Once again I announce: "All hail popepat!" And Mrs. Pope and Minipope. They once again opened up their house for (can it be?) the 12th Maxicon (which is still ongoing, but I moderated my participation to Saturday only... stretching into Sunday).

First up for me was Garrett's Dead Space RPG. I had played the demo, which made me the most knowledgeable about the source material I think. Which is not a problem, since the whole point is to scare the pants off you with the unexpected. It went well: fast-paced, high tension, limited resources, stressful timing deadlines. If there was any problem, it was that the gods of luck smiled on us too much in the final showdown. Good scary fun.

Next up, aaronjv ran The Tribunal, an award-winning LARP created by jiituomas. The 12 players play soldiers in a totalitarian state, faced with a difficult decision: whether to value honesty over expediency. I'm torn about how much I should or shouldn't reveal. One part of me says it doesn't matter since whatever happens is almost entirely the product of the players; the other part says that hearing the rationalizations or bullshit produced by one set of players might affect future players who read about it, and thus color whatever they would ultimately produce. I'll err on the side of caution and step back a bit.
I enjoyed the experience. This is perhaps controversial. Some people (named Aaron) have denigrated the idea that LARP is merely (?) an enjoyable pastime. It is Art with a capital A. I don't have a problem with that, except that in its extreme form Art becomes Pollock and Rothko. You're a rube if you expect to enjoy it, it's Art fer crissakes. Art!
I had my doubts about whether I would enjoy being an ant in a totalitarian army. But I came in to the game with not only an open mind, but a willingness and readiness to do it right. And the other participants probably saw me red-faced and shouting more in those couple hours than in the rest of their experience of me. Anyway, my awesome role-playing (relatively speaking) is beside the point; the point is that I enjoyed the experience. But am I supposed to enjoy my Brussels Sprouts?
My answer is that I don't care. LARP for me is an enjoyable pastime, and as long as I enjoy it I will continue to participate. It may also be Art; it may also be therapy; it may also be escapism; I don't care: Philistine that I am, I'm only interested in doing it if I enjoy it.
Anyway, stepping back in. I liked the way that character names instantly invoked associations that helped to establish character, and aided others in remembering same. I liked the way that the game was essentially entirely created by the players rather than directed from outside. The game relies on the players being willing to play, and I'm glad we had a group up to the challenge.

Following that was an impromptu meeting of the Live Game Labs & other interested parties, wherein we plotted the future of American LARP while simultaneously solving the problem of monetizing LARP and trading juicy gossip.

Richard Fortey's book is named after a somewhat mysterious storage room at the Natural History Museum (formerly part of the British Museum). I believe whatever review or precis I saw suggested that that was what the book was about, so I was expecting a strange unearthing of random semi-treasures not considered worthy of display, mothballed and forgotten. But that's not exactly what the book is about at all.
Fortey is/was an expert on trilobites at the museum, and this is really more his recollections of the people, all experts in their fields, with whom he came into contact, and the collections housed in the behind the scenes areas. And some history of the towering figures that were either very important in the Museum's history, or picturesquely eccentric. And plenty of insider gossip and scuttlebutt that makes for a good read, whether it's vodka hidden among the velociraptors or amorous trysts among the molluscs.
Despite not being about what I thought it was about, the book was still (?) very absorbing. I think the best thing it does is to set out how useful the giant collections are that are all behind the scenes, where no public visitor will ever see them. In the modern age, perhaps the point of the museum is to attract paying visitors, but the real value is in these collections that form the real basis of many disciplines.
And now, since I read it on kindle, the pull-quotes:

Nor is it permitted to cause offence by naming a creature johnsmithi after John Smith while stating that it is the most unattractive member of the genus. I have to say that Linnaeus himself did not follow this prescription, and named a useless weed Siegesbeckia after one of his enemies.

The edible properties of the truffle are not matched by their aesthetic ones, for most truffles look like some kind of knobbly animal excreta, which have been passed with not a little discomfort.

Mineralogists also tend to be the more mainstream scientists. They are the ones that wear the white coats, and hide away in the basement while reading dials from sophisticated machines. Only a few of them have gone mad, and many of them have lived blameless lives in the single-minded pursuit of mineral excellence.

'This stone is trebly accursed and is stained with the blood, and the dishonour of everyone who has ever owned it.'

Complain about the city putting up crosses on a tower next to your public university? In Texas?

That's a firing. And a harassment, of course. Article also interesting for the comments in which it appears one of the commenters is the person who sent a threatening email to the professor.

#1: Don't post things to facebook, or you will have to scroll through your stupid timeline to relocate them again.

#2: Original story

#3: Update:
"bones not belonging to the mobster were recovered [from his tomb, but] they have not yet been positively identified as [the missing girl's]."

"The Catholic Church's leading exorcist priest has sensationally claimed a missing schoolgirl thought to be buried in a murdered gangster's tomb was kidnapped for Vatican sex parties."

Dumbth was Steve Allen's term for... well, dumbth. Ignorance, poor reasoning, inefficiency, laziness, etc. The first portion of the book is essentially a catalog of dumbth, as seen in the news, or experienced directly in Allen's life. Unfortunately, since the book was published in 1991, and this update was ten years later, and Steve was an old old codger, many of the examples are from long long ago. Worse, some of them are cranky grandpa stories about how they didn't have the right kind of onions for his belt at the store, even though they had stocked quite passable onions formerly. It's also a bit much, just having dumbth after dumbth laid on you.

Fortunately, the second portion of the book is generally much better. Here he provides his 101 ways to improve your thinking. There's nothing earth-shattering here, but he presents a lot of good rules, and does it in an accessible, humorous style. Avoiding bias, recognizing bias, relying on evidence, not getting too attached to your first hypothesis, keeping up with the news, and so on. Alas, the book is probably least likely to be read by those who could most benefit from it. Give a copy to that aged relative who forwards things to you that have been debunked by snopes, or who instantly decided that George Zimmerman should be let go (or summarily executed).

Following up on Obama narrowly edging out a felon in the WV primary, he had trouble in KY and AR. Obama won both contests, but this time he nearly lost to Nobody (KY) and some Occupy Wall Street lawyer dude (AR).

In other news, Ron Paul picked up all of ME's delegates and most of the delegates in MN. Although the caucuses in those states were won by Romney and Santorum, respectively, the delegates were actually chosen at recent conventions. With this tailwind, Paul bids fair to surpass Gingrich to reach third place in the Republican primaries.

Wikipedia has Romney at 972. 1,144 are needed, leaving him to get another 172. TX (May 29) doesn't have that many to award, so Romney will most likely(*) go over the top on June 5th, when CA (a winner-take-all-state) [and NJ, NM, and ND] votes.

(*)A few other states (WA, LA, MO(**)) will have their conventions on June 2nd. Depending on how those turn out, and how well/badly Ron Paul does in TX (a proportional state), it might happen then, instead.

(**) Missouri had both a primary (won handily by Santorum, followed by Romney and Paul) and caucuses (won in a relatively close one with Santorum over Paul, with Romney a distant third). But the pre-state convention district conventions seem to have favored Romney. So I despair of our mickey mouse system.

Ho-Lee Shit.

At Louche Ends: Poetry for the Decadent, the Damned & the Abinsthe-Minded is a slim volume of ladyeuthanasia's Stoker nominated poetry.
It's hard to review poetry. It's hard to review stuff written by people ya know. This is double-hard.
I'm not a big fan of free verse, but the form (or lack thereof) does seem to be a good one for these late-night thoughts. The best of the poems (of which there are more than a few) have the rhythm and music of fine speech. Probably the strangest thing about reading some of these poems is that knowing the poetess occasionally provides some personal insight into them. For other poems I can appreciate the sense and the tone, but I can't help wondering if I might gain a similar personal understanding if I just offered Maria the right drink at the right time and got the right story out of her.

The book has absolutely nothing to do with the film, so it's kind of like a brand new, authentic, Fleming Bond. Except that it isn't. 'Spy' is told first person from the POV of a young woman, and Bond doesn't show up until the final third. It almost reads like a Mary Sue fanfic. The first third is her sexual biography, told in flashback and filmed in Slightly-Prurient-o-Vision. In the middle third, she's taken hostage by cartoonish thugs, whose main sources of enjoyment are making her cook for them and making insinuations of impending rape. In the final third, Bond stumbles accidentally upon the scene to save her, and his main sources of enjoyment are making her cook for him, killing bad guys, and finishing up with a one night stand. The main character, Vivienne Michel, is perhaps the best thing about the novel, a reasonably interesting and lifelike character study (coming from a guy who thought it reasonable to create a female character named Pussy Galore who heads a criminal gang of lesbian trapeze artists). The worst thing about the novel is everything else. I like that it strays wildly from the formula, something like the couple stories written from Jeeves' or Sherlock's POV, but unlike those, this one doesn't turn out successfully.