deliver serious supernatural-butt-kicking bang for your moviegoing buck.

Finished Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe last night. (It’s a short book, and reads pretty quick.) Premise: It’s 2012, and subcultures have grown up around time zones. Art Berry is living in London, but his true loyalty lies with the east coast of North America, to the detriment of his sleep schedule. Also to the detriment of his official employer, a European conglomerate that he’s sabotaging with plausible-but-bad user interface design advice. Then his lover and best friend betray him over his brilliant idea for a wireless networking music-swapping scheme for use in traffic jams, and have him committed. Or maybe that’s just a paranoid fantasy brought about by sleep deprivation....

Finished The Claw of the Conciliator on the way up to my parents’, started Sword of the Lictor. A bit of speculation, and some note-taking:

( SPOILERS for the Book of the New Sun )