More Old News

Image via Wikipedia

Further to yesterday’s collection of links:

The Real World:

• Are cities governed by predictable mathematical relationships? Physicist Geoffrey West thinks so.
• The New York Times compares IMF indicators of advanced economies.
• The Australian government has spent more than $5.5 billion over the past decade to reduce carbon emissions. They aren’t getting very good value for money.
• A billion dollars will buy you a Maybach 62 Landaulet luxury car, a Gulfstream G550 personal jet, a 104m yacht, a 7-bedroom mansion near Silicon Valley, an island in the St Lawrence Seaway (complete with a castle to use as a summer home), and a Patek Caliber 89 watch to time how long it takes to travel between them all—with enough change to stay in the Imperial Suite of Paris’ Park Hyatt Vendôme for 112 years, should you get bored with your surroundings. And then things get really obscene…
• Even if you don’t own a Maybach, you can use SQL injection to avoid speeding fines. (For the less technically minded, the camera reads and executes the text across the car’s front bumper; it’s a command to erase the camera’s entire database of stored number plates!)
• Michael Lewis provides the inside dirt on the Irish economic collapse, over at Vanity Fair.
• Movies get a lot of things wrong about serving in the military. Cracked.com examines just five of them.
• National Geographic explores the catacombs of Paris; meanwhile, the Japanese government plans to excavate the research headquarters of Unit 731, the secret biowarfare R&D group infamous for live testing on prisoners in WWII.
• The public, third-party release of 3D printing designs for Settlers of Catan pieces has raised new questions about intellectual property and games.
• A British immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by putting her on a terrorist watchlist whilst she was visiting relatives in Pakistan. His actions were only discovered three years later, when he went for a promotion—when the routine security check revealed that he was married to a terror suspect.
• Are you geeky? Are you hungry? Then head over to The Necronomnomnom and get cooking! (Just save me some, okay?)

Roleplaying:

• This ravine—featured at The Hopeless Gamer—is one of the coolest pieces of miniatures terrain I’ve seen in a long while.
• Author AncientHistory shares three bizarre book-related behaviours and rules for reference works for Call of Cthulhu, over at Yog-Sothoth.
• And if you need a character and are stuck for time, try Scott’s 1920s Call of Cthulhu Character Generator. Alternatively, RPG Plotter offers this cut-down character sheet and rules mods for Call of Cthulhu.
• Morten Greis, of Roles, Dice and Fun, is writing an outstanding series of articles on running a Delta Green campaign. So far, he’s written an introduction to Delta Green, a primer on handling investigation, house rules, a discussion of campaign structure, and examined cosmology and Mythos tomes and intricacies of plot and character. Better yet, there’s more to come…
• The Red Box Blog suggests that as XP directly relates to combat ability in D&D, it’s an inappropriate reward for roleplaying. Prophecy Points may be the answer, but the Red DM acknowledges problems with some players. Perhaps Chaotic Shiny‘s Prophecy Generator might provide part of the solution?
• Reality Refracted has a very nice series of articles on crime in RPGs, which goes hand-in-hand with Dungeon Mastering‘s thoughts on forensic investigation in D&D.
• Big Ball of No Fun delivers some commonsense about common knowledge in-game, and Roleplaying Tips tells you how to improve your game through nonverbal communication.
• The subject of children and RPGs is starting to creep its way into the blogosphere. Kobold Quarterly has a good primer from Uncle Chris and Dungeon Dad, but the advice therein applies just as much to new adult players as well.
• And finally, Gaming Brouhaha reviews one of my all-time favourite RPGs, Tribe 8.

Bonus Link: Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. And, yes, there’s plenty more where these came from…

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