A nice evening.

* Met with doctor_atomic at the Diesel to playtest a game that dougo hopes to enter in the next Icehouse design contest. (We liked it.) There ran into tahnan, who added some additional observations about the game, and also cnoocy, who I said ruh-ruh to about some thingamabobs.

(Speaking of Icehouse: The big feature story in the new issue of Games is all about Looney Labs, the Big Experiment and the Mad Lab Rabbits. Woo, congrats y'all. (I have not read the article and assume it's actually positive.))

* Then we saw Batman Begins at the Somerville (with two more of the doctor's friends, who we bumped into at the door). An enjoyable and tightly constructed little action/adventure movie. Even though he's only a second-string villain in the canon, the Scarecrow as the Big Obvious Supervillain meshed in very nicely with the whole plot. I found the film's latter half to not be over-explosiony (with the exception of one somewhat eye-rolling scene near the end) despite criticism I had heard before. Really, it's just a well-built piece of work.

Then to the Burren for my daily trough. Nomf, nomf. I have a secret: I'm not sure I like Guinness. Once you get past the head, it's kind of... watery? You know? It tastes thin, or anyway thinner than it looks. I dunno. Still, Guinness is what I order when I go to a place like that that is trying so hard to be Irishy. I just feel obligated.

* Hearing back from the big network salvo I launched earlier this week, at an average rate of one new person's response per day. This is acceptable and I hope it keeps up.

* Naughty me, sort of: used eMule for the first time ever, in order to locate and download a copy of A Clash of Kings. Now I can pick up where I left off when my own paperback of it was ripped off by someone at South Station three weeks ago. ("But jmac, you could have borrowed my copy." Yeah, well.) Was surprised how easy it was. And as one with a history of a more-than-casual relationship with the print media, I mean the more complicated sort of "surprise", here.

Still: off to read myself to sleep over this printout.

(no subject)

Anyone had any experience with LyX? About to write a long and involved technical document for the first time in a while (in a year and a half, really). The thought of once again hand-grinding DocBook tags with Emacs fills me with ennui.

I suppose I could use this here copy of Word, too. But it offends my nostrils for divers reasons, and not (just) the hairy-hooting "free as in speech" ones. Fact is, I very much prefer the DocBooky way of working with a document structurally, rather than layout-wise. There are ways to kinda-sorta do this in Word, and as far as I know they are all shallow and weak hacks.

I'm passing the time now waiting for tetex to install, praying it compiles. Dum de dum.

Update: Pff. Never mind. It compiled, and the application runs, but trying to convert the intro page into HTML results in a baroque error, and trying to covert it into a PDF results in a pageful of garbage. Flussssh

I hate everything.

Update 2: Oh, I didn't have the latex2html program installed. Trying to fink it now. Also I didn't notice that there's a bunch of PDF converters to choose from, and some seem to actually work OK.

I'll start kicking through the tutorial while that program tries to install itself... if I can't easily turn what I write into HTML, it's a deal-breaker.

Update 3: The HTML conversion magically works, post-finking. OK, less hateful now.

Update 4: The HTML conversion command seems to have vanished from my menus in between launches of the application. Um.