Kerry is creeping ahead again

according to electoral-vote.com. It may be more correct to say that Bush's bounce has faded; there are too many toss-ups, but he doesn't seem to be obviously ahead any more, not even like he was just a couple of days ago (according to that same site). I have only started to hit that page daily; is this actually the end of a trend, directly corresponding to Kerry's long-overdue focus on Iraq?

My money's on another Orange Alert next Sunday.

Misc game stuff

Looney Labs has had the design for Aquarius ripped off and turned into a commercial, Mormon-themed game. The theft is so complete that even the card counts and mappings are exactly the same. Andy and Kristin have run into situations like this before, but mostly from open-source-heads who didn't quite realize how they were inviting Righteous Hippie Wrath upon themselves by silently porting Fluxx to the Palm or whatever. (Andy has since written a policy regarding freeware electronic copies of their games.) This time, though, Money Is Involved, and so the situation is sure to get stickier. I wish them luck.

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Ran into a MLRabbit at work yesterday, one I haven't seen in a couple of years or so. This was in the cafeteria at the School of Public Health; he's working for HMS now, too. (Though for a department or institute that's miles away from mine, conceptually.) Gave me his card and suggested a lunchtime pick-up game of something. I think I'd like that! I haven't played games at work since O'Reilly, and I miss it.

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I've been playing D&D with M & J & co. for a couple of months now. While "the pope" may still be my favorite GM, I like this group's a lot, too... he's a film school graduate who is (when not GMing or at his day job of shoving crates around) shooting ultra-low-budget horror flicks for his portfolio. Every session he brings newly-aquired props to show off (this week it was a custom made fangy mouthpiece from his journeyman piece) and stories to tell. And of course, his descriptive style is high-cinema, especially with combat. We're probably pushing NC-17 just from the violence alone. Kind of icky, but fun to experience.

Last session we had our Boss Battle while listening to the Kill Bill soundtrack, and "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" (the brassy title track that's not the Nancy Sinatra song) came on right at the start. That was all kinds of perfect.

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I started designing the UI for Volity's Crazy Eights last night, but it's more of a weekend task. Gonna try to get up early Saturday to seriously grind away at it. It includes SVG for a full deck of cards, and JS functions for common card-deck activities, meant to be reusable in other card games' UIs (or, indeed, other UIs for this game). I'm excited to be this far into the project, and I think I'll have an easier time infecting others with the same excitement once it's done and working with Javolin.