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Kickstarter 2010 in with a calendar
You might recall that I made some photomosaics a while ago.

A while ago, I stumbled across a site where people can propose projects, and other people can pitch in to fund and participate in those projects. That site is Kickstarter, and there's a bunch of neat projects there, from a building project in Zimbabwe to an elephant conservation documentary to a spooky short film project to DIY fusion.

You'll admit, that's a range. But one thing that hasn't been there is a calendar of PhotoMosaics for 2010.

UNTIL NOW.

I'm asking for $1231 to make a calendar filled with photomosaics. Each month will have a collection of themes, like February will likely have Valentines and Black History pictures (along with probably 3 or 4 other themes). If you want to help out a lot, you can even submit a photo of your own for one of the months. Or select a theme for the big picture - maybe you want July's big theme to be National Ice Cream Month. Done and done.

Or, maybe you'd like someone's birthday, or your anniversary to be printed in the calendar for all to see. For a mere $150, it will be so.

That link again: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davelecompte/2010-photomosaic-calendar-0

Tell your friends!

Gratuitous Image Post
Is Sam disgusted at something you just said? At something wrong in the United States? Is it all just too much for him?

Maybe Sam should sit down in a quiet room and listen to some soft music.

Which Car? PitchCar!
In this post, I diverge from rambling about computer or console games and ramble about boardgames! Or, a game that doesn't have a board, but it takes up your dining room table, or maybe your living room floor. Still, no CPU involved. No network connection, no batteries required.

Years ago, I bought a copy of Carabande. Something about that makes me want to insert festive punctuation to make it ¡Carabande! (which might show up as I intended, which would be a minor typographical miracle).

The game's pretty straightforward - you get a bunch of track pieces and some wooden disks (think pucks or tiddly winks) in the box. Setup is to assemble the track pieces into a loop of track, and then play is to race the disks around the track, by flicking the disks with your fingers. There are rules about leaving the track and other small details, but it's a pretty straightforward game. And pretty fun. Also, not exactly easy, since it requires dexterity. So, you can actually get good at it, as opposed to games that are approachable, but just random.

There was some expansion to that edition, which I never picked up, and then the game and expansion went out of print.

But lo! (¡lo!) Another publisher made the same game, but slightly different dimensions. (Why? To be cheaper? To make sure people bought their base set, and not just expansions?) The new edition is called "PitchCar". And they've been publishing expansions beyond the original edition, so I've finally caved and got a PitchCar set. There was a deal at an online game store I was looking at, and I couldn't resist, so I got the base set and two "Stunt Expansion" sets.

And now that I've provided the context, here's my litany of complaints - having not played the game yet, just unpacked it.

colored pucks - ¡Carabande! came with 8 pucks, 2 each of 4 colors. You got to apply stickers to these pucks, which had numbers on them. PitchCar comes with 8 pucks, 1 each of 8 colors. Still stickers, no numbers, but the stickers come 2 each in 4 colors. So, I get to choose if I want to put a red sticker on a pink disk or a blue disk. Both seem like bad decisions. Also, the stickers provided have no numbers, so you have to remember that you go after the red player, and you have to hope that he remembers to go after the light blue player.
instructions fail - the instructions in the PitchCar box are titled "PitchCar Mini", which doesn't pose a problem. I get that there's another edition of the game that's smaller, and the rules are the same, but packing the wrong instructions in the box seems shoddy.
cut the rails to length - the first thing I noticed when I opened the Stunt Expansion box was that the instructions included cutting the plastic rails to the correct length. I suppose I can do that without too much difficulty, but then again, one might expect the manufacturer to have provided the pieces cut to the correct length already. You might think they'd do a professional job of it.
rail slots on right hand side - some of the track pieces have a left side and a right side. Some of them don't. The ones that do have a specific orientation all have the rails on the same side. I find this baffling, and would have expected half to have rails on the left, half on the right. I might not ever use rails on these particular pieces (especially if I have to get around to cutting the rails myself, see above), so maybe it doesn't matter.
supports - the stunt expansion is all about building an overpass. Crazy, and probably dangerous. But hey, 3 dimensions are better than 2. You could have a ramp going up, a little bit of an overpass, and a ramp going down. OR, you could put a bunch of supports under your track and have an extended length of layer-2 gameplay. If you want. Except that the supports that come in the box are made out of polystyrene foam and look like packing material. Super shoddy. I'm embarrassed to ask my friends to play a game with packing material supports. Also, the supports are awkwardly sized so that the box doesn't quite close. Very nice.

So, yay, a racing game that should be fun, but filled me with regret as I had opened the boxes.

Perhaps I'll make some custom pieces - some supports that don't look like afterthoughts, some rails that are the correct length. Maybe some disks that are not pastel colors, and have numbers on them. If I'm getting really ambitious, maybe some track pieces made out of laser-cut plastic.

In my copious free time.

Console Programming
I'm still amused by a quasi-pun in the title. When I write games for the PS3 or XBox 360, that's one kind of "console" programming. When I use a curses-like interface to make an ASCII art game, that's a completely different kind of "console".

If I were to run NetHack on my PS3, (and how do you know that I haven't? I'm already running Linux on it) that'd just make things confusing.

Anyway, I offer the following deliberately retro screenshot as evidence that I'm doing something:

It's using something that looks like an old Apple ][ font, though it's a little misleading on a number of levels. The look that I'm playing with here is the ROM font, but the Apple ][ was only capable of 40x24 columns in text mode, so the display that you see here is a cheat at 80x60 characters onscreen. The aspect ratio of the characters is a little bit off, but that's probably acceptable.

Oh, also, the Apple ][ didn't have lowercase in the ROM font. By the time the //e came around, that was added, so the font I'm using isn't completely made up.

So, a question you might be asking, and I would probably be asking at this point, is whether the world really needs another platformer. And, of course, the world certainly doesn't. I've played enough platformers, I want to pretty much check them off. That said, I'm currently playing Spelunky. But this isn't a means to create a game that hasn't been made before, it's an exercise, much like art students draw draped cloth or bowls of fruit. I spent a bunch of my childhood thinking about making platformers, laying out jumping puzzles. As a gamer, I'm bored with them. As a developer, I've somehow never got around to really "owning" the logic for climbing up and down a ladder in a way that I like, or a really satisfying jump arc.

So, will this be a Donkey Kong clone? Maybe. It certainly looks like it now, but I may dispense with that as I go on. Or perhaps I implement a dozen different games, including Donkey Kong, Spyhunter, Jumpman, and Miner 2049er. Those aren't all platformers, and even among the platformers, the mechanics of dealing with ladders feel different from game to game, so it might be weird to jam too much into a single game.

A buddy of mine from High School and I sat down years and years ago and brainstormed a side scrolling platform game that we never made. Perhaps some elements of that end up in this game. Perhaps not, or perhaps only as a voice from years ago of a half-imagined project that we never completed.

All of the retro-wallowing aside, though, there are some modern reasons to work on this project - I want to bang out a complete game in short order, and this feels like about the right size of a project. There are some other issues that I want to explore, too, like having a fixed-length game update loop, which runs decoupled from the render loop. That's not a particularly weird sounding thing, but most of what I've done lately has had an update loop that is passed a duration that represents how much time has elapsed since the last update call. Typically in these cases, updates are interleaved 1:1 with render calls, so as the frame rate goes up, the update arguments go down in an inverse relationship. An update loop that goes forward a known amount of gametime has some nice features, including being able to be entirely deterministic. If your simulation is being sampled at varying timesteps, this means that there can be chaotic divergence, which gets to be a pain if you want to do things like playing back an input stream (though, I suppose you could record the frame timestamps, and use that to replay things, but still, it feels like plenty of opportunity for things to diverge).

Anyway, that's one thing that keeps me from doing other things that I should be doing.

Back up early, back up often.
The above is true for so many things - and it isn't less true if you counsel people not to carry all of their eggs in a single basket. Do you carry eggs in baskets? If so, how many baskets? Good.

Seems like carrying eggs in omelets would be more reliable. But I'd still avoid having a single-omelet-of-failure.

When I got home last night, I discovered my primary Windows PC wasn't able to find the network. My primary Macintosh machine also failed to find things outside of the house. Tracing up the waterfall of digital goodness, I discovered that my router/access point/firewall had no lights on, and nothing I could do with the various cables sprouting out of it would do anything.

The good news is that I was able to roll in to Staples this morning before 9am, return home, plug it in and attempt to set the device up using their multimedia wizard configuration tool. That didn't work out at all, so I ended up plugging a laptop directly into the device and set up such arcane trivia as netmask, gateway, and port forwarding details.

And here I am at work, and I'm pretty much blocked from getting work done here. What a weird contrast, having been "productive" in the sense of bringing my home network back up again - a lot of work to return to the level of functionality that it was at 16 hours ago.

But the note to myself, as hinted by the title, is to jot down the addresses and port assignments in some non-electronic format, so that I might be able to refer to it when I need to again.

something I'm working on

Nothing super duper interesting there, yet. I'm using PyCap, a Python wrapper around PopCap's engine. Right now, you can drag and drop dominoes. Soon, there will be a little more structure, including a puzzle template, which will provide both a reason and an organization for the dragging.

The story of 1001 * 2/3 nights
So, I like books. Some number of you, the readers, probably also like books.

I've been at this thing for a while now. In fact, I think that I've been indoctrinated into this almost as pervasively as "say please and thank you" and "cover your mouth when you sneeze". On the various trips that my family went on when I was growing up, I can remember many times when we'd be walking down the street in a new city, and we'd stop in a bookstore. Perhaps more telling - I don't recall walking past a bookstore in these situations.

So, a few momths ago, I was ambling through one of my local bookstores. (I'm afraid to say this wasn't a locally owned bookstore - it was an instance of a big chain. You'd know the chain if I mentioned it.) Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a 3-volume set of The Book of 1001 Nights. You know, the Arabian Nights mythos. I've got a collection of Grimm's fairy tales, and when I was growing up, I had a volume of Andersen's fairy tales, so an Arabian Nights collection would find a welcome home on my bookshelves. Well, I'd find space for them, perhaps displacing stuff that could get relegated to less prestigious shelves.

I casually surveyed the volumes and did not purchase them at that particular moment. Perhaps the $20 sticker price per volume was enough to cool my enthusiasm.

Later times, as I ambled between these same shelves, I noticed that they only had volumes 2 and 3 of the set. Ah, more excuse to delay my purchase. I'll just wait until they have all three, and I'll snap them all up at once.

Just this past weekend, I was again in the same bookstore, and I found myself disoriented. Against my best intentions, I found myself in young adult fiction. Yikes! The bookstore was reorganizing its shelves. Now I was in toddler lit. Help! I'm just looking for some Arabian Nights! I fled the bookstore with no books in hand, but most of my sanity with me.

After some recuperation, I went back today, and managed to find a helpful sales associate. "I'm looking for a 3 volume set of the Arabian Nights, I think it used to be on that shelf over there before the reorganization." "Oh, yes. Those are now downstairs, to the left of the cafe. That's where mythology is now." Ok, fine. Perhaps even better would be to walk me to the shelf in question, but I can probably find my way to the cafe, and figure out where left is from that.

And, in fact, by just walking around the perimeter of the cafe area, I was able to find the mythology shelf. Not far from the vegetarian section and the business section. Of course. And there was a pile of books that matched my memory. Volume 3. Volume 3. Volume 3. Volume 3. I sense a problem. Volume 3. Hm.

So, I selected one of the many instances of Volume 3, and made my way up to customer assistance. "Hi, I'd like Volumes 1 and 2." "Does it have to be of that edition?" "Sure, this one's pretty." "Hm."

The customer assistant went through many contortions of copying ISBNs from computer screen to paper, walking 10 feet to another computer screen, copying ISBNs back from paper to computer screen, and back again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I love it when databases don't talk to each other. Otherwise, Skynet gets us.

Seems that the computer believes that the store has multiple copies of each volume, but our best theory is that each of the volumes that the computer believes are 1 or 2 are actually mislogged. The computer tells us that maybe there are some copies of volume 2 that arrived in the store today. So the assistant trundles off to the back room to see if anything has bouyed to the top of the incoming bookflow. Nope, nothing readily apparent there. Hm, there's a place in Federal Way (what is that? 30 miles away? 40?) that claims to have a copy of volume 1. They'll ship it to me free of charge, if I don't mind paying for the book over the phone. Yeah, that sounds OK. Do they maybe have volume 2 as well? Yeah, they might. As this is all going down, Volume 2 turns up at the desk I'm standing at. The manager (above the supervisor, above the assistant) has tracked down a copy that was going to go on display. Or something. And then the manager went off to try to locate a volume 1, but was never seen again.

So, maybe volume 1 is out of print (already? this edition is has a 2007 copyright date). Maybe they've got a crazy inventory management system that's entirely out of communication with their customer-driven "help me find a book" kiosks. Maybe this book that I ordered from the Federal Way store is actually going to show up on my doorstep in the next few days.

And hey, maybe I'll enjoy reading some fables.

PC Gamers with a taste for whimsy: Buy This Game
Also, who have $5.

And a Steam account, or the tools for getting a Steam account.

The game is "Blueberry Garden", in which you tend to trees, and small critters and run and jump and fly, or maybe more like gliding. There's exploration and, um, stacking. Like Myst meets Jenga.

Er, more like SketchFighter meets Loco Roco with a dash of Crayon Physics.

Hm.

Maybe you should Look at the YouTube footage.

And then you can get the free demo.

And then you should BUY THIS GAME.

There's more about the game HERE.

Also more when you beat the game. You will know when you beat the game. I know because the game told me I beat the game. But the point of the experience isn't to puzzle out a solution - it's to play around with an experience. So is it a "game", then, if the point isn't to "win"?

I say that it is, but if you want to call it a "toy" or a "sandbox", that's fine, too.

What? You haven't bought the game yet? It's $5. Surely you have $5 for a light diversion. Also, there's cheese.

warning, cut for unpleasant imagery.

( unpleasant )

I have a two part plan.

Firstly, I would like to call on our culture to treat those that serve their nations with respect. Too often, wars become unpopular and the warriors are inconvenient reminders. I would like to live in a world where "homeless vet" isn't a useful phrase.

Once we reach a point where veterans are honored on a daily basis, we can begin working on phase 2 of my plan, which is to make Memorial Day a separate holiday from Veterans Day. Right now, they are nearly synonymous - and if you're thinking of people in the armed services, that's not bad.

And, nuts, I forgot to record "It's Armed Forces Day, Charlie Brown".

I may have injured a woman.
I may not be able to use my own left ankle tomorrow.
I need to remind myself the fancy swing moves that I've let fall out of my dance rotation.
I really don't like parking downtown.
I danced with numerous Ashleys, Chelseas, a few Britneys I think, a Kendra, and multiple Emilys. The places I normally go dancing has people with names like "Rose". I submit that "Ashley" was not popular in the greatest generation. Discuss.
I wasn't the oldest person in the room, and I certainly wasn't the strongest dancer in the room. But I was good enough of a dancer that I felt okay that I was nearly a generation older than the median age of the room.
There was a dancer who seemed in constant danger of moving in directions her clothing couldn't keep up with. To the best of my knowledge, this potential did not manifest. Perhaps if it were that sort of dancing establishment, they'd check IDs at the door.
I'm sore and tired and dehydrated.

And yet

I had a good time, and will try to find a way to go back soon.

New Rule
The ironic use of "shocked" or "shocking" will only be permitted if you're a character in "Casablanca".

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/exclusive-loose-cannon-comes-out-guns-blazing/?biz=1

This is where I've been working for the past year and a half, more or less. Warning, the above linked article doesn't really say much at all.

I can only assume Laura's getting crazy royalties.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922 or 1929)
or, "Nosferatu, a symphony of horror", but which I've been mistranslating as "a symphony of the grey".

This is a silent film adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" novel. It was made without permission of the Stoker estate, and Stoker's widow won a lawsuit which led the film to be almost entirely destroyed. Some copies made their way to France, outside the jurisdiction of the courts demanding that the prints be destroyed, and so the movie has passed down into public domain.

In 1929, an edition made it to the United States, which explains the confusion about the dates.

Since the movie is in public domain, there are several editions available. Depending on the version that you see, the main villain might by Count Graf Orlok, or they might dispense with the ruse and just say that it's Count Dracula. The edition that I saw was one of these latter editions - Dracula, Renfield, Van Helsing, and so on. I found that somewhat disappointing - I would rather have seen the version of the film that was truer to the filmmaker's original intent, and do the translation into the Stoker cast of characters myself.

It's been a while since I've seen a silent film. I'm surprised at how hard it is for me to see these characters as actual characters, and to see the craft of putting the characters before the screen as actual acting. In the first few minutes of the movie, the hero and his wife pantomime their way through a scene where he gives her flowers. I get it, you love her. Oh, and he has to go to the Carpathian mountains, wow that must make you very sad. Sad like a zombie, I guess. Acting styles change, though, so if I'm going to be watching film from the 20s, I have to be prepared for that sort of thing.

One more gripe I had with the edition I watched was the selection of music that played with it. Clearly somebody selected some classical music and dubbed it in as a soundtrack. I wonder if the entirety of the selection process was finding a number of pieces that added up to the running length of the film. I know that for many silent movies, the local movie theaters would provide their own accompaniment, including deciding what music to play with the movie. So I'm not complaining about an inauthentic experience - I'm sure that this selection of music might have played somewhere. I just figure that a good accompanist would have selected a broader selection of moods, including some spooky or suspenseful pieces during the suspenseful parts of the film. I guess my notions of film music were shaped by George Lucas, and the use of leitmotif in Star Wars. Movie music doesn't have to have character-based themes, but it's certainly something that I would have liked to have seen in this movie.

In the queue: "The Birth of a Nation" and "Metropolis" are sitting on my stack of DVDs - perhaps I'll see one of them, soon. I also have the 1931 "Frankenstein" and 1935 "Bride of Frankenstein" coming soon. I think my tolerance for silent films or just early film will have burned out as I push through those, and I'll find myself in movies of the 60s. 81 to go.

The Rest of the Spreadsheet
Ok, so I griped about not being able to finish the "best movies of my lifetime" project by the December 31 2008 goal.

And I eventually did manage to complete the project, chipping away one Woody Allen movie after another. One thing that I've learned is that I don't think I really care for Robert Altman. Good to learn.

I've looked at my spreadsheet of remaining movies, and if I average 4 movies a month, I should be able to finish right around the end of 2010. That seems reasonable, but that's about the pace that I was trying to maintain for the earlier portion of the project, and the earlier portion was for less than a year - so I may not hit this goal, either.

Also, the American Film Institute keeps publishing lists, and to some degree, I keep listening to them and adding them to one list or another. This particular spreadsheet doesn't have the AFI's "10 top 10" content rolled into it (yet). There's a fair amount of overlap, but there are some movies (Breaking Away) that I'll have to go back and add in.

I've just put my exercise bicycle back in the living room, pointing at the "screen" (the wall onto which I project), and hey, maybe I'll get back in the habit of biking before work, and maybe knock out a half a movie a day that way.

I recently sent a DVD through SwapADVD.com off into the gaping maw of the US Postal Service, and when it arrived, the recipient sent me a "private message" (how quaint!) saying that he was the founder of the service, and he hoped that I was appreciating it.

Thanks to SwapADVD, I currently have a copy of Metropolis (1927), which I may hang on to - I had seen it once, years ago, but it's a landmark of early Sci-Fi, and that's the kind of thing that I don't mind having gathering dust on my shelf. I also have a copy of Charade, which I've seen probably twice, and have assigned myself to see again as part of this project. So, that's two DVDs in hand of my own to watch. "The Birth of a Nation" is on its way - I don't expect to enjoy it, but I'll be happy to check it off my list.

Recent movies:
The Killing - surprisingly good heist movie
Dr. Strangelove - enjoyed it more this time than before, not as much as a lot of other people, though.
A Day at the Races - (Not really on the list) Yawn. I've decided to kick all the other Marx Brothers movies down my NetFlix queue. I've heard the memorable one-liners, and they're not any funnier in context.
Persepolis - (also not on the queue) good, but I might have appreciated it more if I didn't try to see it at 6am on Saturday. Saturday morning cartoons, good - trying to read subtitles that were going by too quickly, bad.
Philadelphia Experiment - (So not on the list) I remember wanting to see this in 1984. I was wrong.
TED: The Future We Will Create - (not on the list) Very Good. I think I mentioned it here already.

Ship it.

Stick a fork in it.

"The Last Picture Show" was, well, the last picture in that part of that project.

It reminded me a great deal of the logical extrapolation of American Pie by way of American Graffiti.

The continuing drama of film
I've got a number of movie lists that a want to work my way through. One of the lists is an accumulation of movies that mess with your head (you know, your Momenti, your Darkos, that sort of thing). A blog post that got me rolling was Matt Baldwin's article about the topic: http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/002670.html

So, I took the movies in his list and a few others, subtracted out the ones I'd already seen and didn't feel that I would benefit from seeing again.

There was a movie on the list that I actually owned, but was surprised to see on the list, an Anime DVD called "Perfect Blue". I didn't recall much about the movie, so I went back to it today to see what was really going on.

As I saw it again, I recalled the characters, but I had completely forgotten the ending, so it came as a surprise again, which is something of an accomplishment, I guess. There are a lot of complaints I have with the movie, but my big complaint is that about 20 minutes from the end of the movie you get an explanation that sort of provides a structure for all the pieces, and then there's another explanation provided which doesn't account for all of the facts, and doesn't feel consistent with the other explanation.

Bleh. Time enough spent on that movie, I was happy to flag it on SwapADVD.com as something I was ready to be rid of, and right away the system was happy to give me an address of someone (poor soul) who wanted the disk.

As I stuck the disk in the mailbox, I discovered a NetFlix envelope, which contained a disk that had snapped in half. Sigh, back in the mail for that one. As I was going through the NetFlix process to return the broken disk (aside: they provided checkboxes - not radio boxes - one checkbox to allow me to say that the disk is physically broken, one checkbox to allow me to say that the disk is unwatchable. I should have checked both, I guess.) ... anyway, as I was going through telling NetFlix that somebody at the post office had folded the DVD in half, I noticed that "The Last Picture Show" had gone from "unavailable" to "short wait".

Huh.

So, I moved it from the bottom of my queue back up to the top of my queue. As of right now, NetFlix is saying that it's shipping today. I guess that's a short enough wait.

Fingers crossed - I might actually be able to finish this one project at last.

Not to quote a motivational speaker...
I'm not referring to Chris Farley's memorable character, but rather Tony somebody. I just watched "TED: The Future We Will Create", and I really enjoyed it. I also would love to be invited to attend TED one day, but I've got to become a Matt Groening, an Al Gore, or a Meg Ryan. I suppose I could also become something like that guy who wowed people with his multi-touch displays a few years ago, back before multi-touch was everywhere (everywhere = iPhone).

I suggest that you check it out. (I was considering posting a Facebook status line: "Dave suggests you should watch TED: The Future We Will Create", at least to those who intend to live part of their lives in the future", but here we are.

Towards the end (not to spoil the plot of the movie), Tony Robbins asked the audience about what reasons people give to explain why they didn't accomplish something. "Didn't have enough... time... money..." and so on. To which Robbins made the claim that really, it's usually not a problem with having enough resources, it's a problem with having enough resourcefulness.

Now, sure, that sounds like the sort of thing that a motivational speaker would say. But hey, it's a convenient way to introduce this other thing.

I've been griping about NetFlix's habit of pulling movies that I want to see out of my queue and moving them into the "unavailable" ghetto at the bottom of the page. I'm still displeased with that. I'm experimenting with a solution, a website called SwapADVD.com, which allows you to enter in the DVDs you have that you want to get rid of, and your wish list of movies you want, and it does the matchmaking. If somebody wants your DVD, they give you a mailing label, and you drop the DVD in the mail. Bam, you've acquired one quantum of karma (a "credit"), and you can get a DVD from someone else.

#1 on my queue is "Last Picture Show", and I'm optimistic that it'll become available soon.

Even if I don't get all the movies I've been planning to watch quickly and easily, I'm getting rid of movies that I never intend to watch again, so that's a win.

85 to go
or some such.

I just watched "Manhattan", or sorta half-watched it. Woody Allen is much easier to take early in the morning when you're distracted, it seems.

So, now my NetFlix / American Film Institute / IMDB project is down to 85 movies according to the spreadsheet I looked at this morning. I suspect there's a clutch of movies from the AFI's 10 top 10 that I intend to see, but haven't sorted into the list yet.

And then there's the sub-project, where I took all the movies on that list, selected those that were released in my lifetime, and I tried to see that sub-list by the end of 2008. I've missed that, but now the one movie remaining on the sub-list is "The Last Picture Show", which had been slated to be available in late April on NetFlix, but now is listed as being unavailable.

So, either I wait for it to come out on DVD (or, I guess, Blu-Ray), or I scrounge the DVD swapping services, or I scrounge eBay, or I wait for it to show up on cable. So much for making plans.

In related (in the sense that it also made me mad) news - I wrote Hasbro with more enthusiasm and happiness than I felt, saying that I'd love to know when they were ready to make PDF downloads of their out of print books available again. I have (surprise) not heard back from them, and in the interim, I've enriched their competition - there are plenty of small game developers that are making adventures and rules supplements available for purchase - some as PDFs, some as print-on-demand books. I spent a chunk of change on both of those recently.

And, as a punchline to this whole storyline, the particular supplement that set me off on this fugue of anger against TSR / WotC / Hasbro was one that I had already purchased in PDF format, as it turns out. And some of it is pretty dreadful, including some pen-and-ink drawings that might have come right off the back cover of my 5th grade math book.