Today the last regular post to Ten Years on Terra went up, the weekdaily blog I've been keeping of the A Time of War (MechWarrior) tabletop I've been running for the last year. Writing that has been a major contributing factor to the lack of posts on this LJ -- most of my content creation effort has been going there, trying very hard to keep up with the once-a-weekday schedule I was holding myself to. The first three weeks were definitely the hardest, but anytime the frontlog dropped below three entries or so was stressful.

On the other hand, maintaining the log was a tremendous boon to my as a gamemaster, and made sure that I spent at least a few hours a week thinking about the game, even if I wasn't running that particular week. I think I may make this a regular feature of my GMing style -- perhaps not publicly (this one was partially done as a service to the rest of the BattleTech community) but the public exposure definitely motivated me to keep writing.

I could make comments on the game itself, but I've already done so (quite exhaustively) there.

In an effort to get more content here, I asked darkoni42 to provide me with seven topics to talk about. I believe the rules of this meme obligate me to pay these topics forward on request, but I expect everyone who reads this and is likely to participate has already gotten a goodly set of topics for themselves.

So, without further ado, ( I'll strain to remember how to use an lj-cut )

Oh, hello, LiveJournal. Haven't talked to you in a while.

This week finds me in Alexandria, VA, having just returned from JoCo Cruise Crazy II. The new cruise felt very different from the first one, but I still had a lot of fun, and went snorkeling for the first time ever. The cruise was marked by an eagerness among everybody to make the most of the time we had, so it wasn't very relaxing, but I met a lot of new and interesting people and reacquainted with some friends from last year. I'll likely go on the next one, too.

We flew back late Sunday, landing at BOS shortly before 0000. I had my flight to DCA at 1100, 102 emails from work, 62 of which were marked urgent. I still haven't slapped a lid on everything yet, but I've been running flat-out pretty much since we landed, and two days later I'm taking some time to collect myself.

Intercon is barreling down on me like an on-rushing freight train. It has long been my policy only to sign up for the Saturday afternoon and evening timeslots at weekend LARP conventions, because I'm never sure if I'll be flying Friday or Saturday. This time it paid off -- I'll be traveling both days. Of course, costuming will be almost impossible. Fortunately, I think I slap together a costume for Linfarm Run from what I have at home, but Prince Comes of Age may suffer. I'll miss Dead Dog, too -- Indianapolis waits for no man.

Projections indicate I'll have some time to myself at home sometime around the 12th of March, although I have several projects in the tube that might want that space. Here's hoping I get some downtime before TechEd.

This got generated as something of a byproduct of my research into a number of different things, but I thought I'd share it. I built a simple Asteroids network game. The architecture is such that the server calculates the entire game, and sends each client a report on what they can see. The client then sends back a very specific data structure that details what actions the ship takes. The server continues calculating and sending reports, and the ship continues sending orders. Any number of ships can be connected at the same time, and the game tries to spawn then close to each other.

The heart of this game is the C# Project that comes with it. The project contains a simple client with two procedures in the frmMain form (CreateShip and Think) that can be modified to build a new AI for the ship. The idea here is that multiple people develop different Ship AI's, and then connect them to a server to see which can accomplish a goal faster (although at the moment the only reasonable goal seems to be to shoot the other ship.) If there's interest in this kind of thing I'll spend some time to expand on it, if not, I'll probably let it go.

Anybody who is interested can find the starter kit (the C# project for the client and two different server applications) at this location. If you don't already have a C# (or other .NET) development environment, I suggest Visual Studio C# Express 2010.

Because of a few changes around here, the amount of shelving I have has dropped. As a result, I had to find about five feet of books to take off the shelves and move into storage. I thought I'd share the list of books that I decided I probably wasn't going to reference in the next year or so.

( Cut for length )

I'm not sure some of those books will ever see service again, but I am loathe to hurt or dispose of books, no matter how old.

I know a lot of you are looking for new places to live, so I thought I'd run this up the flagpole. My sister is relocating and looking for tenants to fill her cozy hardwood 2-BR on Prospect Street halfway between Central and Inman. Parking (FCFS), 524sqft, great lighting, second-floor, 1800/m. Move-in is negotiable over the course of the summer. If there's interest I can put my hands on pictures fairly soon.

This past weekend was Festival of the LARPS 2011. I ended up playing in two games, and running one. Despite being on-staff for Midsummer, Cold Flash is the first game I really felt like I was a proper writer of. So, quick review:

The Stand: Breaking Light's 2011 offering, this game ended up being a rather relaxed experience for me. I had fairly straight-forward goals, and was able to get cooperation from the people I needed, got all my affairs in order, and besides getting shot (non-fatally) and having my business burned down, I feel like I did pretty well. I found out post-game that a significant amount of my plot just failed to materialize, but so it goes. I had a good time, and the closing act made the game unique in my LARPing experience, and something I'll undoubtably remember for years to come. But that's not mine to announce.

Ruins of Grandeur: A fun, puzzle-based game about Egyptology in the mid-19th Century. There's actually a law now in Massachusetts stating that all LARP cons must have a certain percentage of games set in the 1800's. It is a follow-on to the 1995 Elder God Full Employment Act. That aside, the game was interesting if somewhat frenetically GM'd, and I had a good time. Also, about an hour before wrap, I got called up to kick the afterburners onto the plot. That was a lot of fun.

Cold Flash: The game that I wrote with Mike Hyde. A 1960's-era Cold War game with a huge technical element. The game went very well, better than I had hoped ahead of time. I was very fearful of technical problems crippling the game, but it ended up working, sufficiently that it may one day run again. Because of the amount of infrastructure I had to get working there, I learned a great deal about what to do and what not to do in future runs, and which elements produced effects worth the cost. In the end, my players told me we did a good job of producing an emotional experience similar to what they felt the Cold War must've been like to leaders in the middle of the kind of crisis they were dealing with, which I take to be a good sign. Shooting for a game which is not intrinsically funny, but is very serious throughout, and instilled fear and paranoia in a way that didn't seem farcical was a target I wasn't sure I was going to be able to hit, but now I feel that if I didn't do so, I at least landed close enough to justify making another try.

I've been writing network code for well over a decade now. Early on, I was writing straight off the RFC's, so I got to see the protocols that make up the Internet as we know it in their original state. In RFC793, Transmission Control Protocol (arguably one of the most influential standards ever to come out of IANA), Jon Postel, the editor of the RFC series, included a section (2.10) called the Robustness Principle:

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

It has since become known as Postel's Law in Network Programming circles. Although its merits have been debated, a large amount of the interconnectivity that makes our current information age possible relies on this rule. It is almost essential for any group of independently developed programs to communicate with each other, even with the most specific of communication specifications.

I've been going over this ground again because of a project I'm working on for Festival of the LARPs, and I am struck by how useful a principle this is, not just for communities of computers, but for their users as well. Behave with all possible etiquette and decorum when dealing with others, but accept their behavior however it falls upon you (within the bounds of law and order, of course.) A responsible member of society, like a well-engineered server, should be unflappable, regardless of what emerges from the throng around them. I confess, I have not always lived up to this principle, but it is one I strive to put into use wherever applicable, not just in the tangle of packets and streams of a listener loop.

Just watched Bugsy Malone excerpt, and now I can't get the image out of my head of a parody of this video with me, captainecchi, and a couple other typecast LARP villains.

I finally went through an (mostly) exhaustive update of my LARP Resume on http://larpresume.boldlygoingnowhere.org. I think I got everything except the first few runs of METEOR! I was in, and the NPCing I did for Endgame once, which I refuse to accept was LARPing. Tallying it all up, I have played in a total of 43 games since 2004.

Wow.