Archive for 2009
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Below are the redefined nine alignments, preceded by their original definitions AD&D. It’s interesting to note that Gygax perceived Neutral Good (now dubbed Skeptical Altruism) as the alignment for the most heroic of characters, because he believed that characters who choose the extreme ends of the spectrum (which would be Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil) had it wrong due to their extremist viewpoints.
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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
In killing Dibala, it can be argued that Chase was striving to generate the most good for the most people, because he believed that if the dictator died under their care, he would be preventing genocide. At the same time, however, we know Chase’s motivations were conflicted at the outset: on the one hand, Chase feared Dibala and didn’t understand the full complexity of the situation in the dictator’s country; on the other hand, he hated Dibala for his callousness, his calling Chase a coward, and his criticizing Cameron. So it can also be argued that Chase’s actions were not entirely altruistic.
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
If you love Google Reader and regularly create "Shared Notes" as you skim through your daily dose of RSS feeds, then this quick tutorial will help put those notes on your website. Forget fiddling with plugins for this one—by using the DOMDocument class in PHP 5, you can scrape your Google Shared Notes feed to display your latest shared notes directly on a page within WordPress.
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Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
We're heard a lot about Flutter. The Flutter homepage has accumulated something like 1,592 comments since its release—a bewildering array of bug reports, praise, and feature requests—and the now defunct support forum was a mire of temporary solutions and fixes until it was abandoned by its developers and replaced with a Google Group. The only public place that exists for WP hacks like myself to confer about the plugin in its current state is this group, which has recently been beset by spammers. The Freshout guys occasionally post there, but we’ve heard little about progress on the next release of Flutter, even while bug fixes circulate among members of the community.
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Saturday, September 19th, 2009
I admit, my views about our society’s future are probably on the fringe, as far as futurist daydreaming goes: right now, I'm reading Accelerando on my g1 and contemplating converting my own meager library into a paperless one. To me, digitizing is about becoming more mobile in a world that grows increasingly complex, data-rich, and decentralized. The only way we’re going to benefit from the tremendous amount of information out there is by automating our processes—that is, transcending the human limits of our input by allowing distributed networks to expand our consciousness. It all sounds Kurzweil-crazy, I know, but in the end we are just spiritual machines.
