Lonely Lion

Saw this post by way of Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ delicious feed, announcing that Turbogears 2.0 will run on top of Pylons. Very exciting news. I’m still desperately in love with Django, but its always nice to see the neighbors get a fancy new lawn ornament. Good team work folks. I’m all for it.

Clint Ecker rounds up the latest Django news. Lots of great stuff in that post. Nice work Clint.

Geekdad sums up what’s wrong with D&D nowadays. I admit, I never really played D&D as a kid. We’d just make characters and have them bash each other up in an “arena.” We clearly lacked imagination. We needed a Dungeon Master…they’re hard to find in suburban Ohio.

Camri and I just recently finished watching Freaks and Geeks start to finish. That show blew my mind. I’ve been hearing about it for years, I even did Improv in college with one of the cast members sisters, but for whatever reason it just never really hit with me. I didn’t watch much TV between 1998 and 2003. Anyway, the show is great. Really great. The final episode features a sequence of scenes played out during a D&D campaign. It floored me.

I contend, based on that TV show, and backed up by the above Geekdad article, that its just sort of sad that D&D doesn’t really work anymore. However, on the flipside, I volunteered very_very_very briefly with a local geek club for high school kids. Half of the kids in the club had World of Warcraft characters. Am I a cranky old man now? That doesn’t think that the new fangled stuff is as good as the old stuff? The WoW culture is as secretive and nerdy as D&D was in its heyday. When I asked one of the kids what server his character was on, and told him that I (at the time) had a Tauren Hunter of my own, he looked at me incredulously, like “old man, what’s your chocolate doing in my peanut butter?” So, really, things just change. In case you didn’t know that. It’s true. Stuff changes.

Jonathan Messinger on a slight shift in language. A great essay on the difficulty of being an independent [anything], and how defining yourself in terms of something else is a bad thing.

Same Title Different Story just started its second title last week. After a brief flurry of activity, our subscriber base has pretty much plateaued. It isn’t a bad thing necessarily, we have a good number of fans who clearly like the show. I’ve gotten good feedback, and the authors are happy. That said, I’d like to get the word out, and get things on the upswing again. If anyone out there has any suggestions for promotion, I’m all ears.

Also…reader…tell your friends about this podcast. It’s good.

I posted some pictures from yesterday’s OLPC hack-a-thon. All in all, it was a pretty productive day. Although no real code was written, we did get everyone set up with a reasonable development environment, which is half the battle, as well as a general plan for how we’re going to implement the initial run of the choose your own adventure app. We also set up a Google code project, for the work (that hasn’t been done yet), you can find it here.