Avram's journal

A couple of sketches

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:24:00 GMT

Did some sketching today at the Tea Lounge, which has become one of my regular hangouts. (The one on Union St, not the soon-to-be-closing 7th Ave branch.)

The guy on the left is Howard Bloom. I’ve no idea who the woman on the right is.

Wow, it felt good to do that. It’s like a muscle in my neck has been tense, and now it’s relaxed.

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:53:50 GMT

Weight: 301

1 set of 20 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Triceps Extensions with a 12-lb dumbbell.

MoCCA this weekend

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:37:50 GMT

Hey, everybody! The MoCCA Art Fest is this coming weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm, at the Puck Building, on Houston St a block east of Broadway. Admission is $10/day or $15 for the weekend. Who else is going?

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:05:19 GMT

Weight: 302.5

1 set of 20 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Triceps Extensions with a 12-lb dumbbell.

My weight hasn’t changed at all over the last four weighings. That’s never happened before; usually there’s some fluctuation. Weird. Maybe my scale’s broken.

I think I screwed up my form on the first five or six triceps extensions. Need to remember to keep my upper arms more or less stationary.

I’m also thinking I’ll continue this workout on Wednesday and Friday, then next week think of something to add in.

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:57:02 GMT

Weight: 302.5

1 set of 20 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Triceps Extensions with a 12-lb dumbbell.

Concentrated on form today, and doing the lifts slowly. It seemed especially difficult, but that may have been due to slacking off this week, or to slowness and proper form.

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:31:44 GMT

My arms still hurt a bit yesterday, which I took as a sign that my muscles needed more than one day’s recovery between workouts. Also, I discovered that I had my weights set to 12 pounds on Monday, not 9 as I’d thought.

Weight: I didn’t weigh myself today, but I was 302.5 on Tuesday.

1 set of 20 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Triceps Extensions with a 12-lb dumbbell.

The triceps extensions seemed a lot more difficult today, probably because I’d done the shoulder presses beforehand.

Lemme tell ya, picking up my five-pound laptop right after, it felt like it weighed nothing.

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:37:37 GMT

Weight: Forgot to weigh myself this morning, but I’ve been 305.5 the last two times.

1 set of 20 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells.
1 set of 20 Triceps Extensions with 12-lb dumbbell.

This felt like a workout. I didn’t hit my maximum level of ability, or what Body for Life calls a “10”. More like 7 or 8. I felt like I could have maybe done more reps. But I did feel some strain, and my arms do feel slightly noodly now, with that “This’ll hurt more tomorrow” post-workout ache.

For Wednesday, keep on like this. Add Dumbbell Shoulder Press.

For next week maybe, incorporate push-ups and ab crunches. See about adding a smaller, second set at more than 12 lbs.

Long term, add cardio of some kind. Get Wii Fit when it becomes available. (Which may be a while; Amazon sold out of pre-orders weeks ago.) Meanwhile, walk more, and faster. I realized the other night that I’m not walking slowly because my feel hurt — they don’t anymore. It’s just a vague sense of lethargy and sloth that’s slowing me down.

Share, remix, abuse

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:10:53 GMT

Anyone else wonder if maybe theferrett just stared too long at the Creative Commons logo?

All the night can be so long

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:34:42 GMT

I had a rockin’ time seeing the season opener of Battlestar Galactica at trinityvixen’s and feiran’s place Friday night. (I’ve got neither TiVO nor a VCR, so BSG is likely to interfere with my Games Club attendance for a bit.) Pizza and margaritas enhanced the experience.

It wasn’t till the next day that I noticed the episode’s title: “He That Believeth In Me”

For some reason, I really want the next ep to be titled “I Knoweth Not Just What He Seeseth In Me”. (No, not seeeth.)

Doodles

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:50:19 GMT

More doodling in that pocket Winsor-Newton. I’m using Inktense pencils for the colors, and mostly they make me want to try real watercolors again. Well, that and seeing Enrico Casarosa work on the cover to his new book. And the juicy colors in this cute little Miyazaki sketch of an island.

Some token sketching

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:39:05 GMT

I was digging through a box of still-not-unpacked art supplies, and I found that pocket-sized Winsor-Newton watercolor sketchbook I was so into a couple years back. Flipping through it, I found this doodle, which I apparently hadn’t bothered to scan. I probably drew it while still living in Jersey City.

This page, on the other hand, is from my hand•book sketchbook that I generally carry around with me nowadays. Both these were drawn at Prospect Perk, one of the very many coffee shops to be found in Brooklyn’s North Slope. The woman in the coat was done a few weeks ago; the ink drawing of the seated man a few days ago.

Comparing computers

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:48:42 GMT

For people who were wondering about the relative weights of computers at Games-Club-in-Exile last night:

I think mnemex’s new laptop was a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which starts at 2.7 pounds. If it’s the largest model, it’s got a 13.3” display (1440x900?), but I can’t tell how much that particular model weighs.

According to Wikipedia, the XO-1 weighs either 1.45 or 1.58 kilograms, depending on which battery option you choose. Call it around 3 pounds, so yeah, it might be a bit heavier than the Lenovo.

The ASUS Eee weighs about 2 pounds. If I were gonna get a lightweight, toting-about computer, this would probably be it.

The MacBook Air weighs 3 pounds and also has a 13.3” display (1280x800).

Update: Oh, right, and the thing I was trying to look up? Mike Rohde’s SXSW sketchnotes.

Controlling LJ

avram@grumer.org — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:58:31 GMT

With LiveJournal’s new owners announcing that LJ will no longer allow the creation of new Basic accounts, lots of people are upset over the prospect of having to look at ads. For those of you lagging behind the leading edge of web browser technology, here’s a solution:

Step 1: Firefox if a free open-source web browser available for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. (If you use Linux, you already know all about it, so just skip right on to some other post.) Download and install it. It’s free. Costs no money. Since it’s open-source, it’s highly customizable with lots of themes and add-ons, which brings us to…

Step 2: AdBlock is a free add-on for Firefox that allows you to block ads from showing up when you browse the web.

Special for Mac users: If you don’t want to leave Safari, you can still block ads! SafariBlock is a Safari add-on based on AdBlock. Or try Ad Subtract, which uses CSS to hide ads.

Another reason to use browser extensions: Y’know how when a LiveJournal post gets a lot of comments, LJ starts hiding some of them, and you need to keep clicking to unfold the hidden comments? Doesn’t that annoy the crap out of you? Here’s what you do:

For Firefox, get Greasemonkey.
For Safari, get Greasekit.
In either case, get LJ Thread Unfolder.

Now those long comment pages will get an “Unfold All” link at the top of the comments. Click that, and it all unfolds. (In my experience, this doesn’t work perfectly — a few comments stay folded — but it works pretty well.)

Gym

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:51:10 GMT

Weight: 309
20 minutes on the recumbent bicycle, low settings. Heartrate was in the 120-125 range for most of it.

Also walked up seven damn flights of stairs, because the elevator was acting funny on the ground floor. Of course, by the time I got to the gym on the 7th floor, it had fixed itself and beaten me there.

Gravel/Kucinich '08!

avram@grumer.org — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:43:55 GMT

84% Mike Gravel
79% Dennis Kucinich
78% Bill Richardson
74% Barack Obama
74% Chris Dodd
71% John Edwards
70% Hillary Clinton
68% Joe Biden
43% Ron Paul
40% John McCain
39% Rudy Giuliani
35% Mike Huckabee
31% Mitt Romney
25% Tom Tancredo
24% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

(via supergee)

My biggest complaint is that Giuliani comes in above last place.

156 IQ, plus some net.savvy

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:12:06 GMT

(via mylescorcoran)

A few warnings about this one: First, they demand your email address to send you the results, rather than just giving them to you. And they do this after you've taken the test, so you've already committed time and emotional energy to it. I added "+iq" to my email name, so I'd be easily able to block anything further that comes in with that address.

(Y'all know about that trick, right? Most decent email servers are set up so that if your address is, say name@example.com, you can add a plus sign and any arbitrary string of letters and numbers after the name part and it'll still go through. Say, name+iq@example.com.)

Second, they ask for your name, address, and phone number, and they do some sanity-checking on the info so you can't just make up any old nonsense. I gave them a fake name, my old Jersey City address, and a fake phone number (with a legitimate Jersey City area code).

Third, they then ask for even more identifying info, like your mother's maiden name. Screw that shit. I didn't even fill out that form. By then they had already emailed me my results link.

Fourth, the code they give you for posting to your blog includes a 0-by-0 pixel image at the end with a complicated filename that's probably used for some kind of tracking. I clipped that out before pasting it into this post.

So really, it's both a test of your IQ and a test of your ability to avoid getting your personal info snarfed.

Update: And when you close that third form without filling it out, they give you a pop-up JavaScript window tempting you with a "free gift"! Man, these people are sleazy. I feel like it might have even been a bad idea to log into gMail while I still had one of the post-quiz form pages open in another tab. I just checked, and no dangerous filters have been created in my gMail account, but still.

There, I've yanked the links from around that image. If you want to take that IQ test, you'll have to type the URL by hand, and they won't be getting any google-juice from me.

Ow, my brain

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:15:11 GMT

I am smarter than 93.94% of the rest of the world.
The Most Impossible Quiz (via mylescorcoran)

Sci-fi sounds quiz

avram@grumer.org — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:52:28 GMT

	I received 86 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

(Via holyoutlaw)

100 Hobby Games

avram@grumer.org — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:05:58 GMT

Via jimhenley, here's the table of contents of Green Ronin's book Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Titles I own (or have owned) are in bold, titles I've played are in italic, titles I've both are both:

Bruce C. Shelley on Acquire
Nicole Lindroos on Amber Diceless
Ian Livingstone on Amun-Re
Stewart Wieck on Ars Magica
Thomas M. Reid on Axis & Allies
Tracy Hickman on Battle Cry
Philip Reed on BattleTech
Justin Achilli on Blood Bowl
Mike Selinker on Bohnanza
Tom Dalgliesh on Britannia
Greg Stolze on Button Men
Monte Cook on Call of Cthulhu
Steven E. Schend on Carcassonne
Jeff Tidball on Car Wars
Bill Bridges on Champions
Stan! on Circus Maximus
Tom Jolly on Citadels
Steven Savile on Civilization
Bruno Faidutti on Cosmic Encounter
Andrew Looney on Cosmic Wimpout
Skip Williams on Dawn Patrol
Alan R. Moon on Descent
Larry Harris on Diplomacy
Richard Garfield on Dungeons & Dragons
William W. Connors on Dynasty League Baseball
Christian T. Petersen on El Grande
Alessio Cavatore on Empires in Arms
Timothy Brown on Empires of the Middle Ages
Allen Varney on The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Phil Yates on Fire and Fury
William Jones on Flames of War
Rick Loomis on Fluxx
John Kovalic on Formula Dé
Anthony J. Gallela on The Fury of Dracula
Jesse Scoble on A Game of Thrones
Lou Zocchi on Gettysburg
James Wallis on Ghostbusters
James M. Ward on The Great Khan Game
Gav Thorpe on Hammer of the Scots
Uli Blennemann on Here I Stand
S. Craig Taylor, Jr. on A House Divided
Scott Haring on Illuminati
Dana Lombardy on Johnny Reb
Darren Watts on Junta
Greg Stafford on Kingmaker
Lester Smith on Kremlin
Wolfgang Baur on Legend of the Five Rings
Marc W. Miller on Lensman
Ted S. Raicer on London's Burning
Teeuwynn Woodruff on Lord of the Rings
Mike Breault on Machiavelli
Jordan Weisman on Magic: The Gathering
Steve Kenson on Marvel Super Heroes
Gary Gygax on Metamorphosis Alpha
Greg Costikyan on My Life with Master
John D. Rateliff on Mythos
Chris "Gerry" Klug on Napoleon's Last Battles
John Scott Tynes on Naval War
Erick Wujcik on Ogre
Marc Gascoigne on Once Upon a Time
Mike Bennighoff on Panzerblitz
Steve Jackson on Paranoia
Shannon Appelcline on Pendragon
JD Wiker on Pirate's Cove
Richard H. Berg on Plague!
Martin Wallace on Power Grid
Tom Wham on Puerto Rico
Joseph Miranda on Renaissance of Infantry
James Ernest on RoboRally
Paul Jaquays on RuneQuest
Richard Dansky on The Settlers of Catan
Ken St. Andre on Shadowfist
Steven S. Long on Shadowrun
Peter Corless on Shadows over Camelot
Dale Donovan on Silent Death: The Next Millennium
Matt Forbeck on Space Hulk
Ray Winninger on Squad Leader
Lewis Pulsipher on Stalingrad
Bruce Nesmith on Star Fleet Battles
Steve Winter on The Sword and the Flame
Jeff Grubb on Tales of the Arabian Nights
Shane Lacy Hansley on Talisman
Douglas Niles on Terrible Swift Sword
Ed Greenwood on Thurn and Taxis
Mike Fitzgerald on Ticket to Ride
Thomas Lehmann on Tigris & Euphrates
Warren Spector on Tikal
David "Zeb" Cook on Toon
Mike Pondsmith on Traveller
Zev Shlasinger on Twilight Struggle
Kenneth Hite on Unknown Armies
Sandy Petersen on Up Front
R. Hyrum Savage on Vampire: The Eternal Struggle
George Vasilakos on Vampire: The Masquerade
Kevin Wilson on Vinci
R.A. Salvatore on War and Peace
Jack Emmert on Warhammer 40,000
Chris Pramas on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
Steve Jackson on The Warlord
John Wick on Wiz-War

Games Club: Arkadia, Clans, Maharaja, Race for the Galaxy

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:42:16 GMT

It’s been a few months since I posted about new games at Games Club. I think we fell into a habit of playing mostly old games for a while, and then bugsybanana and I skipped going for most of this summer’s exile period. But now, here, some games that were new, or at least new to me, from this semester:

Maharaja
I barely remember this now; we played it back in September. It involves moving around a board building palaces, with money generated at the end of each turn based on what you’ve got in a particular city, and it costs money not just to build houses and palaces but also to move your architect token around the board. First player with seven palaces wins. Challenging, but we haven’t played it again since.

Clans
A pretty simple movement-based game. I’ve played it a couple of times now, and while it’s not great, it’s pretty simple and doesn’t take long to play.

Arkadia
I’ve played this twice, and both times came in second one point behind mnemex. It’s a pretty good game based on construction, worker placement, and earning colored seals which have varying values. One of the challenges is that you have only five opportunities to cash in your seals for victory points, and you get to choose when four of those happen (the fifth is at the end of the game), and have to time them for when the seals you have are at maximum value. But those cash-in phases are also the only way to get the workers you need to earn more seals….

Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is a new game (just shipped a couple of weeks ago) based on the original design for San Juan, and incorporating more elements from the parent game, Puerto Rico, like exchanging goods for victory points. It’s about as complicated as Puerto Rico, though it seems more intimidating because of the variety of strange little icons on the cards, but it plays faster. We played it four times in five hours last night, and that included learning the rules and explaining them twice.

Like San Juan, it’s plays pretty quicly and is easy to set up. Like Puerto Rico, it supports more strategies — not just a shipping strategy, but multiple build strategies. Because play within a phase is simultaneous, you’re not screwed if the player to your right is following the same strategy you are, as you are in Puerto Rico.

I’ve got one big complaint about the card design: The card titles are printed in black, on top of a dark gray gradient. But the title is the least important part of the card, so it’s not that big a problem.

Update: One of the developers posted a “periodic table” of the cards. (That’s the large version. You need to be a member of BoardGameGeek to get at the super-large version.) A few observations:

Military worlds make up a bit more than a third of the total set of world cards (23 military to 41 non-military). It didn’t feel that way when I started with New Sparta, tried to follow a military strategy, and only drew two meager little military worlds all game.
There are more blue production worlds, and fewer blue windfall worlds, than any other color:
- Blue: 9 production, 5 windfall (14 total)
- Brown: 5 production, 7 windfall (12 total)
- Green: 4 production, 7 windfall (11 total)
- Yellow: 2 production, 6 windfall (8 total)
Also, blue and brown have a smaller proportion of military worlds.
And there are 17 uncolored worlds.
There are 12 6-cost development cards, out of 31 development cards in the deck, but that doesn’t count duplicates.
There are 14 cards that increase military strength.

(Earlier posts about boardgames.)

Fennel?

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:58:08 GMT

Your Score: Fennel

You scored 25% intoxication, 25% hotness, 75% complexity, and 25% craziness!

You are Fennel!

You're a cool cat. Crisp, clean, fresh, and extremely complicated. You're like quantum physics or modern jazz. Think Niels Bohr meets Ornette Coleman. You may look normal now, but once you sprout, you look kind of, uh, funny.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

How to remove LJ's figleaves

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:25:10 GMT

You may have noticed some LJ posts turning up behind LJ cuts with “Adult Content” warnings. Whether you’re an adult or not, here’s how to get that to stop happening:

Go to your Edit Profile page. Fill in the Birthday data. Keep in mind that:
1. You don’t have to use your real birthday. Make sure to use a year that makes you more than 18 years old.
2. There’s a Birthday display options menu that lets you decide who (if anybody) can see your birthday, and how much they can see. I’ve got mine set to display only the month and day, and that only to people I’ve friended.
Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit Save Changes!
Go to your Viewing Options page. Scroll down to the bottom, and set the Viewing Adult Content menu to Do Not Collapse. If you haven’t already set your birthday, that option will be grayed out. Oh, and while you’re at it, you may want to reset your Safe Search Filtering preferences, which Six Apart has set to “Use moderate filtering” for you, without asking you or notifying you.
Remember to Save Changes!

Hughcasey has more about LJ’s new content-filtering feature.

Great sproutin' onion!

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 01:03:22 GMT

bugsybanana found this colonizing our fridge. "It's like Palm Sunday!"

Great sproutin' onion!
Originally uploaded by Avram Grumer

Heroes, season 1

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:16:56 GMT

Just watched the first season of Heroes. Some thoughts:

Mr Bennet is clearly the non-powered character who’s dangerous because just thinks a step ahead of everyone else. The Batman.
OK, both the X-Men “Days of Future Past” storyline (explicitly mentioned in the first episode) and Watchmen.
Paint washes off pretty easily if it hasn’t had time to dry yet.
In fact, it’s not really clear what medium Isaac works in. He seems to have oils on his palette, but he’s also got all those big cans of what seems to be house paint. It’s not like we ever seem him doing any Pollock-style action painting.
What, five years in the future and they’ve got a memorial up?
New York City voting machines aren’t electronic, much less networked.
Dude, Peter can fly on his own.

In general, far too much of the plot is driven by the fact that the most powerful good guy is a moron. Still, I like most of the other characters.

"But that's not the weird part!"

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:01:47 GMT

Has anyone else considered this?

Lion	Dzur
Lamb	???
Polar bear	Tsalmoth?
Walrus	???
Salt marsh harvest mouse	Teckla
Wildebeest	???
Ant	???
Worm-eating fernbird	Hawk? Phoenix? Athyra?
Sea otter	Orca?
Giant anaconda	Dragon? Yendi?
Kangaroo	???
Sort of a cross between a frilled lizard and a common house cat	Tiassa
Wild dingo	???
Emu	Issola?
Tapir	???
Frog	Jhegaala
Golden retriever	Lyorn

Here, some context for people to young to remember the first season of Saturday Night Live. (Scroll down to the third comment.) He names seventeen animals!