Starry Wisdom

Way back in the 1970s, when I was just a toddler, Steve Jackson came out with a little game called OGRE. The premise of this tiny little game (the original was pocket sized) was that one side played a giant robotic death tank, and the other side played an army composed of ‘conventional’ units (if you call levitating tanks conventional). The former tried to wipe the latter’s command post off the map, while the latter’s singular goal was to destroy the former. It’s very asymmetric, but fairly balanced in the end.

I probably first became aware of OGRE in high school, after Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service, due to a cyperpunk roleplaying game they were developing at the time. Or maybe it was from the cruddy computer game that Origin released in the late 1980s…

Now, Steve Jackson has turned to Kickstarter to release a new, huge version of this seminal strategic board game. I for one am hugely excited about the 14lb sixth edition! And unlike Wasteland 2, I should get my copy this year!

And, lest you think that the only things I support are games, I also recently supported Flint and Tinder’s premium made in America underwear.

For whatever reason, my blog got somewhat pwned recently. Probably because I sucked at upgrading WP, but there was some stupidity in the layout of the directories which probably also contributed to the hacking. Either way, I cleaned it up last week, but I messed up some wordpress source files, so I decided to do a fresh installation. and just hookup the old database. I think things are good now (they appear to be, but if anyone happens to notice something odd, let me know1

It’s been a while (over a month!) since my last post. I obviously failed completely to do a post a day, but no matter. It’s time for a new post!

Let’s go back in time to the late 1980s, 1988 to be precise. Imagine you are a 13 year old boy who likes computer games and you come across a poster advertising this:

You find the game, perhaps a week later, and turn to the back of the box:

If you’re anything like I was 24 years ago, you’d do anything you can, including spending a couple of weeks allowance, to buy the game. Which I did.

The game itself was similar to some other games at the time – most particularly the Bard’s Tale games from the same studio, Interplay, but it had some notable differences, not the least of which was that it was set in a post-apocalyptic world, instead of a fantasy world. But the story, about a group of survivors from a nuclear war at the end of the 20th century was far more gripping than any story of magical heroes in a made up land could ever be. Your young team of Desert Rangers is sent off into the great desert to investigate some disturbances, and this leads to ever more adventures throughout the American Southwest. Demented farmers, giant bunnies, and deadly robots are some of the fiends you will face as you carry out your mission, which grows to epic proportions as you learn more about the state of the world.

The game, of course, is not perfect – at least on the Apple II version that I played, healing was very slow – you basically had to hit escape and ‘wait’ over and over to recover health- and hope that no random encounters came up while you were still weakened. I ended up sticking my joystick on the escape key to simulate it being hit over and over, while I would read for five minutes or so.

Anyway, I doubt I can sell this game to anyone who hasn’t played it, and I don’t think it’s quite help up so well, mostly because of the graphics. The game is also rather hard at some points – remember this was before the days of the world wide web and gamefaqs.com, so most of the secrets had to be discovered by one’s self. I remember spending days trying to get through the sewers of Las Vegas, because I couldn’t find the one item I needed to open some door and let me out. But the joy of actually finishing the sewers, and coming out with enough firepower in laser weapons to beat the dread Scorpitron filled me with much joy. I enjoyed the game so much that I ended up playing through it several times through during my high school and early college years.

The real point of this post, and why I am so excited about something from the 1980s, is that Brian Fargo, the founder of Interplay, has started a kickstarter to fund a sequel to Wasteland, almost a quarter century after the original’s release. It made it’s funding goal of $900,000 within the first day, and it is currently at almost $1,500,000 at the time of this posting. The more money donated, the better the game will be and at the $1.5 million mark, there will be a Linux and OS X version of the game released, in addition to the Windows version. Hopefully the kickstarter will hit that amount – I’m very excited to play the sequel (I pledged a fair amount of money), and I can’t wait until it’s released. There’s still time if you are interested in pledging!

I wanted to post about something awesome but – well, my admin page seems to be sans CSS right now, so I am posting this stupid thing from my phone. Maybe tomorrow I can fix the install tomorrow and do the post I meant to make.

Some of you might remember I wrote a bit about POPOS earlier this month. Today on the SF Chronicle website there is an article by John King on this very subject. The thesis of his article is that it easy for developers to hide the existence of these required open spaces with signs that are all-but-hidden within plain sight.

We have the list of these places on the door of our office at work, and while I haven’t yet managed to check out any of the several within easy walking distance, I intend to do so in the next few weeks, and I will report back on my experience when I do.

Also, quick note: we passed the building inspection on Tuesday and have our Certificate of Final Completion and Occupancy, so we are free to move forward with the condo conversion. Which yes, I still owe a real post on, but that’s a post for another day.

Last year someone pointed out a Call of Cthulhu Advent calendar app to me. I, of course, downloaded it and ended up scoring 100% on the daily quizzes, but that is neither here nor there. The calendar was put out by Red Wasp Design. and late last month they released an IOS strategy RPG/Horror game – Call of Cthulhu:The Wasted Land. The original release was a bit buggy, as these things can be, but the patch that came out about a week later fixed the major problems and in the end it’s a very playable game.

The basic game play is turn based strategy with role-playing game elements. Your team of 4-6 ‘investigators’ are involved in a mission to save the Allies and the World from … well, unknowable horrors. In fact, that horrors are so unknowable that every time your characters interact with unnatural foes their sanity slowly ekes away. If sanity hits zero, the character will go insane, which sometimes causes them to freeze in panic, and other times allows them to go berserk. Either way, sanity can be restored, both before and after insanity, with a properly equipped character with the Psychology skill. See below for a picture of the intrepid investigators fighting various horrors:

This is a great game, compatible with both iPhones and iPads (in HD) for the low price of $4.99. Per the developers an Android version is in the works. I highly recommend this game!

I should post a real post about this sometime, with some specific information, since there isn’t a lot of information about this stuff around, but I’m currently in the midst of converting my place to condominium. I purchased the top floor of an Edwardian two-story in 2010, along with another person. We are currently co-owners (Tenants in Common – TIC) of the house with “exclusive” use of various parts of the property. San Francisco has some peculiar laws around converting this shared-deed property to a multiple-deed condominium – basically there is a lottery in which TICs of up to 6 units can enter when they meet certain owner-occupancy thresholds, and a small number of units win every year. There are two other ways to convert to condo. The first is so big companies can do it whenever they want, which is 50% or more improvement (which includes, of course, new construction). The second is a, lucky for me, exception for two unit TICs with a clean (eviction-free) rental history. After one year of both units being owner occupied, the TIC is eligible to begin the condo-conversion process.

Anyway, that’s the background, and like I said, sometime in the next couple of months I will write more about this and my particular experience, but one of the big steps towards conversion is to get a ‘code and safety’ inspection by the City. This inspection costs something like $2500 for a two unit building (it scales up, but the biggest per-owner burden is at two units). Building, electrical and plumbing inspectors come out and point out all the violations which then must be corrected within the next six months, whether or not the condo-conversion goes forward. A signed job-card verifying the completion of this work is needed to continue on with the process. We had our inspection November, and we got our report back at the end of 2011, and it really didn’t seem too bad. Only one ‘building’ issue was called out, a fairly minor issue with one of the back patio stairs, and there were a few small electrical issues, and a few more plumbing and mechanical issues. I don’t have the final bill for the contractor work on this, but it’s going to be around $5000 of work, shared between the two of us. Actually when I went in to the Department of Building Inspection to get the permit for the work, the inspector who looked over my report and my permit application said “wow, this really is not very much work, usually it’s a lot more”. Well, thats a lucky break for us – it’s probably a good thing that the former owners of this place replaced most of the electrical and redid the bathrooms and the downstairs kitchen, ALL WITH PERMIT in the past five years.

Ok, now to get to the point of this. We aren’t done with inspections yet, the building inspector has to come out Friday and look at the stairs and close the job cards, but the electrical and plumbing inspectors came out yesterday and both passed us. So hopefully when the building inspector comes out Tuesday he’ll just sign off on the small back staircase, and we will be free to proceed to the next steps.

I thought I was going to have to take a cold shower today, because the water was ice cold even after running for a minute or two. Contractors were over yesterday to do the minor code work that needs to be done for the condo conversion – more about this in a later post, I think – and one of the things they did is replace the first bit of pipe coming off my gas meter, before it splits out to upstairs and the basement (water heater and furnace). Well, I was worried they busted something for a moment, then I decided to see if they had just turned the water heater off. And they had. Thankfully it’s a tankless heater, so a very short time later I was able to take a shower.

It’s hard to remember and hard to do.

Uhm, I’m going to Millennium for dinner tonight, a fancy vegetarian restaurant. It might or might not be a convert a carnivore wednesday, which means savings, but… well it doesn’t matter. I’ve actually been once before, with Mackenzie and her sisters. Her youngest sister, Lary, is a vegetarian, so you’d think it would be right up her wheelhouse – but she was kind of the cheese and pasta sort at the time, so it was a bit a travail, and just ordering took something like an hour. It was good though, so I am looking forward to the return visit tonight!

Television isn’t glamorous, but most of us spend at least some time watching it. Recently (around the new year) I got a promotion from Comcast/Xfinity or whatever they are called, which came with some free Showtime and HBO, for a limit time (6 months/1 year respectively, I believe). With the addition of Showtime, we’ve started watching the show Homeland, which they are replaying. We’re 4 or so episodes in now, and I don’t really see how the show can keep going, but I hear that things change and it continues to be good, and that Angela ChaseClaire Danes really deserved that award or whatever she got for it.

The other thing I’ve been watching is a lot of Holmes on Homes and Holmes Inspections on HGTV and DIY. This is a Canadian show where Mike Holmes, a general contractor in Toronto, rips people’s homes apart to fix various problems. He probably goes overboard sometimes, but it’s interesting to see how a lot of the things are done, and to compare how careful they are about running pipes on the ‘warm side’ of walls up there, whereas half of my pipes our OUTSIDE OF MY HOUSE!

What else should I be watching?