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Harald recently started running a Mystara campaign for us. At the end of the first session we reached a major city in the setting. On Google+ he asked: how to give Karameikos' Specularum the Vornheim treatment.
Here's what I said:
I felt unable to use Vornheim the book at my table. The only things that made it into my game were cool ideas that don't need much text to explain: snakes are books; a library with a hydra that needs beheading for regular reading; gorgons in power.
The things I didn't care for: long lists of random stuff to encounter, room by room descriptions of something, shortcuts to create maps of roads and buildings, drop die charts for guards, AC, hp, all that stuff.
Thus, my first suggestion is to brainstorm weird ideas with friends and write them all down. Each idea gets no more than three or four sentences or lines. Put it on a wiki. Once you have 100 of them, let it sit for a while, then whittle it down. Aim for twenty awesome and unusual things that people (and you) will read in ten seconds and remember for a year. Pick three to use in your city when the party gets there first. Maybe add more stuff later, or use it for different cities.
If you want Thyatis to be harsh, have the road to the city pass by twenty or thirty crucified bandits. Some of them alive? These bandits are whipped and crucified and left to die, but at night the authorities expect friends of the punished to take them down and whisk them away (ie. they are de facto exiled).
The man in charge is Alexander Suworow. He has a separate post from the executioner because only non-nobles can be crucified. The current arrangement allowing the crucified to be taken down sits well with him. If you need to know about bandits, talk to him. He has lists of those who were punished and where they are from, so in an emergency you might find relatives of bandits with Suworow's help.
Stefan Karameikos maintains a company of elves somewhere. How many? Where exactly? Perhaps they have a built themselves an elven pleasure palace, a sylvan oasis, a locked park, protected by phantasmal forces.
Little Johnny has disappeared. Asking his friends reveals that he's had the reputation of having been in every garden of the city. He is now lost in the elven pleasure palace.
Tayha'a, the one-legged elven green keeper, says he has found nobody.
Tags: RPG Old School Vornheim Prep
Recently Philip Watson asked on Google+ how often we have evil NPCs join the party only to turn on the players at a critical moment. I said that I never do it because it trains players to behave in ways that I don't enjoy.
Let me explain. Once players start mistrusting everybody it leads them to kill innocents because they fear betrayal, it leads them to torture prisoners because they might be lying, it leads them to endlessly debate whether this or that is trustworthy information, and so on.
Lies: I much prefer to be upfront about lying non-player characters. "The old man says this and that, but you're suspicious. You feel he might be lying to you!"
Non-player characters are an important information channel. I can use them to tell my players about the world, to provide hints and help, I can have non-player characters agree with a plan if I think it's good enough and they should stop planning, I can have non-player characters refuse to go along with a plan if I feel it is lacking an escape option, etc. Once I introduce untrustworthy information into this channel, it's poisoned, effectively closed.
Promises: A similar idea is that my prisoners never lie. When prisoners beg for mercy and promise to run away and never oppose the party again, then that's exactly what they do. Once released prisoners start getting reinforcements, I train my players to always kill prisoners.
Torture: In the current political situation I feel that torture is being downplayed and made palatable, it's practically legitimized again. Where as the real world is sliding back into the dark ages, I refuse my game world to do the same. Thus, if my players want to torture somebody, I find that highly distasteful. To drive home how useless torture is to gain information, I usually ask my players "Ok, what do you want to hear?" And then, whatever they say: "That's exactly what he says." I refuse to role-play stuff I don't want to read about in books.
If my players start to incredulously ask different questions, I might try and make my point again but it won't take much for me to tell my players out-of-game that I really don't want to hear about torture at my table ever again.
Tags: RPG
Comments on 2012-07-06 Training Players
I agree completely with you here. I actually have the trouble of needing to retrain my players as they began by mistrusting me. Probably because they are students at the school I teach at, perhaps becausew they are only 13 and 14, maybe because they have come with a background in computer RPGs and mmorgs.
– OberonViking 2012-07-06 10:10 UTC
sadly, because I play with a mixed group from various other gaming groups, this kind of untrustworthiness seems to have been firmly established long before I got there. using an NPC as the guy who wired them's second in command who was supposed to be very helpful indeed, even going behind his boss's back on occasion for reasons of his own that were all in the player's interests, and they still thought he was lying or withholding information.
– shortymonster 2012-07-06 10:18 UTC
An interesting point. On the one hand, we are trying to make the game world dangerous and full of evil. But then we avoid almost all things which are truly evil. We slaughter lots of creatures without problem and are happy when countless villagers are massacred because that is the next adventure hook. But torture, abuse, despair, we do not want to have those in the game. Why should we? If its ugly in the real world, how could it be fun in play?
There is something delusional about our hobby.
– lior 2012-07-06 11:30 UTC
It's weird, I do this all the time and the players never really have a problem trusting anyone. I've never had a player do any of the things. Threaten to torture somebody? Never. Sometimes they'll say "I don't want to get screwed!" and I'll say, "Well, you probably won't" and that's pretty much the end of it.
@Lior: I think there is nothing delusional about it at all. It only seems delusional if you make broad simplifications. Let me dig a bit deeper:
We might get into real world ethics, of course (the ends justifying the means, is there a just war, human(oid) rights, war conventions) – but I think the key is how people feel at the table even if they cannot express it clearly.
There's a line to be drawn everywhere with respect to "how much we can take". Just as we do not experience risk in mathematical terms, we don't experience cruelty and pain in statistically relevant terms. It matters whether we're doing it, or it is being done to us, or we hear about other people doing it, the amount of graphic detail is important, our own sensibilities play an important role (people who enjoy watching Saw movies and I are not in the same boat).
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-06 12:31 UTC
Alex takes a couple shortcuts to get to game content he enjoys and is interested in. That is not delusional.
It's a question of where you draw the line in descriptions and where you lift the veil about NPCs. "His eyes dart around nervously as he tells you this" or "you have the uncanny feeling he is not telling the truth" is not the same thing as everybody always being nice, even if they're supposed to be the bad guys.
Example: In Alex' Wilderlands campaign there is a red dragon who got seven virgins every year; the reasons long forgotten by the humans. Yes, the dragon is going to sacrifice these innocent people in a ritual (and that is all I as a player needed to know) … but the ambiguity of real life starts beyond this; the dragon does this to seal a demon kings' soul so he doesn't resurrect himself in this part of the material plane.
And the goal of that subset of the campaign, chosen by the players, was to ensure the dragon doesn't need to do that anymore. So:
– Harald 2012-07-06 12:42 UTC
@-C: If your players never suggested torture, more power to them! What about the other issues, however: When your players release prisoners, the freed prisoners go and fetch friends to chase after the player characters? If so, do the player characters continue to release prisoners? When your non-player characters lie to your player characters, will the players still trust other non-player characters? Perhaps your player characters never trust any non-player characters? Or perhaps sifting through the statements the non-player characters make is part of the game? It also seems to be what you're saying in On Ignorance of Skill Based Play:
You present the NPC as a puzzle like any other. He has needs, traits, and desires that investigation (i.e. talking, to him, other people, or context clues) can discover. Then the players make choices about how to handle the situation – choices that if the investigation is done properly they will have a good idea about the results. You present these choices explicitly to the players.
This would be similar to me openly admitting that the non-player character seems to be lying once they player ask me "is he lying?" or "I watch his face and try to figure out whether he's lying." In response, I'll provide something pretty obvious like the examples Harald provided above: "His eyes dart around nervously as he tells you this" or "you have the uncanny feeling he is not telling the truth."
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-06 12:45 UTC
@Alex, @Harald: Let me rephrase. We want dragons sacrificing virgins, but we do not want to think about what that would mean and how and why that is horrible. We want a road flanked by dozens of crucified criminals. But we do not want to imagine what that really means. Crucifixion → bad, human sacrifice → bad. Those are trivial conclusions. We want them in the game, but we want them to stay trivial.
Also, I did not say Alex is delusional, far be it from me. In fact I think Alex' method is a mature way of not dealing with unfun issues.
I am deliberately saying "There is something delusional about our hobby" because I think it applies to almost all of us, myself very much included. I suspect those players who are OK with torture are so because it does not touch them emotionally as easily. In other words, it stays trivial for longer.
– lior 2012-07-06 13:30 UTC
@Lior: I suspect that this is an aspect of all sane humans and is true for almost all endeavors: too much detail makes you crazy; too much terrible detail makes you crazy. It protects you from the tedium and horror of everything, of the entirety of our human existence. The repression of horrible details and (sometimes) their sublimation into action (or adventure in the case of role-playing games) seems to be one of the most basic mechanisms allowing us to function. But then again, I'm not a psychologist and have my reservations regarding Freud. ;)
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-06 14:07 UTC
Question: how are lying NPCs different from trapped dungeon rooms? Is it a question of context? If so, maybe NPCs encountered in a dungeon are unreliable, while those encountered in a town are trustworthy? That seems like it might be a reasonable assumption, much like how players usually don't feel the need to probe the floor in a tavern with a 10 foot pole.
– Brendan 2012-07-06 22:43 UTC
@Brendan: I think looking at the difference between traps and lying non-player characters is a good way of considering the issue. Context is a good point. I'd say that a non-player character joining the party and moving from the tavern context to the dungeon context warrants a bit more thought: Is the non-player character now a liability or does he "stay trustworthy?" My players might be expecting the character to stay honest and I tend to agree.
Another aspect I like is how traps or liars are discovered.
Here's how I think traps ought to be used: there must be ways of discovering traps that doesn't involve rolling dice. I like to say: "If you need to roll dice, it's already too late." Thus, examining the floor might yield "a line across the floor" or "a dried puddle of blood" or something along these lines. I like -C's traps on his Hack & Slash blog because he discusses this discoverability of traps.
What about lying non-player characters? I feel that they need the same kind of discoverability. In the original example on G+ the Philip Watson had the evil cleric drink booze instead of joining combat in the first round and similar hints out there, so as far as I'm concerned, that's good enough.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-07 10:04 UTC
I'm not sure whether I had this problem before. Ever since importing a few photos yesterday I can no longer sync my iPad with iTunes. The last step is Waiting for changes to be applied and it takes forever.
I'm thinking that maybe I need to "Restore" the iPad. This will take many hours—and I have already wasted a few hours trying to find a solution without restoring from backup. Let this serve as a note to my future self that it didn't work. Just restore the stupid thing.
Even if this means waiting for 16.4G of photos and 32.3GB of apps (mostly PDFs for GoodReader).
Some 2½ years ago, I wrote about the reputation mechanics I was using in my D&D 3.5 game. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out. There just wasn't any incentive for players to act in order to gain reputation. It was always incidental. In between games, the referee would update reputations and whenever a player was in big trouble, they'd say that they wanted to roll for divine intervention. Unfortunately, they usually didn't know what their reputation was and with whom it was.
How to increase player involvement? I remembered my first Asian themed D&D 3.5 Kitsunemori campaign. There, players had to roll over their current reputation in order to increase it. That always caused a lot of excitement at the table.
Thus, for my houserules ("D&D Mine" aka. Campaign:Halberds and Helmets) I now require players to roll over their current reputation using a die that represents the magnitude of their deed.
Reputation: Fame and honor can be earned everywhere. Even the gods are interested in the deeds of mortals. Reputation is tracked separately for all the gods, towns and factions. The higher a reputation is, the harder it is to increase it.
In order to gain reputation, roll higher than the current reputation. The starting reputation is 0. Thus, the first time reputation increases, no roll is necessary.
Deed Roll To find an item, to bring it back, to save something d4 To rescue a life, to find the victim of a kidnap, to render services to a church d6 To rescue a village, to help an entire community d8 To render a service to the gods d12
Gods: In an emergency, reputation also acts as the percentage chance for divine intervention. In addition to that, reputation also limits the circle of miracles (spell levels) available to clerics. Thus, a cleric cannot work any miracles on their first adventure since they are lacking an appropriate reputation.
We'll see how that works.
Tags: RPG alignment Reputation
Comments on 2012-07-10 Reputation Revisited
Sounds like a nice and simple method.
– Simon 2012-07-11 08:22 UTC
Playing in your game, I found it so hard to actually get reputation that I stopped bothering about it. I surely must have missed opportunities or simply didn't figure out what would click with you?
Also, is there some kind of infamy stat, i.e. for that priest that simply went and followed the frog gods when things didn't turn out with his god the way he wanted? That in contrast seemed eerily easy, very much dark-side "it's a trap" like – without the good side trying to scheme to get their sheep back in the fold. Intentional?
– Harald 2012-07-11 10:10 UTC
Perhaps you are right and getting reputation is too hard. If it happens rarely, people will not think about it. Gaining experience points, on the other hand, happens after every session. Maybe I need to create a stronger ritual at the table. After every social encounter: "Guys, time to roll for your reputation!"
Remember those first adventures? Looking back, I'd say I missed the following opportunities:
As for Onbog's defection: maybe we could have enjoyed a true back and forth between the forces of law and chaos if the player had stayed with us. We'll never know if that would have turned out to be a good source of plot hooks. Similarly, as soon as the paladin of Mitra realized that the priest of Nergal had poisoned the wells of Oathcomb, the priest's player left us. I want to make the struggle of various deities over the character's fate a part of the game, but it hasn't really happened, yet. This is also one of the reasons I think the system needs reform – or it needs to be ditched.
As for it being easy to switch to the Dark Side: I guess this is part of my ethos that I have baked into the setting:
This produces the Sword & Sorcery Fantasy Post-Apocalypse Dying Earth vibe I'm going for, hopefully.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-11 12:41 UTC
Yeah, I feel like it was unclear to me if I should ask for reputation rolls (Mother May I syndrome); I'll know better in the future.
Now I need to consider if I want this in the Mystara game … it would actually be quite interesting.
– Harald 2012-07-11 13:55 UTC
It's not an easy question to answer. I added it because Planescape has belief and it feeds into divine power and a lot of outsiders. Does Mystara have that? I added it because all the gods are ambiguous, so there is no obvious right choice to make. If Mystara has the three local good immortals, how important is it to track reputation? The Immortals boxed set also offers a different end game based on quests and adventures. That would leave reputation for the worldly factions: empire or rebels, duke or baron, elves or humans, or the various towns and cities? I really think that reputation only makes sense in an ambiguous world where players will not really want to choose any of the options wholeheartedly. Much like Skyrim, I guess. Mystara seems to be a lighter world of more clearcut sides and simpler choices, and therefore it's not immediately obvious that adding reputation per faction would be important.
Perhaps Mystara would benefit of a simpler system: it is assumed that all the characters are part of a culture (social network with shared ethics) and therefore there is but one reputation or fame score to track. We could also say that this is what character levels track and be done with it, I guess?
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-11 14:36 UTC
The way reputation was handled in our Alderking game back then also didnt work for me. It wasnt really clear what the gods wanted and what not and it wasnt really clear when reputation was awarded. Example: Scheming for the downfall of Purdell gained Lerizwan some reputation with Set but Iz got none from Set for assassinating him. Does Set prefer manipulation instead of killing? Why did Lorey then not get any rep for dominating that Drow? Because he used magic instead of natural charms? It wasnt clear what exactly gets rewarded and the reward (better chance for the D100 prayer roll) never came up and was pretty small so no reason to bugger you with "Why didnt I get…" questions.
I think a reputation system needs clear rules for
The benefit for the gods is pretty clear but what about citys and factions? A similar roll if you ask them for help? In that case the maximum of 12 reputation seems a bit small.
– Florian 2012-07-12 13:02 UTC
Good point. Maybe a "morale score" – roll this number or lower on 2d6 for a positive reaction?
As for the different treatment of the various player characters, I think this was simply oversight. I didn't remember often enough, nobody checked what I was doing. It lacked player involvement. Hopefully the new system with the invitation to roll will change that.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-12 22:03 UTC
If you want to get started with Google+, here is what I would suggest:
*asteriskes* to make them bold. You might say, for example: "I'm a gamer and love to talk about table-top role-playing games (RPG) such as classic D&D from the eighties and computer role-playing games for the Xbox (CRPG) like Skyrim."
When posting, try to keep the posts on topic and share them with the appropriate circles only. Check out this flow chart about sharing on Google+.
You'll find that Google adds "What's Hot" items to your stream. This sucks! Somewhere in the vicinity of these posts you'll find a way to adjust how many of these posts you'll find in your stream. Setting the slider to zero worked for me.
Much later, you might want to install Chrome and check out the "Uncircle Uncircles" and "Uncircle Inactives" add-ons to prune your circles again.
If you have a web cam hooked up to your computer, look out for ConstantCon games via Google+ if that is your thing (it's not for me).
Update: 2013-10-31 New Google Plus Usage is where I explain how adding a big ton of people to my circles ended up not working for me.
Tags: Google Plus RPG
I needed to figure out how numerical superiority worked out in melee without resorting to a battlemap. A typical situation would be skeletons coming in through a door: how many party members can hit it? I used to think "everybody!" As the party size has grown to ten characters and more I feel this might no longer work.
When I was adding up experience points at the end of last session I was looking at this list: Logard with Piyo and Arnd; Hermann with Urs and Ors; Schalk with Gimir, Uluf, Tschannin, Borgir and Schlappe (with retainer Rell being sent away) – and this is with just three players! As you can imagine, I started thinking about space requirements.
I guess I started thinking about this when I read Roger's House Rules: Weapons, Armor, Combat aka. The Rule of the Assayers' Guild.
I'm thinking of giving every weapon a little special advantage or disadvantage while keeping the 1d6 damage for all weapons rule:
I decided I needed to write it all down for D&D Mine aka. Campaign:Halberds and Helmets:
Space: In a wide corridor (10 ft.) three can fight abreast; four if they are wielding stabbing weapons such as short swords; two if one of them wields a two-handed weapon; one if wielding a two-handed sword. With a polearm (halberd, spear) you can attack from the second row. → In a narrow corridor (5 ft.) only one can fight; two if wielding stabbing weapons such as short-swords; there is not enough space to swing a two-handed sword. → Two enemies per round may enter a room through a five foot door. They can be attacked by up to eight people in the first row with stabbing weapons and another ten may attack with polearms from the back row: eighteen against one! If an enemy is surrounded on all sides, they may be attacked by twelve people in the first row with stabbing weapons and another sixteen may attack with polearms from the back row: twenty eight against one!
→ → ← ← → → ← ← ↗ ↗ ↑ ↑ ↖ ↖ ↗ ↑ ↑ ↖
The above is from the rules document. It shows a party controlling a door where the front row fights with short sword and shield and the back row fights with polearms.
Here are some more examples.
Roman senators stabbing Caesar with daggers:
Roman soldiers with short swords and shields against barbarians with battle-axes:
German Landsknechte with two handed swords against Swiss mercenaries with polearms:
|2H swords
|pikes, short swords
The Landsknechte really need to get initiative. If they do, they can use their two-handed sword to attack all four mercenaries facing them with one attack roll.
Update: I'm still thinking of special properties for weapon…
Very short weapons such as daggers cannot be used with a shield.
Stabbing weapons such as short swords allow you to fight in tighter formation. See above.
Long weapons such as longswords can be used to slash at footmen while riding.
Two-handed swords can be used to hit every enemy in reach with a single swing.
Two-handed axes can be used to break down wooden doors.
Polearms such as halberds and pikes can be used from the second row.
Hooked polearms such as halberds can be used to pull riders from a horse on a critical hit instead of inflicting damage. Riders suffer 1d6 falling damage and end up prone (remaining enemies get +4 to hit, they can get up the next round and either attack or retreat).
Long polearms such as pikes can be set against a charge (double damage on a hit).
Lances can be used to charge (double damage on a hit).
I'm still undecided. Too complicated?
Tags: RPG Old School
Comments on 2012-07-13 Space Requirements
And there we are, very close to battlemat requirements …
– Harald 2012-07-13 10:01 UTC
I know!
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-13 10:24 UTC
Marillenknödel: Das ist ein Quarkteig mit Aprikosen drinnen. Das genau gleiche Rezept kann man auch mit Zwetschgen verwenden. Man isst sie mit "Brösel", dh. Paniermehl in Butter gebräunt einfach drüber leeren.
Das reicht je nach Talent für 8–11 Knödel bzw. 5–6 wenn man die Hälfte macht. Ich und Claudia essen gerne je drei Knödel für eine Mahlzeit.
Zu einem Teig verarbeiten. Traditionellerweise eine halbe Stunde ruhen lassen. Das mache ich aber nie.
Aprikose oder Zwetschgen entkernen und mit Zucker füllen. Das wird sehr viel einfacher, wenn die Hälften nicht ganz getrennt werden! Ebenfalls praktisch (mache ich aber nie) Würfelzucker statt ein gehäufter Teelöffel Zucker.
Frucht mit Teig umhüllen. Das ist das absolut Mühsamste und braucht viel Übung: Ist der Teig nicht klebrig genug, schliesst er nicht. Ist er zu klebrig, klebt er an den Fingern statt an der Frucht. Sobald der Teig schliesst, pappe ich gerne noch etwas Mehl rundherum, damit sie nicht am Teller ankleben, während sie auf die restlichen Knödel warten.
Wenn alles fertig ist, in einem grossen Topf mit Salzwasser 10 min. kochen. Gleichzeitig Paniermehl anbraten und braun werden lassen, Knödel heiss servieren und das Paniermehl drüber streuen.
Der Weg:
Das Ziel:
Viel Erfolg!
Comments on 2012-07-18 Marillenknödel
Alex that looks awesome. Looks kind of like an egg, once it is all put together.
– Adrian 2012-07-18 20:17 UTC
It's the miracle of Knödel!
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-18 22:27 UTC
Meine Oma kam aus Schlesien. Sie hat mir das Rezept für Pflaumenknödel "vererbt". Wir verwenden einen Kartoffelteig. Aber der Clou am Ganzen ist, dass das Stückchen Würfelzucker zunächst mit Cognac getränkt wird, bevor es den Stein ersetzt. Und die Brösel vermische ich dann auch noch mit einem guten Esslöffel Zimtzucker.
– IngoBelka 2012-07-29 14:02 UTC
Den Cognac und den Zimt muss ich unbedingt probieren!
Auch in Österreich gibt es Leute, die statt Quark ("Topfen") einen Kartoffelteig nehmen – selber finde ich das allerdings zu mühsam. Vielleicht sollte ich es mal probieren um zu schauen ob es geschmacklich einen Unterschied macht.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-30 09:06 UTC
I maintain a wiki engine called Oddmuse. It's the software used to run my blog, for example. It is written in an older scripting language called Perl. Perl predates Unicode. That's why the use of UTF-8 or UTF-16 is not mandated. That, in turn, means that usually bytes are interpreted as an UTF-8 encoded character is only visible as two bytes.
Consider this regular expression to match !WikiWords:
How would you extend it to parse ÖlPlattform?
Assume the following Perl code was written in a source file that was UTF-8 encoded:
$str = "OelPlattform"; print "OelPlattform YES\n" if $str =~ /[[:upper:]][[:lower:]]+[[:upper:]]\w+/; $str = "ÖlPlattform"; print "ÖlPlattform YES\n" if $str =~ /[[:upper:]][[:lower:]]+[[:upper:]]\w+/;
This will just print
OelPlattform YES because what looks like "ÖlPlattform" actually starts with the bytes C3 96 and C3 is not an upper case letter. It's actually unclear what it is. In a Latin-1 environment the C3 would print as ×the dreaded sign of encoding errors!
I wanted to keep Oddmuse encoding agnostic. Users could specify a different encoding which would be served together with the page HTML such that they could have wikis using GB 2312. This is why Oddmuse contained the following line and similar code:
# we treat input and output as bytes eval { local $SIG{__DIE__}; binmode(STDOUT, ":raw"); };
This resulted in problems when some packages I was using did in fact produce UTF-8 and so I had to use code as follows:
eval { local $SIG{__DIE__}; binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); } if $HttpCharset eq 'UTF-8'; print RSS($3 ? $3 : 15, split(/\s+/, UnquoteHtml($4))); eval { local $SIG{__DIE__}; binmode(STDOUT, ":raw"); };
I'm not sure why I surrounded it all with an eval—I assume it was to support an older version of Perl but I'm not sure.
Ok, so I wanted to get rid of all that.
The solution seems deceptively simple: add
use utf8; to the source files and open all files using the UTF-8 encoding layer.
When printing UTF-8 to STDOUT, you need to tell Perl that STDOUT can in fact handle multi-byte characters. Since the HTML produced is UTF-8 encoded, I know that this is true. If you don't, you'll get "wide character in print" warnings.
binmode(STDOUT, ':utf8');
You need to be careful with all input and output, however.
open(F, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $RcFile);
The same is true for output:
open(OUT, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $file) or ReportError(Ts('Cannot write %s', $file) . ": $!", '500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR');
Oddmuse also offers the ability to include other pages (Transclusion) and to produce feeds. This can be a problem. The default page processing is to parse the raw text and start printing HTML as soon as possible because I have always felt that it was more expedient to start printing the top of the page while the rest was still being parsed. What happens when I don't want to do this, eg. I'm in the middle of building the RSS feed?
The solution I had been using was to redirect STDOUT to a variable. Perl calls this a "memory file." The problem is the encoding of this memory file:
Here's what I had to write:
open(STDOUT, '>', \$page) or die "Can't open memory file: $!"; binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); PrintPageHtml(); utf8::decode($page);
I think this works because
binmode tells all the
utf8::decode makes sure that all those bytes are in fact decoded back to Perl's internal representation.
Then I discovered that I needed to look at the bytes if I wanted to URL-encode strings:
utf8::encode($str); # turn to byte string my @letters = split(//, $str); my %safe = map {$_ => 1} ('a' .. 'z', 'A' .. 'Z', '0' .. '9', '-', '_', '.', '!', '~', '*', "'", '(', ')', '#'); foreach my $letter (@letters) { $letter = sprintf("%%%02x", ord($letter)) unless $safe{$letter}; }
Now that I'm looking at the above I wonder what sort of bugs I'm introducing with the inverse operation that I haven't changed:
$str =~ s/%([0-9a-f][0-9a-f])/chr(hex($1))/ge;
I feel that this requires a call to
utf8::decode when done! Strangely enough none of my tests have picked this up. :question:
(Actually I think I know why I haven't stumbled across this problem: I only use the function to decode the Cookie, and all the functions accessing the cookie go through an extra encoding/decoding step that would not be necessary if I had fixed the URL-decoding function. 💡)
Another problem I stumbled upon: directories. Directories often ended up Latin-1 encoded.
utf8::encode($newdir); return if -d $newdir; mkdir($newdir, 0775) or ReportError(Ts('Cannot create %s', $newdir) . ": $!", '500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR');
The reason I didn't discover I had the same problem with filenames was that I'm using a compatibility layer on my Mac when I do my developments. The Mac uses UTF-8 NFD instead of UTF-8 NFC as is the standard on the web. Thus if you take bytes encoding a filename from the web and create the file, or if you go the other way, you have a problem. I store the index of all pages in a files. When a new page is created, I get the page name (NCF encoded) from the web, and store it in a file. When I read the file, the content contains the NFC bytes and with these, I cannot find the NFD encoded file (because the filesystem changed the encoding as it wrote the file). I hated it so much. Thus, the Mac compatibility layer does an extra encoding and decoding to get everything from NFD to NFC—and thereby protected me from this error.
As soon as I installed it on my sites, however—they all use Debian and ext3 filesystems, I think—I had a problem.
The necessary fix:
utf8::encode($file); if (open(IN, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $file)) { local $/ = undef; # Read complete files my $data=<IN>; close IN; return (1, $data); }
utf8::encode($file); open(OUT, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $file) or ReportError(Ts('Cannot write %s', $file) . ": $!", '500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR'); print OUT $string; close(OUT);
Another stumbling block was that the non-breaking space was no longer just a byte sequence like any other, namely C2 A0. Perl suddenly recognized it as whitespace! This is a problem if a path contains non-breaking spaces! The old code translated spaces to underscore characters, so that wasn't really a possibility. But whenever I had been "smart" and used a non-breaking space, I now had a problem. The
glob function splits its arguments on whitespace. Where there was one pattern, I now had two broken patterns!
Here's an example:
glob(GetKeepDir(shift) . '/*.kp'); # files such as 1.kp, 2.kp, etc.
Here's another example:
foreach (glob("$PageDir/*/*.pg $PageDir/*/.*.pg"))
The solution is to
use File::Glob ':glob' and replace every occurence of
glob with
bsd_glob. Wow, my application was very much unsuited to filenames containing whitespace and I hadn't even realized it!
foreach (bsd_glob("$PageDir/*/*.pg"), bsd_glob("$PageDir/*/.*.pg"))
Remember the regular expression to detect wiki words I used at the top? This was the actual regular expression I had been using:
$WikiWord = '[A-Z]+[a-z\x80-\xff]+[A-Z][A-Za-z\x80-\xff]*';
Essentially wiki words only worked for a first letter containing an ASCII upper case letter.
At first, I switched this to the following regular expression (trying to minimize changes):
$WikiWord = '[A-Z]+[a-z\x{0080}-\x{ffff}]+[A-Z][A-Za-z\x{0080}-\x{ffff}]*';
It turns out that Perl 5.8 chokes on this regular expression, howeveer. FFFE and FFFF are noncharacters. I had to change the regular expression.
$WikiWord = '[A-Z]+[a-z\x{0080}-\x{fffd}]+[A-Z][A-Za-z\x{0080}-\x{fffd}]*'; # exclude noncharacters FFFE and FFFF
I'm sure this list isn't complete but I'm sure it's long enough to illustrate my main point: this is painful. It's HTML quoting all over again.
Comments on 2012-07-20 Perl and UTF-8
Things to do for Oddmuse:
– Alex
Can it recognize new WikiWords as "ÖlPlattform", thanks to change regular expression to match them?. As far I can understanding it a little, does it need change those regex and changes way of read (write?), string (from url, for instance) and files?
– JuanmaMP 2012-07-22 01:16 UTC
Actually, I think that a simple change of the regular expressions is all that is needed.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-22 05:11 UTC
I have a job that creates backups of my sites using rsync. My sites are in Germany and the USA, the backups are in Canada and Chile. The point was to protect myself against hosting services disappearing and my sites getting lost. Recently I was thinking about data corruption, however. As soon as the cronjob writes the corrupted data to the backups, there is no way to retrieve my data. (There is in fact a third backup: every few weeks I use rsync to copy the remote sites to one of a rotating set of mobile disks, one of which is always outside our apartment.)
There is in fact an option for rsync which will allow you to create copies of your file tree at certain intervals using hard links for the files that haven't changed. I found a tutorial on how to do it: Time Machine for every Unix out there subtitled "Using rsync to mimic the behavior of Apple's Time Machine feature."
And that's exactly what I did.
Was empfiehlt man eigentlich einem Rollenspielanfänger, den man nur über das Internet kennt? Zusammen spielen ist ausgeschlossen. Meine Präferenzen wären: einfach und schnell zu lernen, typische Fantasy.
Eigentlich würde ich ja gerne Labyrinth Lord empfehlen, aber die aktuelle Version vom Mantikore Verlag ist leider nicht gratis online verfügbar. (Buuuuuh! 👎)
Der Link auf die alte, deutsche Labyrinth Lord Ausgabe bei RPG Now funktioniert auch nicht mehr. Was ist denn da los? Ist die plötzlich illegal geworden? (Buuuuuh! 👎)
Sofern ich da nichts anderes höre, gibt's das Teil mal hier: Labyrinth Lord (Deutsch).
Ich habe übrigens Dungeon Slayers empfohlen, obwohl ich es selber nicht spiele.
Vielleicht hätte ich die M20 Grundregeln empfehlen sollen. Zwar habe ich japanische Waffen und japanische Rüstungen dafür, aber keine (deutsche) Liste der Zaubersprüche. Also für Einsteiger auch nicht geeignet.
Der Geist Mesopotamiens ist eigentlich super, braucht aber Fudge Würfel. Auch keine gute Idee. Vielleicht sollte man das für W6-W6 umschreiben? Oder dann lieber gleich Solar System beziehungsweise meine Kurzfassung der Regeln. Auch hier müsste man allerdings die Fudge Würfel ersetzen. Wie mühsam!
Update: Aus den Kommentaren hier ein Link auf eine neue Version von M20: Andreas Mehlhorns M20 basiert auf der super geniale Version von Dirk Remmecke mit Zaubersprüchen, Ausrüstung, Monstern und einer kleinen Spielwelt.
Tags: RSP
Comments on 2012-07-30 Für Anfänger
Man kann statt der Fudge-Würfel |W6-W6| werfen; nur mit den Bonus- und Straf-Würfeln wirds dann nix, und die Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung ist etwas anders.
Wenn man Bonus- und Straf-Würfel beibehalten will, dann kann man 3W6 gegen Schwierigkeit 11 würfeln und die Fertigkeitswerte verdoppeln:
– Harald 2012-07-30 15:26 UTC
Zu M20 gibt eine neu gestaltete Version von Andreas Mehlhorn: http://bucheibon.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/m20-in-neuem-aber-immer-noch-amateurhaftem-layout/
– Stefan 2012-07-30 19:37 UTC
Wow, ist ja genial! Danke viel mal.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-30 20:09 UTC
Es kommt auch schwer darauf an, welche Vorlieben die Spieler haben. Da würde ich mehr drauf setzen. machen sie eher nen erzählerischen Eindruck? Kennen sie viele PC-Rollenspiele? Ich habe mit meinen Neulingen D&D 4 genommen. eigentlich nicht die erste Wahl, aber im Gegensatz zu Dir kann ich für sie leiten und ein Spieler hatte auch schon Vorerfahrung. Aber ohne Unterstützung würde ich Neulinge damit nicht unbedingt anfangen lassen. Da ist Dungeonslayers schon ne richtig gute Wahl, vor allem, weil es uach umsonst ist und es sich so jeder runterladen kann.
Übers Internet mit denen spielen ist keine Option?
– Jan 2012-07-31 05:34 UTC
Ein Anfänger kennt seinen Stil und seine Vorlieben natürlich (noch) nicht. Wie auch. So jemandem KANN man nicht ein bestimmtes Spiel empfehlen, höchstens eine Auswahl in verschiedenen Richtungen.
Ich empfehle Anfängern für gewöhnlich: geht spielen. Sucht euch ne Runde um mitzuerleben, wie das Spiel überhaupt funktioniert und probiert auch VERSCHIEDENE Systeme bei möglichst unterschiedlichen Leuten aus. Rollenspiel-Cons sind dafür meist gut geeignet. Aber vielerorts gibts auch noch anderweitige Gelegenheiten. Es lohnt sich definitiv, nach jeweils lokalen Treffpunkten oder Communities im Netz zu suchen.
– Captain 2012-07-31 05:51 UTC
Noch etwas Kontext für die Interessierten: Ich betreibe eine "Rollenspiel Zürich" Facebook Seite. Dort wurde ich vor einer Weile von einem Teenager kontaktiert, der in einer Nachbarstadt wohnt und dessen Eltern verständlicherweise meinten, er müsse noch ein paar Jahre warten, bevor er zu fremden Erwachsenen heim D&D spielen dürfe. Die Folgefrage war nun: Ob ich einen Regelvorschlag für ein Kampfsystem hätte?
Da ich mir mit zehn oder so Rollenspiele dank der ersten Ausgabe von Das Schwarze Auge selber beigebracht habe, empfehle ich natürlich gerne Regelwerke von ähnlicher Komplexität.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-31 09:53 UTC
Neulingen kennen ihre Vorlieben noch nicht, aber als erfahrener Rollenspieler kann man durch geschicktes Nachfragen eine grobe Eingrenzung treffen und dementsprechend mit solchen Systemen anfangen. Nach den ersten Runden weiß man dann ja schon mehr, auch wenn man dann wieder nur fragt.
– Jan 2012-07-31 10:32 UTC
Ich werde mal nachfragen, ob DS4 nun gepasst hat oder nicht.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-07-31 11:40 UTC
Recently Mike Evans asked about setting books on Google+. Here's what I wrote:
I found Rob Conley's Points of Light 1&2 to be short and concise setting books. They contain regional maps with a key; most things get a paragraph or two. NPCs get name, class, level. It's very similar to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy but shorter. I have used both at the table and have been very happy. There are free examples available online: Lenap (which is what I got started with) and Southland.
Rob Conley's Majestic Wilderlands has more house rules, classes and the like which I don't care for and unusable small maps. This is why I haven't used it. I usually find that browsing the blogs and reading books gives me cool ideas and make me want to add stuff to the campaign. These things don't need to be in a setting book.
I've used the Forgotten Realms book for D&D 3 as a player to help me write a backstory because I felt the DM enjoyed this kind of thing. The setting book provided names and places galore, so it was very useful to me. As I suspected, however, the backstory itself turned out not to be very useful at the table. This is why the kind of games I like to run don't need this sort of setting book (Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Golarion, Glorantha).
Generally speaking I need much less religion, history and culture background than is usually offered by the big setting books. When I ran the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, for example, I never referred to the Golarion campaign setting book once. Not once! That's how useless it was at the table. I think it's useful for people wanting to write interesting backstories to their well-travelled characters, it's useful to authors wanting to write adventures set in Golarion, it's useful for the community as a reference point when talking about the game they love. It's just not as useful at the table.
Tags: RPG Old School Keep It Short
What: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
When: 18 July, 19:30 – RSVP on Meetup (optional )
Where: Bistro Lochergut (tram 2+3 'Lochergut')
Nineteenth-century Europe – from Turin to Prague to Paris – abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece. (Amazon)
Guardian/Observer review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/prague-cemetery-umberto-eco
Tags: BookClub


text:
SecAF congratulates SAASS grads, marks school's 20th anniversary
by Christopher Kratzer
Air University Public Affairs
6/17/2011 -
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala.
-- The graduation of the 20th class of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies June 15 also marked the 20th anniversary of the school's founding, a fact highlighted in the commencement address by Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley.
Secretary Donley said the ceremony honored not only this year's SAASS graduates but the school's nearly 700 graduates over the last 20 years.
"By now, hundreds of SAASS graduates, strategic thinkers who developed and refined their skills right here at Maxwell, have applied this education to advise and serve the United States Air Force and our armed forces," he said.
According to Dr. Harold Winton, a professor of military history and theory at SAASS, the class performed extremely well throughout the academic year, particularly on their comprehensive oral exams. Throughout its 20 years, he said SAASS has received the resources it has needed to conduct its mission, "but the primary resource is students who are willing to work hard."
The graduates' high level of performance is an indication that they will be a highly sought-after commodity in the field by Air Force officers and others on cutting-edge issues of national security, Dr. Winston said.
During the ceremony, Secretary Donley noted the important role that professional military education plays in today's national security environment.
"Educating strategic thinkers is just as critical as maintaining our technological edge," he said. "Cultivating our best thinkers is part of our investment in people. The success of our Air Force and our national security is directly related to the quality of the men and women who serve."
In addition to 46 active-duty Air Force officers, graduates of the 20th SAASS class included two Army officers, two Marine Corps officers, an Air Force Reserve officer, an Air National Guard officer and six international officers. This is the fifth year SAASS graduates have included international students.
The secretary told this year's 58 graduates to make their experience at SAASS count.
"Take this education, preparation and experience and do something great for our Air Force and for our country," he said. "Our Air Force is a world-class institution thanks to all of you. As its stewards, we are committed to ensuring that the United States Air Force continues to be the world's finest air force for years to come."
SAASS is a follow-on school for selected graduates of intermediate-level Department of Defense PME schools, aimed at creating strategists with a superior ability to develop, evaluate and employ airpower within the complex environment of modern war. Graduates receive a master of airpower art and science degree.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works. Much of what is known about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.
For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.
Source: Wikipedia, "Epicurus", available under the CC-BY-SA License.


text:
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text:
Can you explain Chablis in a morning? Not fully, of course, and not while you are sitting behind a table laden with glasses and spittoons in central London rather than negotiating the stony slopes on a chilly winter morning. However, Rosemary George MW, author of The Wines of Chablis and the Grand Auxerrois, and her two panellists,…
Written by 13 Dec 2011
All about Chablis
Annual membershipPerfect for wine lovers £69 annual Join Save £15
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Still unsure?Find out more about membership and the Jancis Robinson Team. Find out more
This article is for members only


text:
Long Island authorities and volunteers gathered for emergency preparedness drills today. The Community Emergency Response Team gathered in Valley Stream to prepare for natural disasters and mass casualty situations. Authorities simulated a hurricane and building collapse. They also taught volunteers how to conduct a search in a home or building....
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text:
Area schools feature talented wrestlers
Thursday, February 16, 2012
With a pair of compelling first-round matchups, the Versailles Tigers will have their work cut out for them on the first day of the Class 1 Missouri State High School Activities Association Wrestling Championships.
The Tigers qualified four for the event, and two of them are state-ranked wrestlers facing state-ranked foes.
Versailles' Isaiah Clark is the state's second-ranked 138-pounder, and he'll open against South Harrison's Trey Lathrum, ranked No. 7.
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The Volunteer Program of the Diane Peppler Resource Center has been, since the beginning, an integral part of the agency. In the beginning, the agency would not have prospered and grown without the daily support of volunteers. Volunteers help to provide 24-hour coverage of our crisis phone, as well as our shelter. Volunteers help to provide many other services that support our organization.
If you would like to be a volunteer for the Diane Peppler Resource Center, please call us today! There is always room for one more volunteer and many, many services that we need help with.
Call our Volunteer Coordinator at (906) 635-0566


text:
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text:
After last week's technical breakout on elevated volume, stocks have flattened and trading volume has waned as investors seem to be waiting to see whether there will be a pullback to test new support levels and the bulls' conviction. I think the bulls are plenty convicted—not conflicted.
New round-number resistance-turned-support levels are at 13,000 on the Dow, 3,000 on the Nasdaq, and 1400 on the S&P 500. The S&P was the last to breakout and the first to test support. In fact, it has been testing support at 1400 every day since it broke out last Thursday. So far this week, there has been little movement in any asset class as investors hold their positions and wait for the next catalyst. Gold, oil, and the U.S. dollar are all slightly down, 20-year Treasuries are slightly up, and stocks and the U.S. dollar are mostly flat. But the fact remains that there is little incentive to invest in low-yielding Treasuries right now.
[Related -JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM): A Look At Underlying Growth Drivers]
Among the ten U.S. sector iShares, Consumer Goods (IYC) has been the strongest this week through Wednesday, up about +1%, followed by Technology (IYW), Telecom (IYZ), and Consumer Goods (IYK), while Energy (IYE) has been the decisive laggard, down about -2%. The big leader of last week's technical breakout was the Financial sector, and IYF still displays the best overall performance since then.
With banks standing on firmer footing, the Fed is now allowing those that pass their "stress test" to boost dividends and buy back stock. And they are doing so. Some like Citigroup (C) and Sun Trust Bank (STI) have not yet passed the test, but others like Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC), U.S. Bancorp (USB), and JP Morgan (JPM) are getting aggressive.
[Related -Can Eric Schmidt Resolve Google Inc's (GOOG) Biggest Challenge After $100 Mln Bonus?]
Again, I just can't help but say something about Apple Inc. (AAPL) this week. It was just two months ago that I was talking about AAPL finally pulling back into a tie with Exxon Mobil in the largest-market-cap sweepstakes. Now the comparison is a distant memory as XOM has stayed flat at a little over $400 billion while Apple has soared 35% in two months to reach a market cap of over $560 billion.
As I pointed out last week, the "junk rally" phase we have been in might be foretelling an imminent pullback to "re-rationalize," if you will. Higher quality stocks have been underperforming those that were beaten down or have high short interest. But quality will inevitably rise again.
Looking at the SPY chart, it closed Wednesday at 140.21. Last week, it blasted through resistance at 140 for the first time since mid-2008. It now finds itself right in the middle of its up-sloping channel that has been forming since late-December, with resistance around 142 and near-term support around 138. Below that, there is support from the longer-term uptrend line around 135, which also coincides with the rising 50-day simple moving average.
RSI, MACD, and Slow Stochastic are all pointed as if they want to cycle back down to oversold territory. But bulls might insist on churning in place to work off the short-term overbought conditions rather than pull back with any significance. Eventually, price will test its 50DMA for support, but it doesn't have to happen anytime soon.
The VIX (CBOE Market Volatility Index—a.k.a. "fear gauge") closed Wednesday at 15.13, which is just about exactly where it was last Wednesday, and it is comfortably below the important 20 threshold. In fact, it has remained in a range of 14-16 since the Dow and Nasdaq breakouts last Tuesday.
China's high and rising corporate debt problem and how best to address it has received much attention read on...
It's all about jobs now. Actually, it's always been about jobs. But the stakes are even higher—perhaps more read on...
In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast we could for the read on...
The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged yesterday, as widely expected. But the possibility of a read on...


text: If you enjoy making your own juices at home, a "juicing garden" can provide you with a steady supply of fresh, nutritious and tasty ingredients. These seven seed varieties yield organic vegetables, greens and herbs for making flavorful, nutrient-rich fresh juices. This collection was developed for us by Northern California's The Living Seed Company, which donates seeds to school garden programs, youth groups and other suitable charities.


text:
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Iowa State men may hold key to Final Four | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register
Go Cyclones - Four things ISU must do against No. 1 Texas
Texas-Iowa St. Preview - Jan. 12, 2010 - NCAA Division I Mens Basketball - CBSSports.com
Column: Texas gets view from top | CJOnline.com
Wanted: Breakout Big 12 season by frustrated Brackins The 'Clone Zone
Iowa State women's basketball: Fennelly says Cyclones must 'attack the basket' against Texas A&M | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register
Go Cyclones - ISU moves to No. 20 in coaches' poll
ISU coach singles out Metcalf, Terry Brands after National Duals | GazetteOnline.com
Twitter: @ChrisMWilliams
Facebook: Cyclone Fanatic
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text:
The skilled surgeons at Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital are trained to treat our patients using the most advanced technology available in the field.
Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital is the first hospital in Nacogdoches to offer minimally invasive robotic-assisted surgery.
Our new da Vinci® robotic surgery system gives surgeons eyes that can see with the clarity of a high-powered scope and hands that can operate with a range of motion greater than the human wrist – with unmatched accuracy and precision. Once invasive, complex procedures, including prostatectomies and hysterectomies, can now be performed through incisions the size of a dime. What does this mean for you?
The da Vinci® robotic surgery system is an advanced tool that consists of a surgeon's console, a cart at the patient's side with four interactive robotic arms and a high-definition vision system. Operated by the skilled surgeons at Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital, the system's 360-degree jointed instruments refine the surgeons' hand movements through motion scaling and tremor reduction. Because the precise incisions limit blood loss, surgeons operating with the da Vinci® system can work with greater clarity. The vision system not only magnifies the surgeon's field of vision, it also provides the surgeon with a three-dimensional image of the surgical field.


text:
WASHINGTON (August 6, 2014) – Howard University is inviting all incoming students to continue to build upon the university's legacy of service to humanity, through their 2nd Annual Howard University Day of Service (HUDOS) on Friday, August 22.
HUDOS, a University wide initiative, provides an opportunity for incoming students to embrace the University's motto, "Truth and Service." It is modeled after Howard University's nationally recognized Alternative Spring Break program and will provide service learning opportunities as a part of the students' introductory experience to the University.
Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick will give the charge to service address to current students, faculty, staff, administrators and alumni who will volunteer across the Washington DC metropolitan area to discover the power of lending a hand while engaging with the DC community. Faculty and staff will lead and serve along with students and alumni at the individual service learning initiative sites.
HUDOS will focus on six service learning initiatives: education, environmental services, HIV/AIDS, poverty and homelessness, violence, and voter registration. The locations of service are determined by the service project preference selected on the application. Students will be notified of their service initiative assignment via email.
To register visit:
Students - Click here.
Faculty and Staff - Click here.
Registration is open until 5:00 p.m. on Friday, August 15, 2014. All questions regarding Howard University Day of Service can be submitted electronically to email@example.com. HUDOS is coordinated through the Office of the Dean of the Chapel with the support of the Office of Student Affairs.
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Order Of The Arrow – Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Square knot insignia; William T. Hornaday Awards; World Conservation Award; Young American Award Seabadge; Wood Badge; Philmont Leadership Challenge; Youth Protection program … Read Article
S-AM-02 FAUX WOOD GRAIN AND LEATHER – Judy Roberts Saturday …
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Thursday Morning — June 23
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User:Pschemp/sandbox – Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
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Category: Mexican Cinema
¡Viva! Mexico #4: Seguir viviendo (Go On Living, Mexico 2014)
This unusual film was introduced by its writer-director Alejandra Sánchez who joined ¡Viva! programmer Rachel Hayward for a Q&A after the screening. Ms Sanchez is a documentary filmmaker who has here moved into 'documentary drama'. In 2006 she made a documentary about the violent attacks on women in the city of Juárez near the US border. She made contact with a woman whose daughter had been killed in Juárez in one of these attacks and who was now looking after her two small grandchildren. Ten years after her daughter's death this woman was herself attacked and shot several times outside her house. Somehow she survived the shooting (which Alejandra Sanchez argued was prompted by her work as an activist in the campaign about violence directed towards women). The director then decided to dramatise the story of the two children, one of whom witnessed the shooting. She wrote a script and then decided to cast the real teenagers to play themselves. As well as this element, she also used photographs and 'home movie footage' of the children and their mother as part of her film.
In the film the two children, Jade and Kaleb, now teenagers, are visited in the hospital where their grandmother is in a coma by a journalist, Martha, who has been summoned by the family's lawyer, David. Martha (Nora Huerto) is asked to take the teenagers on a trip, away from possible danger, with the hope that they will be able to meet up with their grandmother in Mexico City when she has recovered and go with her to a safe house in Canada.
Seguir viviendo thus turns into a road movie. The brother and sister are understandably traumatised by this second attack. Kaleb never speaks (a device suggested by the director) but his sister eventually comes round. Later it is revealed that Martha has lost her small son in a car accident and one stop on the road trip is at the bar owned by her former lover, the dead boy's father. There isn't a great deal of plot but the road trip includes some of the familiar generic moments, including a drive down the coast and various overnight stays in motels and at least one village house. The film has an 'open' ending with a song and an animated sequence – which I certainly wasn't expecting. During the Q&A Alejandra told us that she chose the ending against advice because she preferred it to the more realistic end point of the airport where the teenagers would board a plane to take them to the safe house.
Why was the children's mother murdered in the first place? Why are women being attacked in Cuidad Juárez? These are the questions that several people in the audience wanted answers for. Alejandra was not able to answer such questions directly (it may have been simply a translation problem). She said that the attacks and killings had been going on for more than 20 years and that you really had to live in Mexico to appreciate what this meant. I took her statements to imply that the children's mother was killed almost as part of the overall violence of the city rather than for something that she did and that the grandmother was attacked because she was an activist campaigning for better police and judicial action against the killers. This discussion did, of course, raise the spectre of violence associated with Mexico's drug gangs, especially in the areas near the US border. A Guatemalan filmmaker in the audience said that this violence should be discussed and audiences needed to be educated about it and why it has happened – otherwise the representation of Central American societies remains simply barbaric for outsiders. This is something people feel strongly about and indeed it does need discussion. Both Rachel Hayward and Andy Willis asked questions which tried to focus on how Alejandra felt in dealing with such highly emotional (and possibly personally dangerous) filmmaking. There are a couple of scenes where the characters think they might be being followed and Alejandra admitted that the paranoia was 'real' for herself and the teenagers and her crew.
This an emotional and at times very moving film and Alejandra Sanchez is a brave filmmaker who deserves support. The film is technically well-made but it is quite short (81 mins) for a feature and I did feel that the final section lacked something. I fear that the film will mainly be seen at specialist film festivals but I hope it does find a wider audience and that it encourages other filmmakers to be equally brave and authorities to initiate action against the violence and towards support for the victims.
¡Viva! Mexico #3: Paraíso (Paradise, Mexico 2014)
When I first began to write about this film I thought it would be straightforward to describe it as a mainstream 'feelgood film' – a romantic drama with comedy and a universal narrative. However, when I started to read a few of the other commentaries on the film and to reflect on what we learned about Mexican cinema during the ¡Viva! Weekender, I realised that there was more to it than that. The Mexican audience is growing but in the main Mexicans still watch Hollywood films over their own domestic releases. I tend not to watch Hollywood mainstream comedies, so a film like Paraíso perhaps seems less unfamiliar to me than it might to the Mexican audience. I'm referring to the concept of a very large woman as the central character of the film. Her weight is an important element of the narrative but, apart from one short sequence, the film does not ask us to laugh at her because of her weight. Instead, the weight issue is just part of who she is and how she deals with the real issue of maintaining her relationship with the man she loves and feeling good about what she does with her life. (I have seen one Hollywood film recently, Spy, in which the talented Melissa McCarthy is a large woman who triumphantly rules the narrative but that is unusual in contemporary Hollywood, I think.)
In Paraíso, Carmen and Alfredo are a loving couple, happily together in their 'dormitory town' in the outer suburban area of Mexico City. When Alfredo gets a promotion in his banking career they must move into the city. From day one, Carmen doesn't really like big city life. Part of her problem is that she now has time on her hands after being an integral part of her family's tax and legal advice business. The crunch comes when at their first bank function when Carmen overhears two of the well-dressed and 'toned' bank employees describing her and Alfredo as overweight country bumpkins. Carmen stumbles into a weight-watchers operation and the couple start diets. The outcome is fairly predictable – one of them loses most of their excess weight and the other doesn't. It's a recipe for marital disaster.
Carmen is an intelligent and seemingly confident young woman. The comedy is gentle and mostly comes from the quirks of social interaction rather than staged pratfalls or comic dialogue. One of the few 'mistakes' is a brief montage of Carmen trying to adopt yoga stances with predictable results. The film feels like a romantic comedy partly because the narrative resolution is to some extent dependent on a rather formulaic cookery competition that is handled very sketchily, as if even the writer didn't really think it made much sense. Most of the time, however, the writing benefits from careful social observation. It's perhaps not surprising that the script is by two women, Julieta Arévalo having written the original story that is adapted by the director Mariana Chenillo. Carmen is played by Daniela Rincón and she doesn't appear to have other credits on IMDB. If she is indeed a new screen talent this is an impressive first screen performance. Alfredo is played by the more experienced Andrés Almeida. His is quite a difficult role underplaying Alfredo who behaves sensitively towards Carmen and things go wrong that aren't his fault. Overall this is a story about two people in love who have to go through a difficult period in order to appreciate how good they are together. I hope that it gets widely seen on DVD in Mexico and that seeing it will encourage more Mexican filmmakers to look for local stories. I realise now that it's a film that relates to the session on 'Latin American Cities' (and the alienation they can generate) delivered in the first ¡Viva! Weekender earlier this year. I'm also reminded of another film from a few years ago, Real Women Have Curves (US 2002) a Hispanic-American film which similarly struggled for a cinema release (but which eventually made $5 million). That film's lead, America Ferrera, went on to achieve fame as 'Ugly Betty'. I hope Daniela Rincón goes on to achieve something similar.
¡Viva! Mexico #2: En el último trago (One for the Road, Mexico 2014)
I knew this film was going to work from the first few minutes of the opening scene. Four men in their late 70s or older are sat round a table in a café-bar playing dominoes and squabbling. Suddenly one orders 5 shots of tequila. Consternation amongst the other three since none of them drink any more. The drinker explains that they are all for him and that he is 'out' – he has colon cancer and he hasn't got long. He then makes the other three promise that they will deliver his most prized possession to its final resting place when he is gone. This object is a paper napkin on which are written the lyrics to a new song by the famous singer José Alfredo Jiménez. The lyrics are dedicated to the dying man and signed by the singer. This is indeed a historical document that is dated and in the handwriting of the star. The three survivors are charged with taking this sacred object to the museum in Dolores Hidalgo where the singer is buried – a trip of over 250 kilometres from Mexico City. That doesn't sound very far, but these are old men with very little money.
The 'three amigos' are great performers, each very different, and I knew I would enjoy their company. The film was briefly introduced by Yossy Zagha Kababie, co-writer and producer (and brother of the director) who featured in a Q&A after the screening. He confirmed that all four of the old men are experienced performers from TV, theatre and film – some primarily working in comedy sketches or telenovelas but others as character actors. One of them, José Carlos Ruiz (Emiliano) has appeared in Hollywood films including Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965). Luis Bayardo (Augustin) reminded me at times of Stan Laurel with a quizzical expression and a general air of innocence.
The plot develops a road movie with a clever script that finds numerous ways of delaying the trio on their journey so that it takes several days for just one of them to reach Dolores Hidalgo and deliver the napkin. (UK readers will possibly remember a similar trip in Last Orders, UK 2001, a Fred Schepisi film based on a Graham Swift novel.) Each of the three men who start the trip has a family issue to deal with. One is a widower being forced into a nursing home by his daughter-in-law, one has a wife with dementia and one is constantly finding the ghost of his dead wife popping up and criticising him. These are universal problems for men of a certain age but the appearance of the ghost also refers us to the ways in which the film tries to connect with Mexican culture and the nostalgia for the trio in thinking about the Mexico of their youth. One of the men 'sees' a white horse on a couple of occasions – a reference (Yossy told us) to one of the 1,000 songs written by Jiminéz. The men also meet a 'witch' and survive a dangerous premonition that involves another ghost. As one of the audience questions highlighted, the role of women in the film is quite interesting in this film about four men – the women have quite small parts but they are often characters with real 'agency' – assertive, organised and 'active'. Yossy agreed that the script had tried hard to achieve this.
This is a genuinely funny film with laughs aplenty but also a social commentary and a moving drama. It's a major achievement. In answering questions during a lively Q&A conducted by Andy Willis, Yossy Zagha Kababie made many revealing statements. He explained that there is a big growth in film production in Mexico, but small films (this cost just US$1.5 million) find it difficult to get screened in Mexico despite the box office boom in admissions (Mexico now rates as the fifth biggest film market in cinema admissions). Most cinemas screen American films and the 100,000 admissions for this film is a sign of success in a difficult market. He argued that as a producer with his brother they aimed to make films about Mexican culture that weren't about drugs gangs. Comedy is popular in Mexico but mainly 'simple' comedy and not the character stuff as in this film. Comedy is also a harder sell to international film festival programmers. So, it's difficult but worthwhile work that the filmmakers enjoy. The focus on music and the town of Dolores Hidalgo – one of Mexico's official 'Magic Towns' with a historical role in the struggle for Independence – is part of this 'reclaiming of Mexican culture'. I think any festival would benefit from including this film and I just wish a distribution deal was possible in Europe – it seems that a Mexican comedy like this doesn't even travel to other Spanish language markets elsewhere in Latin America, but the Hispanic market in the US may be a taker of both DVD and TV rights? If you stumble across this film, take the plunge and you'll have a great time.
¡Viva! Mexico #1: Hilda (Mexico 2014)
I puzzled over this film for some time but then discovered that its script was based on a 1999 play by Marie NDyiae, the French writer with a Senegalese father. I came across her as the co-writer of White Material (France-Cameroon 2009) directed by Claire Denis. This revelation didn't explain everything but it did confirm the European ingredients in the narrative mix and the politics of race and class. During the screening I couldn't help thinking about Luis Buñuel and some of his Mexican as well as his Spanish films. Although the overall narrative is not Buñuelian there are certainly recognisable elements including the disruption of an upper middle-class formal dinner and the whole concept of relationships between 'masters' and 'servants'. That said there is also a distinct Latin American interest in 'the maid'. I remember a Bolivian film Zona Sur (South District, Bolivia 2009) and La Nana (The Maid, Chile 2009).
'Hilda' is the name of a young woman recruited (reluctantly) as the maid/nanny for the Le Marchands, a very wealthy Mexico City family. Hilda is married to Francisco who was previously the gardener for the same family. Senora Le Marchand has a hold over Francisco to whom she has lent money to buy a house. He is now in the process of paying back these loans – which gives the Senora leverage to coerce his wife into the maid's job. Senora Le Marchand (Susanna) is a woman in her 60s and the nanny role refers to her grandson. Her son has returned from America with his wife and child. Meanwhile Senor Le Marchand is in cahoots with the local police chief and is attempting to acquire an American business partner in order to expand his manufacturing business. He ignores and humiliates his wife (he gives her a new passport in which she is described as a housewife and a high school graduate). In fact she was at university in 1968 and she joined the radical students. Later she became a charity organiser. Now she is feeling nostalgic for those days and increasingly alienated from her husband. When she is asked for an interview about her 1968 activities by current students she becomes obsessed with her memories. She has always tried to be 'fair' to her servants and to include them 'in the family'. But this time she becomes obsessed with Hilda – the maid works hard and is very efficient but displays no emotion until Susanna forces her to become enthusiastic and 'passionate'. But Susanna gradually becomes ever more obsessive and we realise that she is out of control . . .
The film's writer and director, Andres Clariond has explained that the film is a response to the great inequalities of Mexican society based on wealth, social class and ethnicity. Many of the Mexican films that make it into international distribution use the same themes to some extent. Y tu mamá también, for example makes some of the same points and La Zona emphasises the increasing alienation caused by the rise of gated communities and the security guard culture. Indeed the setting for the action rarely steps outside the Le Marchand house in which Hilda is virtually a prisoner. The film is presented in CinemaScope and I did wonder if we were heading for a full-blown family melodrama. That doesn't really develop and instead we get more of a psychological study of Susanna, a woman who is representative of those 'children of Marx and Coca-Cola' (as Godard once put it) who have reached their 60s and begun to wonder what exactly they've achieved. By contrast we never learn that much about Hilda. Veteran actor Verónica Langer as Susanna and Adrianna Paz as Hilda do well with the script they have been given but my impression was that there was something missing – perhaps this is because of the opening out of a play? I felt that the climactic section of the narrative developed too quickly and at only 89 minutes I wondered if something had been left out. There is a sub-plot about the son of the Le Marchand family as well as the impact of his father's attempt to join up with American business. These narrative threads add to the overall structure but don't completely mesh with the Susanna-Hilda story. Even so, the film worked for me, offering a mix of political satire, social commentary and psychological study.


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- Inhabitat New York City - http://inhabitat.com/nyc -
The Top 8 Eco Products from the First Ever NYC Green Festival
Posted By Suzanne Boothby On April 24, 2012 @ 5:50 pm In Eco Kids,Festivals,Food | No Comments
Clean water made simple with charcoal. It sounds kinda crazy, but according to Kishu [4] makers, it's a Japanese tradition. You simply put one hunk of this charcoal into a glass or pitcher and it will purify the water from lead, mercury, chlorine, cadmium, and copper. The company sustainably harvests the charcoal from holm oak trees and fires it in a kiln oven. A single piece lasts up to six months and can be composted when you are done with it.
Two companies featured alternatives to plastic bags and they both had bright colors and help reduce waste. These products are especially handy for anyone who packs lunch on a daily basis. Erin Kelly-Dill started snackTAXI [5] in 2003, when her 3 kids started school and she was packing more than 500 lunches a year. Dr. Sara O'Connor started Earth Swag [6] out of a desire to keep plastic away from her family's food.
For Vertical Home Gardeners: The Phytopod [7]
Grow more food with less space. The Phytopod [7] is made with earth-friendly, recycled, or re-used materials and allows you to grow tons of your favorite veggies, fruits, herbs or flowers in a small space. Originally from Oakland, Calif. the company is now based in the Bronx. They work with individuals and schools to help increase access to homegrown food.
Recycled plastic bottles, textile scraps and even discarded x-ray slides are creating the latest trends in t-shirt fashion right here in NYC. Playback [8] Founder Adam Siskind was inspired to create this eco-apparel line after watching An Inconvenient Truth. Not only do are the clothes made from recycled materials, but the colors come from the original product—so a bright green t-shirt comes from a Mountain Dew bottle, not a chemical dye.
When Gwen, the owner of Simply Chickie [9], starting making these clothes in 2004, she said she had to educate people about the importance of organic cotton. These days, people get it. Working with certified organic cotton supports farmers that grow it without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Gwen's daughter, Elizabeth, inspires the designs, and she uses Japanese paper and print to create art for the textiles.
Kale chips seem to be all the rage these days, and the world is ready for crunchy snack foods with more nutrients. The most interesting flavor of kale chips from Kale Krunch [10] was the Spirulina, Orange Creamsicle variety. Kaia foods has managed to combine a superfood with a childhood favorite that was definitely a crowd pleaser. These chips are raw, certified-organic, gluten-free, vegan and dehydrated (not baked or fried).
For the Eco-Celebration: Susty Party [11]
Who says environmentally friendly products can't be fun? The days of plastic party plates are history. Susty Party [11], a Brooklyn-born online store, supplies eco-friendly party supplies from starch plates made of tapioca, potato starch and grass fiber to organic cotton, re-usable party crowns handmade by moms.
P.L.A.Y. [12] makes eco-friendly pet beds and other products with the planet in mind. These beds are made from sustainable materials while still being soft and cuddly for your favorite pal. They also use bottles that turn into soft Planet Fill polyfiber. With designs by San Francisco artists, these beds will complement your home décor.
+Green Festivals [13]
Article printed from Inhabitat New York City: http://inhabitat.com/nyc
URL to article: http://inhabitat.com/nyc/the-top-8-eco-products-from-the-first-ever-nyc-green-festival/
URLs in this post:
[1] New York City Green Festival: http://www.greenfestivals.org/nyc/updates/
[2] the festival: http://inhabitat.com/nyc/the-green-festival-lands-in-new-york-city-for-earth-day/
[3] : http://inhabitat.com/nyc/the-top-8-eco-products-from-the-first-ever-nyc-green-festival/green-festival-charcoal-water/?extend=1
[4] For the Clean Water Seeker: Kishu: http://kishucharcoal.com
[5] SnackTAXI: http://www.snacktaxi.com
[6] Earth Swag: http://www.earthswag.com
[7] For Vertical Home Gardeners: The Phytopod: http://phytopod.gostorego.com/
[8] For Recycled Fashionistas: Payback Clothing: http://www.playbackclothing.com
[9] For the Eco-Baby: Simply Chickie: http://simplychickieclothing.com
[10] For the Eco-Foodie: Kale Krunch: http://shop.kaiafoods.com
[11] For the Eco-Celebration: Susty Party: http://www.sustyparty.com/
[12] For Your Four-Legged Friends: P.L.A.Y.: http://www.petplay.com
[13] +Green Festivals: http://www.greenfestivals.org/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2011 Inhabitat Local - New York. All rights reserved.


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Rivers can't stop thinking about Game 7
Doc Rivers has tried to put last season's Game 7 loss to the Lakers in the NBA Finals behind him. He's tried to forget it, not think about it, erase it from his memory.
Five months later, he continues to have nightmarish flashbacks to all those purple-and-gold streamers falling from the Staples Center rafters.
Even that dang TV commercial for a magazine keeps reminding him of how the Celtics lost the game, 83-79, and the championship to their storied rival in a decisive Game 7. Not that anyone here is feeling bad for him, though.
"I don't think that'll go away," Rivers said. "It's really interesting how often you think about it. Hell, they show the damn video (on TV) all the time so you can get a Sports Illustrated subscription. It drives me nuts. So many times, I walk away from the TV hating Sports Illustrated.
"I don't think that'll ever go away, don't think it should. We showed our team a little clip of the (Lakers) celebration on opening day of training camp. I was amazed how raw that still was with the players. I underestimated that. That was in a way good. That'll stick with you forever.''
Rivers said that he thinks more about that Game 7 loss than he does to the Game 6 victory over the Lakers that clinched the 2008 title.
"Larry Brown told me this summer, 'You know, you should think about Game 6,' " said Rivers. "I said, 'It's easy for you.' Mr. Optimsitic was saying that to me. But you do think about Game 7 over and over again and I'm sure that'll last for a long time.''
Of course, why does that loss bother Rivers so much? Didn't he intimate that it really didn't count because the Lakers never have beaten his starting five?
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April 29, 2016
Monday, December 16, 2013
Undated--Arizona remains the runaway No. 1 in The Associated Press' college basketball poll after winning a close game at Michigan on Saturday.
The Wildcats (11-0), who won 72-70, received all but two of the first-place votes from the 65-member national media panel Monday.
Syracuse (10-0) got the other two No. 1 votes and remains second in a poll, with the top eight teams holding the same spot from last week.
Ohio State is third followed by Wisconsin, Michigan State, Louisville and Oklahoma State.
Duke and Villanova, which moved up two spots, were tied for eighth, while Connecticut dropped one spot to round out the top 10.
North Carolina, which beat Kentucky 82-77 on Saturday, moved from 18th to No. 14. The loss dropped the Wildcats, the preseason No. 1, from 11th to No. 19.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press
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Latest Headlines
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - A Little Rock banking executive and a retired Army colonel from Conway say they're running for the central Arkansas congressional seat being vacated by Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin.
Delta Trust & Banking Corp. Founder French Hill and retired Col. Conrad Reynolds announced Tuesday they're seeking the Republican nomination for the 2nd Congressional District next year. They're the first Republican candidates to announce since Griffin said last week he wouldn't seek a third term.
Hill founded Delta Trust & Banking Corp. in 1999, and is its chairman and chief executive officer. Reynolds ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2010.
Former North Little Rock Mayor Pat Hays announced last week he was seeking the Democratic nomination for Griffin's seat.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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