Jeremiah Genest
29 June 2009 @ 12:30 pm
I am having trouble finding good advice and faq pages for voip rpgs, i.e. running a game over skype. Since I know many folks on my friends list do this can you give me pointers?
 
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
27 April 2009 @ 02:04 pm
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (Ranking, Armed Services Committee): First of all let me repeat what you just said, Bob. I have opposed torture. It's violation of the Geneva Conventions. I worry about treatment of Americans in future conflicts.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: The-- the allegations are that they gave the wrong counsel that’s and—- and that bad things were done. And we violated fundamental commitments that the United States of America made when we signed the Geneva Conventions. And we disregarded what might happen to Americans who are held captive in the future. And by the way, those who say our enemies won’t abide the Geneva Conventions they will if they know there’s going to retribution for their violation of it.


John McCain to Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation

And yet the best we're hearing is some sort of "truth commission." The only sort of truth comission I'll accept is before the ICC, anything short of that had best be in a federal court.

The right wing crazy-sphere must be going nuts.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
27 April 2009 @ 10:45 am
Through the eyepiece of Michael Backes’s small Celestron telescope, the 18-point letters on the laptop screen at the end of the hall look nearly as clear as if the notebook computer were on my lap. I do a double take. Not only is the laptop 10 meters (33 feet) down the corridor, it faces away from the telescope. The image that seems so legible is a reflection off a glass teapot on a nearby table. In experiments here at his laboratory at Saarland University in Germany, Backes has discovered that an alarmingly wide range of objects can bounce secrets right off our screens and into an eavesdropper’s camera. Spectacles work just fine, as do coffee cups, plastic bottles, metal jewelry--even, in his most recent work, the eyeballs of the computer user. The mere act of viewing information can give it away.


-- Scientific American, "How Hackers Can Steal Secrets from Reflections"
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
26 April 2009 @ 08:28 am
Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) last week introduced three bills that he said were needed to limit presidential power and to restore the proper constitutional balance among the three branches of government.

The first bill (S.875) would instruct courts not to rely on a presidential signing statement when interpreting the meaning of any statute. (Similar legislation was introduced in previous sessions of Congress, but was not passed.)

President Bush used signing statements “in a way that threatened to render the legislative process a virtual nullity, making it completely unpredictable how certain laws will be enforced,” said Sen. Specter on April 23. “As outrageous as these signing statements are,… it is even more outrageous that Congress has done nothing to protect its constitutional powers,” he said.

The second bill (S.876) would substitute the United States as the defendant in place of telecommunications companies in pending lawsuits alleging unlawful surveillance. (Sen. Specter also introduced such a bill in 2008.)

“It is not too late to provide for judicial review of controversial post-9/11 intelligence surveillance activities,” Sen. Specter said. “The cases before Judge Vaughn Walker [alleging unlawful surveillance] are still pending and, even if he were to dismiss them under the statutory defenses dubbed ‘retroactive immunity’, Congress can and should permit the cases to be refiled against the Government, standing in the shoes of the carriers.”

“The legislation also establishes a limited waiver of sovereign immunity… to prevent the Government from asserting immunity in the event it is substituted for the current defendants,” Sen. Specter explained. (As for the likelihood that the Government would assert the “state secrets privilege” to abort such litigation, that is addressed in another pending bill.)

The third bill (S.877) would require the Supreme Court to review certain cases concerning the constitutionality of intelligence surveillance, statutory immunity for telecommunications providers, and other communications intelligence activities, and would eliminate the Court’s discretion as to whether or not to grant “certiorari.” The bill was necessitated, he said, by the Supreme Court’s refusal to review an appeals court decision that overturned a 2006 ruling by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor which found the Terrorist Surveillance Program to be unconstitutional.

Sen. Specter discussed his approach to these matters in “The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs,” New York Review of Books, May 14, 2009.


From Secrecy News
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
10 April 2009 @ 11:57 am
The BBC wrote a nice story exploring the relationship from “rebel-held Congo to beer can.” The story takes a look at one of the primary culprits of this largely illegitimate minerals trade: the FDLR, the rebel group whose leadership was involved in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
01 April 2009 @ 09:11 am
Today is [info]peaseblossom's birthday. Unlike my birthday spent auditing she gets to stay home.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
The accidental exposure of a scientist to the Ebola virus last week has triggered a series of teleconferences by Ebola scientists on two sides of the Atlantic united around a single goal: to help save the life of their colleague, an unnamed virologist at the Bernard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, who pricked herself in the finger during an experiment. No approved treatments exist for Ebola, but at the sessions, researchers and physicians discussed the results from a raft of recent studies, some not yet published, into treatments that could prevent or slow the disease, which has a mortality rate of up to 90%.

In the end, the patient and her doctor opted not for an experimental drug but for a new type of living vaccine that has never been tested in humans but has been shown in monkeys to help fight the virus even when given after exposure. An injury from a virus-laden syringe often doesn't lead to infection and disease, because the amount of virus entering the body is small. But the researcher's doctors want to reduce the risk as much as they can.

More here

Pantellos ramifications )
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
20 March 2009 @ 09:47 am
Last night during the Pantellos sessions [info]jeffwik kept on commenting on how messed up the Congo seemed. And I ahd to admit that I'm pretty sure I wasn't exaggerating much based on my understanding of the region.

To drive this home, I see this in on my google reader this morning

Whole villages are being abandoned as civilians flee attacks by Rwandan Hutu militia and Ugandan rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, just weeks after joint army operations to oust the militias ended.


[info]peaseblossom has a wrap up of last night's session and her very cool playlist.

I'm hoping to get the chance to clean up my session flow-chart and scenes and post them with commentary later today (after the meetings end, okay the meetings never truly end but there are lulls)
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
17 March 2009 @ 08:24 am
What, its such a slow day that BBC has one of their writers pull an old college essay on the Wizard of Oz? Or are they all planning on heading to the pub so they are phoning it in? I mean, for goodness sake there isn't even anything new there.

Do some real reporting BBC! I hear there are wars going on, and crazy economic stuff, and people's lives are shifting and theres always AIG.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
17 March 2009 @ 07:38 am
Well today is Evacuation Day here in Boston, and for some reason we haven't evacuated the city. In fact I have to drive through it as I am taking the car due to after work functions. And will Boston be empty? No. Though if it was I'd be wondering if I missed the apocalypse or some such.

Oh yes, I also heard rumors that some saint has their celebration day today. Silly saints.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
15 March 2009 @ 11:15 am
I really shouldn't be surprised that the starchild is currently obsessing over The Seven Wise Princesses, which is a retelling of the medieval Persian epic by nazami chock full of astrological and sufi mysticism.

Apples, trees, all that.
 
 
Current Mood: bemused
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
13 March 2009 @ 11:45 am
Wired has a great account of what some have called "the heist of the century", the robbery of an Antwerp diamond vault thought to be impenetrable. The story was pieced together by reporter Joshua Davis from police reports and from talking to the thief who coordinated the whole thing. True or not, this is a fascinating read that gets me thinking of a Leverage episode, the security system inadequacies especially (think the david jobs).

The Genius led them out the rear of the building into a private garden that abutted the back of the Diamond Center. It was one of the few places in the district that wasn't under video surveillance. Using a ladder he had previously hidden there, the Genius climbed up to a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace, but he approached it slowly from behind a large, homemade polyester shield. The low thermal conductivity of the polyester blocked his body heat from reaching the sensor. He placed the shield directly in front of the detector, preventing it from sensing anything.
Tags:
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
06 March 2009 @ 10:04 am
A plutonium sample recently found at a U.S. waste dump is leftover from a batch used in 1945 for the world's first nuclear bomb test, a team of chemists has announced.


Okay, the "emerging field of nuclear archaeology" is just cool. One of my continual struggles with Gumshoes is getting to the granular level to make stuff like this (or House) interesting, though probably for a one-shot. For more extended campaigns this would be one in a list of skills.

Actually I so want to add it to the Pantellos skill list now.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
05 March 2009 @ 12:38 pm
Other people have done an excellent job of cataloging the odious amounts of priviledge and downright failure on the part of the aspects of the SF community to come to grips with the preponderance of priviledge being demonstrated by some pretty prominent authors, editors and just smofs. Including, and this is most reprehsnible, following a atctic of "outing" that strikes me as the worst of Fox-news type outrages. Bill O'Reilly would be proud.

The worst thing is this is not unique. This happens every single time. And the authors/editors who do it just go on their happy way. If there was justice in the world Harlan Ellison and Orson Scott Card would have long ago stop selling books, and there would be an even bigger list of folks suffering from that.

For me, this personally resonates. One of the reasons I stopped being so active in gaming was watching how [info]peaseblossom was treated in her attempts to discuss feminism. For example, I still cringe whenever anyone mentions Spirit of the Century.

Yes, its unfair to expect SF to be better and more safe than the larger world. But I certainly don't have to like it.
 
 
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
27 February 2009 @ 10:54 am
Gumshoes basically breaks down its skills into Investigative and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities are the sweet part of the system and give an elegant way of handling core clues automatically.

General Abilities are designed to cover physical actions and contests with a strong element of the uncertain. They use a pretty basic system of testing the ability by a 1d6 roll against a difficulty of 2 to 8. Point spends from the general ability pool add to the roll, but deplete your pool and are lost no matter the outcome.

We haven’t been too happy with the way general abilities work in play and have gone back and forth on the best ways to handle them. For Pantellos this is especially important because the game really divides into two spheres: Investigative and Danger. Investigative follows Gumshoes to a T (which is why we choose the system) but the more Danger side we had to decide on a better system.

And for some reason Tarot cards always show up in this group.

So, we basically will have two types of scenes. Investigation and Danger. A scene will be one or the other, player/gm choice. We plan on using something to denote this. Investigative scenes unfold like Gumshoes (though we talked a lot about negative clues). But in a danger scene you narrate based on abilities and then turn over the lesser arcane of the Tarot to determine narrative outcome. Major Arcana can be played to up-the ante. It’s all about asserting reality.

This should work for us, we’ll have to see. Since the characters just touched down in the Congo it won’t be long.
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
25 February 2009 @ 08:33 pm
From Kung Fu Monkey

Save-vs-DM: This is probably a very geeky question, but have you actually made character sheets for the main crew, using whatever system you favor? (I know that I've done it using Spirit of the Century) I know that you mentioned that all the characters have Thief 101 skills, but in your mind do you actually prevent them from doing something because "it's not on the character sheet"?

Seriously, e-mail the SoC character builds to the kfmonkey@gmail.com account. I want to see those. SoC is really frustrating to me, actually. A lot of great stuff, but as soon as you ge tinto tagging aspects of the setting, it all goes to mush for me. A simple system that they overcomplicate a bit in the rules book. FWIW, I'd go True20 or Savage Worlds for a Leverage game.


"Age of the geek, baby" indeed.

Me, I'd use Gumshoes.
Tags:
 
 
Jeremiah Genest
22 February 2009 @ 03:52 pm
A spy is above all a man of politics . . . He must have the breadth of thought of a strategist, and meticulous powers of observation. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor which never ceases. – John Le Carré, “To Russia, with Greetings” (1966)


Who are the characters? )
Tags: