I have never been shy about stating my opinion on bards in Dungeons and Dragons. They suck. They make no damn sense and I wish, just this once, we could pretend that they never existed and drop them from the game.

After a few months of slowly edging toward the prospect, yesterday I bought an ebook. It’s a Sony PRS-300, which is their new “pocket reader.” It’s about the same size as my flattened hand, just a little thinner than my iPhone, and about the same weight as a paperback. Right now, I have it loaded with just over a hundred books and stories, and it’s about one third full.

The next release of App-Cmd, 0.300, will break backwards compatibility with App::Cmd::Simple. Nothing on the CPAN is registered as using it but I’m sure it’s being used. All other uses of App::Cmd should be fine.

Originally, I conceived of Pod::Weaver as a system that took two Pod streams and wove them together. One was the Pod that the user wrote. The other was Pod generated based on some stuff. (That’s about as concrete as the idea was.) This got rewritten a bit and interleaved, and poof, you had better Pod.

“Import things to a lexical scope” has been on my todo list for Sub::Exporter for a long time, and I often thought I had determined how to implement them in pure Perl, and was then often disappointed. The problem is that I basically know zero XS and don’t know how to mess around with B and the op tree. Clearly this needs to change, because the programmers I know who can sling XS and B can do amazing things.

MRO::Magic is a system for writing your own method dispatcher in Perl. I have written about MRO::Magic before, but it’s rushing toward being useful as 5.10.1 rushes toward release.

This has been a good week for me to take things that look to big and break them into smaller, attainable goals. I did it for some work projects, and I think it’s helping me feel like I can start making more progress. It also led to a huge update to Path::Resolver, including much-needed documentation.

For my birthday, my mom said she was going to buy me a bottle of bourbon that I’d had on my wish list for some time. She asked me what it was, and I told her, but she lost the thing she wrote it on. I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s hard to find anyway. I’d like a gift certificate to Tanczos just as much.”

I want a system in which my players can keep logs of the adventures. I want them to be in a clear sequence so you can click “next” and “previous” without having to set the links up yourself. I want it to be possible to have multiple summaries. One unbiased log, a per-player (or per-character) log, and maybe others.

A while ago, someone directed me to Obsidian Portal. It’s a website where you can collaboratively develop an RPG campaign. A camapign has a wiki, PC and NPC tracking, an adventure (b)log, an item tracker, a map archive, and forums. There might be some other stuff, too.