Author Affirmation and Sword of the Gods

The following wonderful email arrived today about someone who read my Sword of the Gods books:

"Hello, I just finished reading Sword of the Gods and Spinner of Lies. I usually read reference material, but I have an unexplored passion for the realm of fantasy, so, I decided to read Sword of the Gods; it was the first fiction book I've willingly read. I found myself completely absorbed by the world and the characters. I was so emotionally involved with the characters, Demascus, Chant, Riltana... I Just had to have more when I finished, so I immediately searched for the sequel and gobbled up that book. Now I'm so sad the journey is over!! Are you going to write a third book? I really hope so. I want to thank you for writing the story and letting me take that journey and for unlocking my desire to read fiction!!"

Wow. I am so pleased to hear about this kind of experience with my books! I also had a great time writing them. I think this is what George Costanaza meant by leaving the room on a high note :-).

But to answer the question of the reader, I don't really want to leave the room. I'd consider writing more Sword of the Gods books, but step one is up to the publisher. For the publisher to decide it wants more, I need to keep getting the word out about Sword of the Gods. Certainly this sort of thing helps.

L-Carnitine And Atherosclerosis

l-carnitine

The metabolic pathway for atherosclerosis has been discovered. Sorry, regular meat eaters. (And energy drink guzzlers!) 

The old school thinking of "if a little is good for you, then a lot must be better" has been proved wrong by Stanley Hazen, whose research last year established a link between bacteria in your gut, l-carnitine, and heart risk.

Yes, it's well understood that l-carnitine is crucial. It helps produce all your body's energy by transporting fatty acids to your mitochondria. However, humans produce all the l-carnitine they need. Supplementing with it (and eating a diet rich in red meat) does no good, and in fact, does harm.

Your gut bacteria can be "trained" to digest l-carnitine by eating a lot of it. The more you ingest, the more your gut fauna evolves to digest it. A byproduct of this digestion is a substance that promotes plaque build-up in your veins. 

Instead of accelerated energy, you end up with accelerated Atherosclerosis!

Want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth? Then give this a listen! http://www.sciencefriday.com/guests/stanley-hazen.html#page/full-width-list/1

And The Winners Are . . .

A few weeks ago I announced a contest to give away one of my novels performed by John Pruden available on Audible.com (three Abolethic books, and two Sword of Gods books). 

Well, that contest has run its course, and the three winners have been selected! The winners are as follows:

Ken Hart (@KenofGhastria on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Plague of Spells!

Doug Hopkins (@combatadvantage on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Sword of the Gods (Book 1)!

Randall Newnham (@coffeeswiller on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Plague of Spells!

I'd like to thank everyone who entered for your interest in these books. 

Last Thoughts About JD

JD Sparks, my friend of 30 years, passed away a few weeks ago. Last weekend was his memorial. Everyone got a chance to share some stories. I was especially grateful to meet many of JD's family and other friends, and hear what they had to say.

But here are some of my stories about my friend.

I met JD in 9th grade, in a shop class of all places. Back then, he went by Jay. He, Monte (the other kid I met in shop class who liked D&D) and I spent a lot of time in class not paying attention. Instead, we goofed off and played games, like one called Global Thermonuclear Destruction on a map JD had drawn on graph paper. We used the 6 sides of No. 2 Lead Pencils for our dice, possibly also JD’s invention. A much better way to pass the hour than listening to our teacher explain how to sand wood and rivet leather.

The three of us soon moved on to the good stuff--Dungeons & Dragons! In one of our first games (played in my parent’s basement of course), JD’s character gained a –1 penalty to his attacks. He decided that meant that he should act unpredictably. At a bridge over an endless abyss, his character pushed mine over the edge, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" Though JD went on to become one of the strongest gamemasters I’ve ever had the pleasure to play with, the “I’m cursed!” story remains one of my favorites.

Our group of goof-off D&D players soon grew to include myself, JD, Monte Cook, Richard Bue, Bob Baxter, and Bret Holien. We called ourselves the Hong Kong Cavaliers (and still do). Back in high school when we weren’t playing D&D or some other RPG, spending quarters at the arcade, or reading comic books, we were doing a school-sponsored forensic activity. That meant debate, and for JD and myself, Oratory.

Oratory required that you write an 8 minute speech each year, memorize it, then practice it so well that you could give it like a pro. By our senior year, JD and I traded top places across South Dakota and western Minnesota each weekend. JD could recite from memory the beginning few paragraphs of all our strongest competitors’ orations. And he could still do so TO THIS DAY.

(Bob Baxter and I were debate partners, and we ended up winning the SD state debate tournament our senior year, but that's another story.)

We Hong Kong Cavaliers remained friends all this time, and in the 30 years since I became friends with JD, I’ve gotten to hang out with him several times even though we've never lived in the same state since High School. Last year I organized a semi-regular D&D game with JD and the rest of the Hong Kong Cavaliers thanks to the magic of Google Hangouts. We all got to laugh as, once more, as JD “put up his defenses!” This time around, though, I was the gamemaster, so JD didn’t get a chance to push my character off any high ledges.

Even more often than we played D&D, JD, Torah Cottrill, and I played online video games over the last several years, especially City of Heroes and Guild Wars 2. JD loved those games, and sometimes we ended up in one of those imaginary lands two or even three times a week. If you had a question about how to craft a sword, where to find the best quests, or where the toughest levels were, JD knew it. And he also was such a gracious friend that he got joy out of stocking the guild vault with goodies that the rest of us could use.

JD was a giving, loving, and talented man. I haven’t even touched on his amazing artistic talent, though Torah and I have several of his pieces framed in our home. Whenever I see them, I think of him. He made the world a better place for the 45 years he was part of it. He touched all of us with his art, his humor and wit, and the way he managed to keep a positive attitude when all the world sometimes seemed against him.

He will be missed more than I can say.

Play D&D Next at Norwescon 36

I'll be running a D&D game at Norwescon 36 tomorrow (Friday) south of Seattle. Six seats, three alts. I'll be running with the rules in the  #DnDNext  playtest packet, which you can download for free at dndnext.com. However, I'll be providing characters--all you need to bring is dice and something to write with. And maybe some graph paper.

The #norwescon  convention programming director tells me that instead of their standard signup sheet, they will raffle off seats for this game. Max of 6 players and 3 alternates. Players will need to be ready to sit at the table by 5 minutes into the hour or the first available alternate will be placed in the vacant seat.

The raffle will be part of their standard hourly attendance drawing. Which tickets are given to those who participate in games. One ticket for one hour. One ticket is drawn every hour. One daily prize is drawn per day. The expectation is that they will have the 9 players by 12pm on Friday ready for the game.

Norwescon 36 Gaming Schedule
http://www.norwescon.org/special-events/gaming/gaming-schedule/

D&D Next Rules Free Download
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDNext.aspx

Wear Still The Coat

We don't expect the coat that fitted the child to fit the adult without tailoring. Why expect any less of old laws?  

The line above is a paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson's actual quote, edited to fit within the constraints of a 140 character tweet, plus link. Full quote: 

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Halo 4: Cortana the Naked

I know I'm late to this party, but I just finished the campaign story for Halo 4.

I loved almost everything about it. But one thing threw me. Every time the A.I. Cortana materialized as an anatomically correct woman wearing no clothing, I lost the thread of the scene as I goggled.

I find it curious that 343 studios would decide to sexualize Cortana by ripping off her modesty. Previous versions of Cortana were unclothed, but weren't naked, AND managed to portray a "real" character with just voice acting and good writing. Why the switch to soft porn? 

Were they trying to make her more vulnerable? Maybe. Cortana was a central character of the story, and one who is failing as her A.I. brilliance burns 10 times as bright, but 10 times as short . . . But it sort of comes across as exploitation. Yes, even though she's not a real person. 

Honestly, I'm not sure where I come down on this. But it was something that threw me out of the story each time she appeared. 

What do you think?

Contest: Free Audio Book

Audio Sample

Update: You can also enter this contest by sending me a message via your favorite social network, or by emailing me at raidonkane@aboleth.org with the subject line Audiobook Contest.

----

I'm holding another contest to give away three audible books!

The winner of this contest will receive their choice of one of my novels performed by John Pruden available on Audible.com (three Abolethic books, and two Sword of Gods books).

To enter, share publicly on your preferred social network that you've entered this contest, tag me so I see it (!), and link to this webpage.

 Something like the following:

Please enter me to win an audiobook written by @BruceCordell at http://bit.ly/cordell_pruden_audio

On April 2nd, I'll collect all the entrants, throw them onto a spreadsheet, and use Random.Org to select three winners!

If you'd like to hear a sample of Mr. Pruden's work, click on the link below the picture.

Say "Thank you Spinning Liquid Core!"

Mounting evidence supports the conjecture that Mars was probably habitable in the past.

I wonder what disaster befell that lonely red planet, or if Mars just failed to establish an ecosystem able to cushion fledgling life from disruptive events.

An absence of both tectonic plates and a magnetic field could well be the reason Mars has no life today. It's possible that Earth's molten spinning core, which directly powers our magnetic field, is also an indirect reason we have shifting tectonic plates. Both are nice to have, if you're a planet with aspirations of habitability.

The magnetic field protects Earth from cosmic rays that would strip away the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

The shifting tectonic plates replenish essential nutrients on the earth's surface of geologic time, ensuring that life continues into each new epoch.

So take a moment, look down at your feet, and tell the Earth's spinning liquid core that you appreciate all it does.

(Actually, there's some evidence Mars may have tectonic plates, but they move excruciatingly slow, maybe too slow to do what's required for efficient nutrient recycling.)

Looking For Contest Ideas

Audio Sample

I'm going to hold another contest, this time to give away an Audible version of one of my novels.

The simplest contest to hold would be "enter to win!" This kind of contest has the advantage of having a low barrier to entry. I've done it before, and I got an overwhelming response.

The other time I ran a contest, it was for a kindle ebook version of Spinner Of Lies, and I asked contest entrants to "spin me their best lie" on their social network to enter. The number of entries fell by an order of magnitude.

So.... I wonder which is better, or if there's a better middle ground, a contest that requires fewer hoops? Putting on my thinking cap, but if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it!

Black Swan Dive

As predicted, no meteorite apocalypse ruined everyone's day today. We "only" experienced a flyby asteroid. But as everyone knows, a different event caught everyone by surprise. A meteor blew books off shelves from twenty feet away and scared the socks off of some poor librarian (and, in all seriousness, injured around 1,000 people).

We didn't get hit. Not this asteroid, not this time. But eventually, Earth's number will be up (again). It's a certainty. And though widely disseminated graphic about asteroids being nature's way of asking us "How's Your Space Program?" is funny, it's only funny because it's chillingly true. 

We remain surprisingly vulnerable, as a civilization, to black swan events.  Here's hoping this double event will spur a bit more money from world leaders to take seriously the funding of programs aimed at deflecting asteroids and comets with our name on them. 

Road Rage Incident

Last night, someone in a super-sized white pickup-truck with license something like 0203 (more I couldn't discern on account of darkness) slipped a mental gasket about something that remains unclear to me, and began a series of aggressive maneuvers designed to either hit me, run me off the road, or make me swerve.

Yeah, exactly.

Thankfully, I daily witness far more positive human traits than that displayed by the random dirtbag of last evening. 

How I do Google+ RPG Hangouts

I've tried many things with G+ RPGing, trying to get just the right mix of interaction and utility around the virtual "table." A friend recently asked me what I'd settled on.

Some people swear by 3rd party add-ons, including the excellent folks at .  If you want a well-tested and thought out interface, check them out. If you're interested in tactical-miniatures combat, they have your solution.


However, I discovered that for my needs, less is more.  

Here's what works best for me:

Ahead of time, I gather art references, as available for a particular dungeon or session for the adventure in question, and put them in SkyDrive (Microsoft's free cloud stoarge service), which allows you to link individual pics via a public URL. (Dropbox and other services offer similar public links.)

I don't use minis, virtual or otherwise, but I do rely on sketching while describing settings and RPG battles; as a DM, I use pseudo Theatre of the Mind, with sketches as an aid.

I make such sketches on white board at my back while I play. Sometimes I cheat and use one at the office where I work, but I bought one at the store for around $18 for my home. I use the whiteboard to sketch the adventurer's progress in a dungeon (or other) setting, careful to make it large enough that A) it's visible through the g+ interace, and B) I can easily add general monster and PC placement if it becomes necessary to understand how a fight is progressing.

During play, everyone rolls their own dice, which requires trust  I suppose, but allows people to use the dice they love, and doesn't require me to force everyone to go through a dice emulator.

As play proceeds, I drop URLs of interesting pics (that I've uploaded to Skydrive, which creates public links), poems, or other pieces of text into the chat window.

I do use the Lower Third add-on, which some of my players also use, which is a great place to add the character's name and class, and even a picture.

This all seems to work like a charm! Even for casual gaming with my old high school friends who aren't game professionals.

I've gotten fancy in the past by logging in with a second computer/phone so that I could display a map on that, but frankly, the amount of juggling that required was a pain--the white board solution is, like Russian pencils in space, more robust.

I hope this inspires you to try a few g+ hangout games if you've been thinking about doing so. Good luck!

Car Insurance Model for Guns (with tweaks)

From http://laist.com/tags/gunbuyback

No one blinks at the idea of liability insurance for our cars. If fact, most of us have been the beneficiary of mandatory liability insurance, after we’ve been rear-ended at a stoplight or suffered some other traffic mishap.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that our guns should also require liability insurance. In fact, we believe mandatory gun insurance is something that both responsible gun owners and non-gun owners alike could get behind. Why? Because of how it would work.

Just as with cars, this plan would require annual registration and liability insurance renewal through private insurance companies. And guess what? There’s already a precedent: the National Rifle Association offers liability insurance to members.

This solution offers many advantages that all well-meaning people on both sides of the debate can appreciate. For example, the insurance market is a proven expert at weighing risk. If they don’t already exist, a gun insurance mandate would quickly generate reams of actuarial tables devoid of anything but solid, dry, actual odds of a particular gun or a gun in a particular situation being used to hurt someone, and find an associated liability price.

Just as car insurance premiums are based on both the driver and the vehicle, so would gun insurance premiums. So someone from South Dakota who’s hunted during deer season for years without an accident would have a much smaller premium than a first-time buyer looking to own an assault rifle.

And just like with insurance, taking comprehensive training, owning biometric gun safes (or owning guns with trigger locks, or even smart guns), and not possessing more than one or two guns would decrease premiums. Other factors would include the magazine size of the weapon, the age of the gun owner, how many children the owner has living in the same home, previous criminal record, and so on.

All of this means that if someone wants an arsenal of semi-automatic rifles, they can still have it. But the civilization they’re part of will disincentivize that kind of bunker mentality through the hand of the market.

And of course, like regular liability insurance, gun liability would provide some restitution for those hurt by guns. (This is liability insurance, so it wouldn’t replace stolen or damaged guns--that's homeowner's insurance.)

We also believe that stiffer penalties for unreported gun theft would be useful. Just like with cars, all guns would have be registered so they can be tracked if they’re used in a crime. We suggest that if your weapon is lost or stolen, you have 24 hours to report it. If you fail to report it and your missing gun is used in a crime, your mandatory gun liability insurance rises steeply. Any shootings involving a weapon registered to you that you have not reported missing/stolen results in a punitive fine (and even higher insurance rates). In addition, a civil suit could be brought against you if firearms registered to you are used in the commission of a crime. But, your gun insurance would help you deal with such a possibility. Specifically, it would pay out to cover damages leveled against you if your gun is used in a crime, by anyone, to pay for your legal defense and for any fines or civil liabilities against you.

As an aside, introducing mandatory gun liability insurance doesn’t mean we can’t continue to enact other sensible measures designed to moderate gun violence. Another front should include closing loopholes in current law that allow private individuals to sell to one another online or at gun shows, at least not without some sort of simultaneous proof-of-insurance requirement. Yet another way to stem gun mayhem would be via a national gun buyback program, similar to the Australian policy, which would prove especially useful for people who come into the possession of guns they didn’t seek, such as when people who discover they’ve inherited several guns after the death of a relative, but don’t have the interest or means to deal with them.

Those hoping for an easy solution should be patient, because as with any realistic answer, gun liability insurance (and other measures noted above) will take time to enact, and more time for their effects to spread to all corners of the nation. But this is a start. And over time, mandatory gun insurance would lessen the likelihood of both parking lot gun aggression by adult against adult, and more importantly, mass killings of kindergarten children in their classrooms.

(The foregoing policy recommendation evolved following the events at Sandy Hook and other recent mass shootings, and incorporates the feedback from my social network and friends. If you think it is viable, do what I've done, and contact the vice president and your representatives with this proposal.)

Morality Guide

I love this Tom the Dancing Bug comic. It's funny; funny in the sense that if I didn't laugh, I'd cry, I suppose.

The graphic isn't really a morality guide, as many of you already fully appreciate. It's a behavior map most of us follow naturally, courtesy of our genes. Which isn't morality; it's our pre-programmed baseline. Moral acts occur when we choose to act differently than our DNA prompts, by expanding a "Who We Are Nice To" category.

The End.

If you're curious about my reasoning, read on. However, just to forewarn you, I fall back on a few SAT words.

For someone to make a moral act, he or she must recognize their own baseline, gene-driven inclination, then choose to broaden a category from Tom's guide. For example, by broadening those we view as part of our Community to encompass a larger fraction of Outsiders, we've made a moral decision. Likewise, by shifting pets and primates, and other mammals and animals up some faction of a category in Tom's guide, we've determined to act morally. (As with anything, if category expansion is taken to extremes, you could go from making a moral decision to making a commitment for a stay at the funny farm.)

All that said, none of us decide how we'll act in a vacuum. The culture in which we are raised is bursting with ideas on ways to behave. However, you can look at them through the filter of ideas that cajole us to broaden these categories, and through a filter that that demand that we keep to category baseline, or even push outsiders into a lower category.

You've heard of the Golden Rule, most likely, which is a major driver of category expansion. Many religions teach some form of this. However, you've probably run up against various "fear the foreigner" meme, which drives category contraction.

Anyway, you've probably incorporated some of these category expansion ideals into your own behavior. Whenever you act according to the Golden Rule in a category outside what your genes demand of you, you're making a moral act. By my lights, it doesn't matter whether you chose to act this way or your culture inculcated you to act differently and more benevolently--that's the benefit of living within an evolving culture! On the other hand, and again by my lights, if you've inculcated less benevolent memes, that's an immoral choice, regardless of what your culture expects. "When in Rome," or "just following orders" doesn't cut it, when you're defining morality.

Otherwise, I agree with Tom the Dancing Bug, broadly speaking, being "nice" is being moral, but only if you've somehow broadened your "Who You're Nice To" category beyond what brute instinct would have you act to preserve your own kin and kind.