I’ve been playing GTA IV. It’s got a lot of good things, but for the most part I’d say it’s a big step backwards from GTA: San Andreas. It’s clearly benefitting from being on newer hardware, but there’s less game. I seem to have fewer missions available, and nearly no random pickup tasks. In San Andreas, I could steal a cop car and do “Vigilante” missions. I could steal a fire truck and fight fires. I could steal an ambulance and pick up the wounded. I could do cab rides. There are probably other random missions that I can’t think of, too. In GTA IV, vigilante missions are much more of a pain in the butt, and are unlocked quite a ways into the game.

I thought I’d look into how often I’d need various kinds of dice in D&D 4th Edition. I did this entirely unscientifically by grepping the PHB.

We need new dice for our D&D game. I ordered a Chessex Pound-o-Dice from an Amazon vendor, Rookie’s HQ Games and Cards. Here’s what we got:

When I started at Pobox, we had a few different ways we sent or delivered mail. Chief among them were IO::Persistent::SMTP, smtpsend, ICG::TestTools::Mail, and Email::LocalDelivery. These all had their own purposes, which was fine, but they also had their own APIs, which was not.

I don’t mean “the RPG” in general is dead. I mean that the game I’ve been running, the ABE RPG, has come to an end. We first met on October 15, 2005, meaning that the game ran for over three years. Wow!

A few months ago I took a look at where to publish this journal. For a long time (years?) I’ve been posting simultaneously to rjbs.manxome.org and use.perl.org. I control rjbs.manxome.org and it does more of what I want, but it didn’t support comments. use.perl.org supported comments and had more readers, but little things about it kept bugging me.

I’m playing Mass Effect now. It’s pretty good, although I’m starting to find it a bit tedious, mostly because I keep having to repeat the same bits. This is especially frustrating when I have several dialog options that look very similar but end up coming out of my mouth with very different tones of voice.

It’s bugged me that iTunes makes it hard to listen to things as albums. Sure, it has shuffle-by-album, but smart playlists are all per-track.

My Xbox 360 came with LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda. I haven’t tried Kung Fu Panda, but I finished the story mode of Indiana Jones. It was pretty good, although nearly the entire Last Crusade scenario was incredibly annoying. The LEGO games from Tt have a lot going for them, but they also have a lot of flaws that just don’t seem to be getting fixed. They have awful cameras, terrible jumping predictability, horrible partner AI, and the vehicle chapters tend to kind of suck. Despite all that, I’d probably give it a B-. Like I said, the LEGO games have a lot going for them.

A while ago, I did a bit of work applying patches to MIME::Lite. It’s the most widely depended upon of the dists I maintain, and one of the oldest, with the most RT tickets. I also don’t really like it very much, so it doesn’t get as much work as I’d like to give it.