More Potter Post Epilogue

More: here's a section of text I cut and paste from an article describing an interview with Rowling and a few fans. A PR stunt, really, but one that gives us a bit more information.

We know that Harry marries Ginny and has three kids, essentially, as Rowling explains, creating the family and the peace and calm he never had as a child.

As for his occupation, Harry, along with Ron, is working at the Auror Department at the Ministry of Magic. After all these years, Harry is now the department head.

“Harry and Ron utterly revolutionized the Auror Department,” Rowling said. “They are now the experts. It doesn’t matter how old they are or what else they’ve done.”

Meanwhile, Hermione, Ron’s wife, is “pretty high up” in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, despite laughing at the idea of becoming a lawyer in “Deathly Hallows.”

“I would imagine that her brainpower and her knowledge of how the Dark Arts operate would really give her a sound grounding,” Rowling said.

Harry, Ron and Hermione don’t join the same Ministry of Magic they had been at odds with for years; they revolutionize it and the ministry evolves into a “really good place to be.”

“They made a new world,” Rowling said.

The wizarding naturalist
Luna Lovegood, the eccentric Ravenclaw who was fascinated with Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Umgubular Slashkilters, continues to march to the beat of her own drum.

“I think that Luna is now traveling the world looking for various mad creatures,” Rowling said. “She’s a naturalist, whatever the wizarding equivalent of that is.”

Luna comes to see the truth about her father, eventually acknowledging there are some creatures that don’t exist.

“But I do think that she’s so open-minded and just an incredible person that she probably would be uncovering things that no one’s ever seen before,” Rowling said.

Luna and Neville Longbottom?
It’s possible Luna has also found love with another member of the D.A.

When she was first asked about the possibility of Luna hooking up with Neville Longbottom several years ago, Rowling’s response was “Definitely not.” But as time passed and she watched her characters mature, Rowling started to “feel a bit of a pull” between the unlikely pair.

Ultimately, Rowling left the question of their relationship open at the end of the book because doing otherwise “felt too neat.”

Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom: “The damage is done.”

There is no chance, however, that Neville’s parents, who were tortured into madness by Bellatrix Lestrange, ever left St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies.

“I know people really wanted some hope for that, and I can quite see why because, in a way, what happens to Neville’s parents is even worse than what happened to Harry’s parents,” Rowling said. “The damage that is done, in some cases with very dark magic, is done permanently.”

Rowling said Neville finds happiness in his grandmother’s acceptance of him as a gifted wizard and as the new herbology professor at Hogwarts.

The fate of Hogwarts
Nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts, the school for witchcraft and wizardry is led by an entirely new headmaster (“McGonagall was really getting on a bit”) as well as a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. That position is now as safe as the other teaching posts at Hogwarts, since Voldemort’s death broke the jinx that kept a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor from remaining for more than a year.

While Rowling didn’t clarify whether Harry, Ron and Hermione ever return to school to finish their seventh year, she did say she could see Harry popping up every now and again to give the “odd talk” on Defense Against the Dark Arts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19959323/

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (with SPOILERS)

This post will contain spoilers, so if you don't want to know what's going to happen in the book, don't read it!






OK, that out of the way...

I quite liked the book. It was pretty grim compared to the earlier ones; much less humor and lots of death and other nasty fates. Lots of moral ambiguity (Harry uses the Cruciatus curse without thinking twice, for example, and even Dumbledore's shining reputation is called into question.) It was a fitting finale to all the investment we readers have in the series. HOWEVER, of course I have a few minor complaints.

1. The epilogue was really pretty bad. Not only that, it skipped over a ton of stuff that we really ought to have seen. Seeing the Harry/Ginny romantic subplot was resolved, but not seeing the resolution because it takes place off camera is quite a blow. Not finding out anything about what the main characters do after school (other than get married and have kids) was disappointing.

2. J. K. Rowling seems to have mentioned many times in the past that she wanted to end the book in such a way that no obvious follow-ups, sequels or licensed stories would be obvious. However, the way she ended so thoroughly closed the door on further adventures for Harry that it felt really forced and the "4th wall" fell to pieces as I could see her manipulating things to cut off any such talk. Blegh.

3. Not nearly enough Ginny. She's been getting more important as a character the last few books and almost dropped off the planet in this one, other than a few scenes near the beginning and a token cameo at the end.

Monsternomicon II (2)

Well, I've successfully finished the book. Did so a few days ago, even. The last few pages... skorne specific character classes and stuff... were a little harder to get through than the monsters themselves, but still interesting.

I promised a fuller review, but on second thought, I don't know that I have much to add beyond what I've already said. I love this books; it's as good as the first one; what more can I really say about it, anyway?

Cosmicity

So, I've finally sorted out the last few kinks with some mp3s I ordered from eMusic a while ago, and I've more or less completed my Cosmicity collection. I don't literally have everything; I'm missing two or three CD singles, and I don't have either of the Syn EPs.

But I've got:

• The Vision (2001 rerelease with bonus tracks)
  
• The Moment (2001 rerelease with bonus tracks)
  
• Isabella (original 1997 release, but I have the "Visionary" CD Single as well)
  
• Renaissance (along with the "Self Involved" and "Too Far Gone" CD Singles)
  
• The Binary Language of Love (but not Resynthesized)
  
• Pure (along with the "Defeat" CD Single only---missing the other two)
  
• Escape Pod For Two (and the Reserve Fuel remix disk)
  

Anyway, I think Cosmicity is really cool, and I've been a fan for at least ten years. Of course, "Cosmicity" has now been abandoned and Mark Nicholas (the artist who used that name) is now doing other stuff under his real name. It's been fun to see his progression. Looking at my collection, I'm not missing very much (and what I am missing is just remixes and a handful of b-sides anyway.)

I'm not sure what I think of his career as a whole. In some ways, The Vision is one of his best, most consistent works, with much of the remaining body of work dabbling in some experimental song structure and whatnot, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Nearly every album has at least a few "hits" but most of them also have a few that don't click with me much at all.

I do have to say, though, that Escape Pod For Two really ends the career of the Cosmicity stage name on a high note. That is freakin' metal.

Monsternomicon II

I've only had the Monsternomicon 2 for less than 24 hours, but it has been thoroughly kicking my butt the entire time. I've even dropped my Harry Potter re-read to concentrate on this, which means I won't get my re-read done before the last Harry Potter book comes out this weekend. Serious business!

So this post isn't going to be a review per se, since I haven't read much more than about a third of the book yet; more like a stream of consciousness first impressions. And my first impressions are that the book exceeds its predecessor, which is something I never expected a monster book to do.

I had a few minimum expectations; things that if weren't done I would be extremely disappointed. Namely, that the Monsternomicon 2 had better detail the troops from Warmachine and the critters from Hordes that weren't in the first Monsternomicon. True; many of the "troops" from Warmachine are better represented in d20 with just giving a few class levels and some specific equipment to NPCs, and the warjacks themselves have their own sourcebook in Liber Mechanika. However, Warmachine had quite a few undead that were unstatted in d20, and Hordes has four factions, of which only the trolls (and to a lesser extent the Circle) were well-represented in the first Monsternomicon. So this new book delivers on my minimum expectations: there's a fairly large section on the Everblight specific dragonspawn, including all creatures for which there currently is a miniature, the last couple of trolls are detailed, there's a large section on new thralls, including bloat thralls, bile thralls, necrotechs and the centaur-like mechaniko-undead cavalry. The machine wraith gets written up as well. In addition to this, a handful of critters from the Witchfire Trilogy manages to make an appearance; stuff that I had completely forgotten about such as the devil rats, the big skorne warbeasts, or the giants who managed to somehow contribute a skeleton that appears in the modules.

The skorne are given pride of place in this book; not only are all their troop types detailed (and more) the last 10-15% or so of the book is literally a mini-sourcebook on their empire and the surrounding area, and all throughout the entire book there's information on them. This could almost be considered a skorne sourcebook that happens to cover a lot of other stuff as well.

Psion makes an interesting point about the first Monsternomicon whenever these "what's yer favorite sourcebook" discussions pop up and it inevitably gets mentioned (often by me.) He says that his problem with it is that it often reinvents the wheel. Iron Kingdoms gives us trolls that are similar yet not identical to D&D trolls. It gives us gobbers in place of goblins. Ogruns in place of ogres. Thralls in place of a host of other non-sentient undead. Etc. This isn't an untrue statement; but I don't see that as a detriment, because the flavor of the IK variety is usually much more intriguing than the standard D&D flavor that it would replace. In other words, I don't think that it makes the sourcebook any less useful for the fact that it reinvents the wheel as long as it does so sufficiently well that you want the reinvented version.

This applies well to me; as much as I dearly love the Iron Kingdoms, honestly I doubt I'd ever run more than isolated one-shots there when I can homebrew, which is half (or more) the fun of running a game in the first place. But I love to steal stuff from other settings as much as possible. And the Iron Kingdoms gives me tons of stuff to steel.

Going back to Psion's point, the skorne struck me as essentially the IK reinvented hobgoblins. A harsh, disciplined, non-human militaristic society: perfect match. However, the skorne are so much more interesting than anything D&D has ever done with hobgoblins. Even Eberrron's Darguun feels cliched, pedestrian and boring compared to the Skorne Empire. So for me, I can see grabbing the entire Skorne empire, having skorne be the name of the culture and society instead of the race, have the "skorne" actually be hobgoblins, and sticking the whole thing into a large, harsh desert area of any D&D setting and having instant antagonists: a powerful expansionist empire coming into contact for the first time with the more "traditional" kingdoms around it, in a campaign that eventually is defined by this war. Voila! Instant campaign based on the skorne.

And like I said, other than changing the skorne to hobgoblins (and they practically already are anyway--just bald, lumpy-headed ones with a slightly different statline) to make it feel more "traditional" D&D, this book could easily become the basis for an entire campaign.
I haven't yet read all the way through the Skorne empire write-up, but it looks reasonably focused and detailed; at least as much so as say Cryx was in the setting book (another great antagonist nation that could fairly easily be tossed into any campaign. I love Cryx!)

Anyway; another post to follow in a few days when I've managed to read the entire thing.

PIE

I've been reading a bunch of stuff on the old Proto-Indo-Europeans. Again. I read stuff about that a lot, actually, but I'm going through another phase of it. Why do I care? What is so compelling to me about a pre-historic people who lived in the Ukrainian steppes possibly as early as 6000-6,500 years ago?

I think the reason I find the Proto-Indo-Europeans so intriguing is that they are the earliest representation of my "ancestry" that we can identify with any confidence. True; I don't know how much the Proto-Indo-Europeans are my actual genetic ancestors (R1a1 haplotype is very rare in Westernmost Europe and the British Isles, where most of my more proximate ancestry comes from) but they are---at least---clearly my cultural ancestors.

Maybe it's true what they say about the Americans---we're always in search of some deep roots we can look back to. And if nothing else, the Proto-Indo-Europeans give us roots about as deep as you can go.

Once again into the breach

Once again I've let a really long time go without any update. Here's something funny.

This last weekend I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. It was made in 1938.I also watched another medieval epic made in 1938: Alexander Nevsky. I was amazed at how primitive that movie is compared to the first; the script, the acting, the filmography, the "stunts", the dialogue, etc. All of it feels at least 20-30 years older than Robin Hood. It felt like watching a really old Douglas Fairbanks Sr. silent movie that had been overdubbed (in Russian) and subtitled.

So it was an interesting experience, and I've always wanted to watch that, but I honestly don't know that I can recommend it. Robin Hood on the other hand, is one of my favorite movies ever.

Obession is over

Well, I've already moved on. [sigh]. Now I'm re-playing Knights of the Old Republic on my Xbox, will probably play Jade Empire after that, and have otherwise been consumed by other short term obsessions. For instance, I just reread all six Harry Potter books so I can feel prepared for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--the final book--which is due out this summer.

I continue to work on my campaign, although I'm not running it at the moment, nor do I envision that I will be in the near future, sadly. But I'm having fun tinkering with it anyway, because that's what I have fun doing. I started up a website where I can put stuff about it right here although currently it only has a very bare bones approach, and only covers a few roleplaying games mechanics instead of any actual setting details.

My plan is to expand that first by giving more in depth mechanics information, and then once the mechanics are out of the way, really getting hard and heavy into some details about the setting itself. It'll probably grow organically, rather than in a systemic manner, so don't be surprised if the organization of the website is pretty unpredictable and chaotic.

Obsession

Great. Now that I've typed that title, I've got the song by Animotion stuck in my head. Who do you want me to be, to make you sleep with me?

Anyway, over on Circvs Maximvs, my online "hangout", my good online pal barsoomcore started a thread where he asked what our obsession was. My response was that I have a few obsessions that I rotate through. Giving it some more thought, I decided that my obsession is actually Japanese two dimensional superhero style martial arts games. 2-D fighters, as they're called. Essentially that means games of the Street Fighter, King of Fighters and Fatal Fury series, or anything sufficiently similar (like, say Capcom vs. SNK). True, I do go through waves where my obsessions with them is at "low tide" but it always... always comes back.

It's a little bit bizarre in a way. That whole little subgenre of games is now essentially defunct. SNK still carries the torch--sorta--with an occasional entry still in the King of Fighters series, but it's questionable if those will even ever make it to U.S. shores anymore. Their latest, which is a year and a half old in Japan, you still can only get for Japanese Playstation 2 (although there's finally a European port coming out now. Fancy that.) Of course, that's also good news in a way--it means I can actually get completely caught up on the whole freakin' genre. In fact, I almost am already, with the exception of a few games that never got decent domestic console ports.

Right now, there are a few games getting Japanese PS2 releases that I really want, which means that to get completely caught up with what I want, I need a PS2, some way to play import games (either because I bought a Japanese PS2, or because I bought Swap Magic or some other conversion tool.) These include the two Fatal Fury Battle Archive collections--one having the entire original Fatal Fury line, the other having the entire Real Bout line, and King of Fighters XI. Holy Moly, but that's an exciting prospect, because once I go there, I'm really pretty much done with collecting, honestly. There's not much left to get. I suppose I could get the Orochi and N.E.S.T.S. and if I really went crazy, I could get the Art of Fighting collections. Closer to home, I could also pick up a few missing installments of some games; the Capcom Classics Collections have pretty much all the versions of Street Fighter II on them in arcade perfect ports, not to mention the original 1987 Street Fighter itself. If I get a PS2 and Swap Magic, I can get the domestic Alpha Anthology for PS2, although I'm not 100% sure that getting that is strictly necessary since I have Alpha 2 for the SNES and Alpha 3 for the PS1. Alpha 3 is already an amazing game in it's own right, and just to have a few frames added back in, I'm not sure that Alpha Anthology adds a whole lot that I'm interested in.

Anyway, I'm just musing on where to go with this, my obsession. I have to admit, it's a little bit of a creepy feeling to know that with a mere $200-300 I can actually complete--COMPLETE my entire collection in terms of games that are worth buying. I've currently got eighteen of these games on various consoles, and with that money I can add a total of twelve new games and update eight games to better versions than I currently have. Granted, do I really care about some of those new games very much--Street Fighter Alpha, for example, when I'll have Alpha 2 Gold and Alpha 3, or Fatal Fury 2 when I have Fatal Fury Special, or Real Bout or Real Bout Special when I'll have Real Bout 2, etc. But I gotta tell you, I'm really geeking out over here about the possibilities.

Dark•Heritage Mk. II rules

Well, I didn't say that I was going to address the topics in my placeholder in order--since this is the Dark•Heritage Mk. II blog, I thought I'd toss out the rules I'm considering for Dark•Heritage Mk. II (technically, this is Mk. III, and they are much more like Mk. I but take advantage of the experience of running Mk. II.)

This time around, the rules base will be built around d20 Modern, not variant D&D. It will also liberally use d20 Past which is an expansion for d20 Modern as well as some Urban Arcana and a touch of Unearthed Arcana. Eventually, I'd like to put these rules in a single location--I'll probably retype them all, save as a pdf and store as campaign notes, but in the meantime, this post just describes which rules I'll be using.

Occupations

The d20 Modern occupations list doesn't exactly work for the Dark•Heritage fantasy setting, so the following are available occupations:
Academic
Adventurer
Aristocrat (from d20 Past)
Athlete
Blue Collar
Celebrity
Cloisered (from d20 Past)
Cosmopolitan (from d20 Past)
Creative
Criminal
Doctor
Enterpreneur
Impoverished (from d20 Past)
Law Enforcement
Military (can choose Archaic Weapon Proficiency if desired)
On the Run (from d20 Past)
Primitive (from d20 Past)
Religious
Rural
Servant (from d20 Past)
Slave (from d20 Past)
Student
White Collar

Skills

The following skills are not available to any characters: Computer Use, Craft (Electronic), Investigate, Knowledge (Behavioral Sciences), Knowledge (Business), and Knowledge (Technology).

The following skills are slightly changed as indicated: Drive--there are no automobiles in the Dark•Heritage setting, but this skill still works for wagons, carriages, stagecoaches, etc. You do not need a proficiency feat to avoid the -4 penalty. Pilot--there are few aircraft in the Dark•Heritage setting (except balloons and zepelins) but it also applies to any watercraft that a character may wish to pilot. You do not need a proficiency feat to avoid the -4 penalty.

Feats

The following feats are not available to any characters: Advanced Firearms Proficiency, Burst Fire, Double Tap, Drive By Attack, Force Stop, Gearhead, Medical Expert, Strafe, Aircraft Operation, Surface Vehicle Operation, and Vehicle Dodge.

The following feats from d20 Past are made available: Find Clues, Minions, Obscure Knowledge, Secret Identity, and Sidekick.

Equipment

The following equipment tables from d20 Past are made available:
Table 2-3: Cannon
Table 2-4: Flintlock Firearms
Table 2-7: Other Ranged Weapons
Table 2-9: Explosives and Splash Weapons
Table 2-10: Melee Weapons
Table 2-11: Armor (minus the Chemico, EOB and M12 options.)

Advanced Classes

The following Advanced Classes from d20 Modern are made available, with any changes as noted:
Soldier -- Feat requirements are Personal Firearms Proficiency OR Archaic Weapons Proficiency
Martial Artist
Gunslinger--At 5th level, instead of the Lightning Shot class ability, pick another bonus feat. Also, be aware of the bonus feats listed that are not available in the Dark•Heritage setting.
Infiltrator
Daredevil--Skill requirement of ranks in Drive is dropped
Bodyguard--Feat requirement: Archaic Weapons Proficiency OR Personal Firearms Proficiency
Field Scientist--Requirements for ranks in skills that are disallowed in the Dark•Heritage setting are dropped
Field Medic
Personality
Negotiator
Shadow Slayer
Occultist

The following Advanced Classes from d20 Past are made available, with any changes as noted:
Explorer
Mesmerist
Spiritualist

The following Advanced Classes from Urban Arcana are made available, with any changes as noted:
Arcane Arranger
Archaic Weaponmaster--Skill requirement of ranks in Knowledge (history) is dropped. These weapons are not yet archaic in this setting.
Glamorist
Shadow Hunter--Skill requirement of ranks in Investigate is dropped
Street Warrior
Swashbuckler
Trasher
Wildlord

Prestige Classes

The following Prestige classes from d20 Past are allowed:
Frontier Marshall
Musketeer

Miscellaneous Rules

Incantations from Urban Arcana are available.
Traits and Flaws from Unearthed Arcana are available.
Action Points get the expanded usage described in Unearthed Arcana instead of the more restricted usage of d20 Modern. In addition, Action Points roll d10s instead of d6s.
Fractional Base Attack Bonus progressions from Unearthed Arcana are also used.

Hit Points and PC Mortality

Back in the day, when I wasn't playing Dungeons & Dragons and wasn't likely to, hit points were one of the things that I commonly heard (and believed myself) to be a problem with the game. The d20 iteration of the game has brought me back, and brought me back to the point where I'm using d20 for everything and don't anticipate changing any time soon. To do this, I've had to make my peace with hit points, among a few other things.

Well, that's not technically true. d20 and the OGC has introduced a variety of alternate methods, including the Wound Points/Vitality Points system, first shown in Star Wars, and the Damage Save first shown in Mutants & Masterminds and then further shown in Blue Rose and True 20. Both options occur in Unearthed Arcana and the new, expanded SRD, so they are "official" as alternates. In addition, the little d20 gem "Grim N Gritty Hit Points" by Ken Hood uses hit points, but the method for determining how many a character has is very different than in D&D.

Where does that leave us? Well the recent discussion, which I participated in just a bit, had the multipronged approach of internet discussions everywhere, but there were two themes that I took from the discussion.

1) Hit points are problematic because at higher levels, a guard--heck, a whole platoon of soldiers--with arrows trained on the characters still can't hope to stop them before they kill them all. This, naturally, stretches the credibility of the system for some players, who don't like the idea that characters are apparently bouncing swords, arrows, fireballs, etc. off their skulls without too much ill effect. The game itself tried (halfheartedly, in my opinion) to address this issue by defining hit points as something else--the ability of a character to avoid damage, turn a critical hit into a lesser one, etc. This is a problem for a lot of people because it requires that we now assume that a "hit" isn't necessarily a hit, and that damage dealt isn't exactly damage dealt. Semantically, anyway. Bleagh.

For my money, there are a few possible solutions--#1 don't play at higher levels (this is nice for a lot of reasons--it's not just hit points that breaks down at higher levels, the game itself becomes pretty difficult to manage in all kinds of ways) or #2 use some mechanism that keeps hit points from getting to high--"Grim N Gritty Hit Points" does this for example, or 3) switch to WP/VP. Vitality points work like hit points, but Wound Points are essentially equal to your Constitution score. If you take a critical hit, you take Would Point damage instead of Vitality Point damage. This represents the possibility that even Joe Blow peon guard-duty chap can take you down if he gets lucky, while still maintaining the flavor of hit points.

Again, for my money, Option #1 is what I tend to focus on. It's a bit of a workaround rather than a real solution, but since there are other things besides just hit points that I don't like about levels higher than about 10 or so, it ends up being a bit of a moot point for me. But if it does, a flatter, or capped, or flattening hit point curve would be nice. I've seen the idea that starting after 10th level, you don't get a new hit dice when you level up, just the other level benefits (maybe a Con bonus addition to your hit points) which means that they never get above about 12th level or so worth of hit points no matter what happens.

In any case, the discussion at ENWorld ended up drifting into the Wound Points/Vitality Points discussion, which is my point #2.

2) Lots of people have complained about Wound points being too gritty, which at first amazed me, since it's the least gritty way of dealing with "the problem of hit points" of any of the common ways I know of. I've since realized that for the most part, the people who complain about this are not the ones who complain about "the problem of hit points"--for the most part, they see that problem as perhaps academic, but not really an issue ranging up to seeing escalating hit points as a good thing and not a problem at all. Many of them also referenced a storytelling preference for not having their character go out like a chump in what could be merely a throwaway encounter with a few goblins.

This is where my tastes break from them. To me, gaming is not just about creating a story, it's about simulating events that lead to a story. If a character dies like a chump--well, that happens sometimes. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And a game where that risk wasn't always there would be pretty boring to me. The discussion went on to talk about it being boring having a character either dead or seriously incapacitated for a significant portion of the session, but I believe that if there's no risk of that happening, that's even more boring. By a long shot.

In any case, I've experimented a bit with ways to address some of these issues that I have with d20, and there are plenty of ways of addressing the problem of greater PC fragility, even in games where the recovery of hit points via magic isn't something you can count on. Because of that, I have no problem either capping hit points or using alternate schemes to derive hit points where the total isn't nearly as high. But, for all that, I've pretty much just made my peace with the concept of hit points anyway. Combined with the fact that I also don't like really high level play for other reasons besides "the hit point problem", hit points are a moot point to me anyway.

Placeholder for topics

Still very busy, but I want to post a placeholder of some topics that I want to blog on. These are topics that I've seen pop up either on EN World or Circvs Maximvs recently, but I've been too busy to spend much time at either. After skimming the topic, finding it interesting and noting that I want to put into words my thoughts on the matters, I figured I'd do it here.

But, it'll take some time, so I'm posting these placeholders so I can come back and do it later.

1. Hit Points and character mortality

2. D&D editions through the ages

3. Fiends

4. Gen Con

5. The source of morality

6. Dark•Heritage Mk. II ruleset

New blog

Well, my old blog has sat fallow--but not unused. In fact, I've been archiving a character from a play-by-post game I'm in on the most recent post, so I'm reluctant to post again. But since I have an unquenchable need to blog (or to hear my own voice, or see my own words in "print") I'm starting a second blog that will be my, err.. my actual blog. Anyway, this is just to claim the territory. More meaty entries yet to come.