total eclipse - requires windows media player. install if you don't already have it. you won't be sorry.

should you be so inclined, Wizards of the Coast are running a contest for community design of one of the rooms in Undermountain. the winner gets $140, a copy of the new Waterdeep supplement, and publication on the Wizards web site. i'm sure you'll all be leaping at this wonderful opportunity!

according to GamingReport.com, Green Ronin will be publishing Thieves' World products for d20!

i grew up reading fantasy and sci fi, and the Thieves' World series was one of my very favorites, among the few that i read more than once. if i recall correctly, it was one of the first (if not the OG itself) multiple-author shared-world anthology series. dark, amoral, with almost no traditional heroes. those of you who loved Sin City in either form should check out this series. the first two volumes were recently re-released in a single edition.

i wonder if i'll be able to talk my regular gaming group into giving this system a try. might have to buy them all the first book to sell them!

i'm hosting OSAF IRC office hours tomorrow to discuss my project, Cosmo, which is a standards-compliant calendar server. it's going to be a fairly technical presentation, but some of you geeks may find it interesting.

my roommate and a half dozen of her friends, pressed into moving service, just pulled away with two trucks packed with all of her stuff. she's moving into her own place elsewhere in Oakland (i'm not sure where). i have good wishes for her, and i'm looking forward to living by myself again for a while, but damn the house feels sorta empty already.

the cats are staying here for the rest of the day while the new place is unpacked, and they clearly don't know what to think. i will miss Boy (the other one is Girl) sleeping on my bed with me every night! Anjuna offered to let me keep them here, but i hate taking care of cats. actually i don't mind feeding them, but i draw the line at changing litter. i'm sure my cat-allergic friends will be relieved to not have to pop pills whenever they come over.

now i get to decide what to do with the empty room. probably just make it into a guest room. Jim Home suggested i move the gaming/dining table in there, build a laptop tray and a removable projector stand to mount on top, and run games with photoshop maps driven from my computer. hmmm!

at my gym (Club One in downtown Oakland), there's a row of ellipticals on the third floor looking down over the basketball court. i watched a game of 2-on-2 today while warming up for my weightlifting session. three of the players were fairly fit and sporty-looking guys, but the other was a tall woman who drove to the hoop just about every time she got her hands on the ball. she made the guys look like absolute chumps. i'm betting she played college ball.

this woman's athleticism was head-spinningly attractive, and it got me wondering why i don't know more people who play sports or did when they were younger. i can't think of any close friends off the top of my head who have any game at all. i was a three-sport athlete in high school (football, track and [church league] basketball), and i played DI-AA college football. i don't believe i know any other former athletes. hell, i have been trying for ten years to get a pickup basketball game together. nothing. denied. my friends are all pasty geeks who commiserate on chat with each other about the jocks they hated in high school. to most of them, exercise is dancing all night at an oontz club, or maybe a round of golf. yawn.

here, i'll try again. my comments don't work at the moment cos of asshole blog spammers, so Bay Area pals - email me if you want to shoot hoops some time eh! also email me if you are a single female athlete!

ps: golfers excepted from above. don't email me. i loathe golf.

the SF Int'l Film Festival kicks off in a couple weeks. i haven't been since (i think) 2002, so i'm very much looking forward to it, though i can still do without the big messy dump of a venue the Kabuki is.

my schedule:

4/21 7pm The Ax
4/25 7.15pm 5x2
4/26 7pm November
4/26 9.15pm Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
4/29 6.30pm Duck Season
5/1 9pm Me and You and Everyone We Know
5/3 12.45pm Izo
5/5 7pm The Dying Gaul

update: turns out that a couple of those films weren't eligible for my CineVouchers. they happened to be the two that i was most excited about. ah well. SFIFF is always a hit-or-miss proposition. that's sort of its appeal. you have absolutely no idea which films are going to stick with you and those which will have you snoozing within 20 minutes.

i usually don't post anything here that i saw on Boing Boing, cos i'm sure we have, um, overlapping audiences, but this is an exception: a fusion of Craigslist rentals and Google maps that gives an unbelievably useful view of just where those listed homes are. wish this had been available to me a month ago when i was looking for apts in SF. would have saved me from wasting my time.

courtesy of McSweeneys, by way of Laurel: live-action role-playing spells i could really use, right now. to that list i'd like to add Summon Housekeeper, Protection from Precipitation, Speed Read, and Resist Sleep.

har - Warren Ellis refers to tribe.net as "Craigslist for the polyfucker/playa-crustie Bay Area community". the only person i've heard talk about tribe runs an astrology community there. go figure.

i have been quiet lately, both here and in meatspace, because i've been playing World of Warcraft like it's my second job. 6-8 hrs a night for over a week now. have a good group of friends there, some of whom live out of town and whom i consequently never see. if you are a WoW player, i'm on windrunner (alliance: angormor, ferguson) and hyjal (horde: grazztt) - say hi and we will destroy troggs and vile familiars together.