It is rare indeed when the Finnish operatic metal band Nightwish comes to the United States. Fans of symphonic metal (like most of us in this house), upon hearing that they would be within driving distance for the first time in many years sprinted, not ran to pick up tickets for this show the moment they went on sale. I can't really describe them to you so all I can really say is take two parts power metal, one part opera, and one part old-school swords and sorcery fantasy, throw into a blender, add a shot of sulfuric acid, and …
The week of 21 March 2016 marked the 23rd anniversary of Death Guild, the longest running goth/industrial night in the United States and second-oldest in the world. In a community where club nights may exist for a handful of years and then vanish, only to be replaced by a new team of promoters Death Guild stands out as the archetypal club night: If you visit SF and you like to dance, you really need to stop by the DNA Lounge on Monday night. The evening of 23 March 2016 was a very special night indeed because three locally prominent …
Since the 20th anniversary edition of Mage: The Ascension was released by Onyx Path Publishing a couple of us have been playing around with it for old time's sake. You can take the players out of the game but you can't take the game out of the players, so of course things went real wild, real fast. So, to that end, here are a couple of rotes for the Virtual Adepts.
(Disclaimer: White Wolf Games came up with Mage and the (Old) World of Darkness originally; Onyx Path Publishing has the rights to publish and extend the oWoD; I'm just …
In my last post on the topic of exocortices I discussed the Huginn project, how it works, what the code for the agents actually look like, and some of the stuff I use Huginn's agent networks for for in my everyday life. In short, I call it my exocortex - an extension of the information processing capabilities of my brain running in silico instead of in vivo. Now I'm going to talk about Halo, a separate suite of bots which augment Huginn to carry out tasks that Huginn by itself isn't designed to carry out very easily, and thus extend my …
On 20 February 2016 the DNA Lounge in San Francisco had another edition of Turbo Drive, the occasional retro/synthwave/electro night that brings back all the smoke, neon, lasers, and all-synthesizers-all-the-time music that we remember from 80's movies and cyberpunk novels. As you might expect, I was there with dancing boots on and earplugs in wearing full dead cruiser garb (nope, no pics handy, maybe next time if I can find somebody to take a pic) to see two bands I'm quite fond of these days, Night Club (who made it big when they were asked to do the …
