The Secret Lair

After several dozen fruitless conversations with locals—most of whom have never heard of the Hoth system—I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the Wampa ice creature does not make its home in the frozen Northern wasteland that is Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.¹ This is just one of many myths that a thirteen-hour journey to the aforementioned peninsula has dispelled.² My failure to find vast, wild herds of nomadic, bipedal reptomammals suited to be ridden as mounts over snow-covered plains is likewise disappointing, but for entirely different reasons.³

Meanwhile, back in an undisclosed location near Cleveland, Overlord Miller has been far from idle in my absence. I fully expect to find his new office chair behind my desk when I return, as he has been somewhat less than subtle with his hints that it lacks sufficient lumbar support and that the biometric security scanner “doesn’t like” his DNA.⁴ While not covertly rearranging office furniture, Overlord Miller has also managed to record a new podcast episode; one that features a guest who is neither a clone nor being “interviewed” against his will.⁵

Thomas “cmdln” Gideon hosts The Command Line , a podcast that—along with its accompanying blog—”explor[es] digital citizenry as a creator and consumer.” I take that first bit to mean we’ll all be rendered unto ones and zeroes before the interview is concluded, but I suppose it’s open to interpretation.

Promo: The Command Line, a podcast that is so two sentences ago.

Discussion: Technology in Science Fiction

• In the beginning there was Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, considered by some to be the first science fiction novel. Man meddled with forces beyond his ken and hilarity ensued.
• Sometime after the beginning⁶ there was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a link to Thomas’ interview with Cory so you didn’t have to search for it? Yes. It sure would.
• Sometime after the beginning but slightly before, concurrent with, and then after Little Brother (and Cory Doctorow) there was Charles Stross (Glasshouse, Accelerando). There was also Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City). To add to the confusion, there was also Vernor Vinge (Rainbow’s End, “The Coming Technological Singularity“). They all wrote books. Coincidence? I think not.
• Oh, and Richard K. Morgan (Market Forces; the Takeshi Kovacs novels, beginning with Altered Carbon), William Gibson (regarded by many as the father of cyberpunk) and Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem).
• SPOILER ALERT! Spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem begin at approximately 20:10 in this episode. The Anathem discussion concludes at approximately 29:00.

Musical Interlude: Horizontal Asymptote by Nicole Campbell [wikipedia] – “A song about a line’s struggle to get closer to a horizontal asymptote with a fear of intimacy.”

More Authors

• Isaac Asimov (The Foundation series)
• Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• David Louis Edelman (Infoquake, MultiReal)
• Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land)
• Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space, House of Suns)
• Rudy Rucker (The Ware Tetralogy, Postsinguarlity)
• John Scalzi (Old Man’s War)
• Robert Silverberg (Invaders From Earth)
• Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, The Difference Engine with William Gibson)
• David J. Williams (The Mirrored Heavens, The Burning Skies)
• Walter Jon Williams (Hardwired, The Praxis)

Etc.

• Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.
• Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman

Lairkeeping

• Our theme music remains “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton, at least until the check bounces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:17 — 38.7MB)

1. Christmas is ruined. [↩]
2. Another being that it is a frozen wasteland in June. Temperatures have averaged in the high seventies to low eighties over the past several days; not exactly the ideal place to hire sub-zero shock troops. [↩]
3. The Secret Lair’s 1st Annual Arctic Polo Tournament has been postponed indefinitely. [↩]
4. His neuroses gene is clearly not recessive. [↩]
5. It’s an interesting concept, but I can’t see us taking this approach too often. [↩]
6. At least 5,000 years. [↩]

If you question the effectiveness of our Retrieval Squads, you may wish to ask Mr. Ken Newquist about his opinion on the subject. They came in the dead of night and before Ken was even aware that his home had been infiltrated he was subdued, transported to one of our Interrogation rooms and submitted to “methods of inquiry” that would make anyone even marginally acquainted with the Geneva Conventions weep.

Once satisfied that we had wrung every useful iota of information from Mr. Newquist, we wiped every memory of the interrogation from his mind—leaving only a powerful sub- and semi-conscious fear of all things related to The Secret Lair—and turned him over to our Detrieval Squad (which probably needs a better name) who returned him to his home.¹

In retrospect, Ken may not be able to provide the best testimonial to the effectiveness of our Retrieval Squads, but he can certainly attest to the thoroughness of our upgraded memory alteration hardware. More accurately, the recording we present in this episode of The Secret Lair and Mr. Newquist’s complete lack of memory regarding the same should demonstrate that the hardware works quite well indeed.

Our interrogation of Mr. Newquist (or, at least, the bits of it we’re sharing) was primarily devoted to roleplaying games, wikis and open source content management systems. While a roleplaying game about a content management system might be incredibly dull, there are certainly ways in which RPGs can benefit from web-based tools, and such is the core of our discussion.

Roleplaying Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • World of Greyhawk
  • D&D 4th Edition
• Mutants & Masterminds
• Savage Worlds
  • The Savage World of Solomon Kane
  • The Pirates of the Spanish Main
• WarHammer 40K
• World of Warcraft

Online Tools for Gamers

• The wiki, a tool that allows multiple users to easily create and link web documents.
  • MediaWiki is the software upon which Wikipedia and Mahalo are built.
  • The Griffin’s Crier wiki is powered by MediaWiki.
• The virtual table top, usually a client-server application, allows remote gamers to play pen and paper RPGs together.
  • OpenRPG is an open source application developed in Python that runs on any OS.
  • Battlegrounds: RPG Edition runs on Windows and Mac OS X.
  • The Screen Monkey GM server runs on a Windows PC, but clients need only a web browser.
• Play-by-Email
  • PBEM-Portal.com
  • PBEM Players
  • Groovy Gamers
• Other Tools
  • RPTools, a collection of tools to help with mapping, tracking initiative, dice rolling and more. [Kudos to Trevor for the link.]

Open Source Software

• Moodle is an open source Course Management System, an alternative to Blackboard.
• Drupal is an open source Content Management System with lots of module support.
• WordPress is the open source blogging software upon which The Secret Lair website is built.

Promos

• The Game That May Be
• Nuketown Radio Active

Ken Newquist is the editor of Nuketown and host of Nuketown Radio Active. His gaming column, Summon Web Scryer, appears in Knights of the Dinner Table magazine.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:11 — 43.2MB)

1. Mr. Newquist’s family was totally unaware that he had been abducted, such is the power of our new temporal arrestor. [↩]

Attention: On Monday Jan 14., I’ll be interrogating…erm…interviewing the Divine Ms. Mur about all manner of things, notably her book Playing For Keeps, as well as other topics. Do you have anything you’d like me to cover?