On Wednesday night, Sarah, John, Chris and I playtested Jason Morningstar’s beta game Fiasco, which he describes as being about “big ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s a state-of-the-art, GM-less game where the players build situations where crisis is just around the corner: think Fargo, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple, Double Indemnity. Then they wind up this tragedy engine and let it go, playing characters in an improv drama whose situation they’ve just specified. There’s usually going a simple plan, and then some complications, some backstabbing and betrayal, probably some murder. Characters often will ruefully remember that at one time, whatever they did seemed like a good idea, often as a guy with a sniffle and an extravagant collection of facial tattoos force-feeds them Ex-Lax after chaining their ankles to either side of a well-used concrete trough. Happy endings are rare.

Our game never quite got that dire — just a little pâté of murder in a tart betrayal aspic. I started up a discussion at Story Games, where there’s a summary. But I also wrote a detailed, scene-by-scene report and figured that this would be a better place for that. So, check after the jump for a story of armed foolishness on the Gulf Coast, a story of unknown paternity, unexpected tenderness, greed, revenge, and running over a guy in a wheelchair who had already been gut-shot and had his fingers broken. Fun times!

Our characters were (played by me, John, Chris, and Sarah): Drug dealer, fence, and all-around local criminal mastermind Spencer “Spider” Parrish. Manipulative, unlucky Sheriff Beauregard “Bo” Tannen, the man with the plan. Scatterbrained, greedy Deputy Jimmie Thornton IV (”the four-oh”). Cheerleader with a heart of gold (or something about as dense) Heidi Jo Summers.

Our setting: Hillview, LA, just north of New Orleans. Population 4000, elev. 2. Those were two very important feet – Hillview had water in the streets after Katrina, but not the kitchens.

We opened up with Spider and Sheriff Bo coming to terms over fencing the ill-gotten gains of Bo and Jimmie’s looting in New Orleans. I decided Spider wanted to split up the Sheriff and the Deupty – not sure why yet – and had him try to agree to a 45-50-5 split, with 45% to Spider, 50% to Bo and Jimmie, and that 5% as a soupçle;on to Bo. Bo browbeat Spider into a smaller share but took the extra share. I announced that Spider would be cheating.

Then, Heidi Jo came to Spider looking to get him to take a paternity test, the kind you can buy in a drug store. She told him that she had Deputy Jimmie waiting outside the hotel, so he had better cooperate. She succeeded and he took the test without raising a fuss, as we worked toward having Spider have actual tender feelings develop for Heidi Jo and her baby daughter.

Deputy Jimmie and Sheriff Bo headed down to New Orleans to enact the Sheriff’s plan. But one of the houses they thought would be empty… wasn’t. An old lady with a shotgun, Ms Parkins, not only greeted them but knew who they were! While Jimmie thought up a plan to try to extract them without trouble, Bo decided it would be safer not to leave a witness and shot poor old Ms Parkins. They looted her house, taking her gun with them. Sarah prepared an unnamed NPC to be upstairs as the scene began to drag, but the principals got the cue and finished up. That said, we didn’t forget that NPC later.

Then, in the next scene, we flashed back to Sheriff Bo proposing his plan to Deputy Jimmie at Martha’s Watering Hole (I grabbed the NPC and it became funny that Martha was a man who kept his prison nickname on the outside), just across the street from the Rose Village and equally convenient to the Interstate. Deputy Jimmie was complaining that he was due a raise after four years – this would become a running joke. Bo convinced him that with money being as tight as it was, a life of victimless crime seemed like their best way out, seeing as how any legitimate income Jimmie made would be subject to his crushing alimony situation (he was living in a U-Store-It locker at this point). Why not use their official cars to dispel suspcion while they drive on down to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and do a little looting? No violence, no victims, no way it could go wrong.

Spider and Heidi Jo met again to talk over the results of the paternity test a few days later. Spider wasn’t the father. At first, he was angry at Heidi Jo, but then he got seriously mad when she told him the story of how Deupty Jimmie had taken advantage of her in a drunken stupor at around the appropriate time. He decided to confront Jimmie and make him do right.

Heidi Jo got Jimmie to come to the Rose Village for a talk, but the Sheriff was trying, at the same time, to get him down to New Orleans for a job on some newly-identified empty, rich houses. The end result was that Spider and Heidi Jo wound up in his green-and-white on a trip down the Interstate. Taking Heidi Jo’s lead, Spider threatened Jimmie, made him take a paternity test too (out of her bag), and then when Jimmie mentioned having been swabbed earlier for an STD, wound up making him stop the car and put a beating on him, since he had gotten it too, presumably through Heidi Jo. As for Heidi Jo, she had what she wanted, but had to stop the only person protecting her and her baby from killing that baby’s likely father. Her moderating influence, starting here, would have a pretty strong effect on the game’s outcome.

Once they got to New Orleans, Spider and Jimmie went into the empty house. A Mexican standoff ensued, broken when Heidi Jo called on the phone to find out what was going on, breaking the tension just enough that guns could go down. Spider, to make peace, decided to let Jimmie know that Bo was screwing him out of money from the sales of their loot, and backed it up with his meticulous account Filofax, always in his pocket. “The left column, that’s Bo. Right column, that’s you. Right column’s smaller.” Jimmie decided he needed another raise.

That night, Jimmie called Bo to Martha’s for a talk. He had Martha close the bar and leave the two officers of the law a little privacy. Jimmie wrote two numbers on a napkin, and asked Bo which one was smaller… They had an argument; Jimmie pulled his gun on Bo, who didn’t think his deupty had the guts to shoot. We closed Act 1 with Jimmie plugging Bo right in the gut.

At the tilt we got “Failure/A tiny mistake leads to ruin” and “Mayhem/Cold-blooded score settling”. Ideas began to flow.

Scene 9 established, via flashback, that Spider had been acting to settle scores with the peace officers all along. A few years previous, they had come to serve him with an arrest warrant for possession with intent (fair enough, of course). He had a rival in prison named Roscoe, whom he had informed on in a desparate attempt to keep out of jail himself, and offered Bo and Jimmie his cash, drugs, and gun as a bribe to let him escape. They took everything from Spider, laughed at him, and effectively sent him off to jail where he served four years.

In another flashback, this one to a year or so previous, Heidi Jo was put into a compromising position when Sheriff Bo pulled her over while she was transporting Spider’s drugs. To avoid trouble, she came onto him and wound up in the backseat. Nine or so months before her baby was born. It was a busy time for her. Flashing forward, she realizes that she may have to keep that bastard alive, at least a little longer. (Scene note by Sarah: “3 fathers o jesus!”)

Next, back to Martha’s, where Sheriff Bo’s immense gut has kept him alive long enough for a confrontation. Jimmie extracts an 80% share from Bo – his raise, finally – and they agree to keep their secret. Jimmie calls a “special” and an ambulance arrives. No questions are asked, yet. Bo will survive, but he’s going to need a colostomy and a wheelchair, maybe forever. He figures out that Spider sold him out to his own deputy.

A while later, Bo decides to call in Spider for a confrontation in the empty sheriff’s office. He’s in a wheelchair, a blanket over his legs, pistol in hand. Spider has the baby, and therefore no gun (this is Heidi Jo’s rule). He show up with the bottle of poorly mixed formula propped against the car seat in the infant’s mouth, but has the sense to put the carseat behind the sheriff’s heavy steel desk. Bo goes to punish Spider for his perfidy, but Spider gets the drop, disarms Bo, and then breaks seven of the bad sheriff’s fingers getting the key to the storage locker full of loot, plus his cash. But there isn’t enough there, and Spider decides he’ll make Bo go to an ATM and withdraw as much cash as possible, not really sure what will happen after that. (John was collecting black dice at any cost, it goes without saying.)

On the way out the door, Bo gets the panic button, which summons Deputy Jimmie. Spider doesn’t notice because he’s called Heidi Jo to pick up the whole group in her truck. They go to a bank a half-block away, where Bo reveals that his bank balance is $32 – he’s got the money somewhere else, of course. Jimmie gets to the office, realizes Bo is gone, puts two and two together for the first time in his entire life, and gets to the scene. Spider, frustrated about his incomplete revenge on Bo but unarmed, takes the wheel of Heidi Jo’s truck and runs over the wheelchair-bound, colostomy-bagged, broken-fingered, gutshot sheriff, to her horror. Jimmie puts six rounds into the driver’s side door as Spider, Heidi Jo, and the baby speed away.

Spider is hit in the leg, not fatally but painfully, and after a short chase, aided by Heidi Jo distracting Jimmie by flashing him, Spider slams on the brakes so that the deupty’s car violently rear-ends the truck. Mostly unhurt, Heidi Jo drives the still-operable truck to her father’s cabin in the woods. The baby also took at least part of a bullet, but she made it to the hospital just in time (we decided that the fallout would determine her fate). Heidi Jo swears revenge.

In Scene 15, with the cover-up appearing to work and the old sheriff out on permanent disability, Deputy Jimmie is promoted to Sheriff, complete with a raise. He signs a background check form, figuring it will be handled within the Blue Wall. He thinks he’s free, clear, and a winner. Instead, the investigation is done by the FBI. They’ll have some help…

Finally, Spider is spending a little spell in prison after the action is over (we never wound up specifying which particular thing led to this… but seriously, take your pick). He gets a visit from the former sheriff, Bo, who wants to mend things between them before Spider is loose again and hungry for more revenge. He proposes that he will take care of Heidi Jo and her girl (who was, in the end, Jimmie’s, but Spider still sees them as his only chance at a family and a way out), and that they will be even. Spider puts a fist to the glass for a bump, and Bo answers with his twisted claw against the glass.

Aftermath: Spider and Heidi Jo were both white 10 (!). Bo was black 14 (!!!). Jimmie was black 3. Note that this wasn’t for lack of trying – Spider only had two dice, and Heidi Jo was split 2-2. Bo had four black dice, the only “successful” collector in the group. Jimmie had three of each, since he wound up being the focus of the storm.

The baby made a full recovery, and Spider and Heidi Jo left Hillview, LA to move to Texas and start over. They had enough money – Spider had, of course, cheated on paying Bo and Jimmie, plus had other ill-gotten gains from his drug operation – to open the Honest Cajun Ford dealership. Heidi Jo found the gun from Ms Patterson’s house and made sure that it made its way into the hands of the FBI.

Sheriff Bo had cash to burn, a sweet permanent disability deal going, and forgiveness. He’d never walk again, he’d be pooping in a bag for the rest of his life, but he had somehow made it clear of the burning wreckage of his simple plan, alive and doing OK, all things considered. He wouldn’t even face justice, since he had a patsy…

The new Sheriff, Jimmie? Everything seemed great at first. Promotion, raise. Then investigation, disgrace, and finally, as he was being perp-walked, a bullet to put him out of his misery, probably fired by Ms Parkins’ mystery friend. Because he was, ironically, being investigated for the murder of someone he didn’t kill… because of her gun showing up with prints all over it and a note, and because of evidence planted in the locker by the departing Sheriff Bo. Score settling, and also a little mistake, indeed.

“Yoker” because it’s… wait for it… draft poker. Yeah, I know, you see what I did there.

You’ll need 4-7 players and a standard poker deck, probably with the jokers removed (subject to playtesting, see below). Dealer deals seven cards, face down, to each player, and sets aside the rest of the deck face-down; it does not figure into further play of the hand. Each player picks up his hand, selects one card from that hand, and puts it face down in front of himself. He then passes the remaining six cards to his left face-down, taking a hand of six from his right-hand opponent, also face-down. He picks up his new hand, selects one of the six cards in it, puts it face-down in front of him along with the first card he chose, and then passes his hand to the left.

Before players pick up their hands of five cards, there is a round of betting (not for real money, of course) that starts with the dealer, using whatever ante and limit rules make sense to your table. Any player that folds leaves the game until the next hand; they shuffle whatever cards were in their hand, plus any that were in the face-down pile in front of them, back into the deck, without revealing them. Once the betting is resolved, players pick up their hands of five, draft a card into their face-down piles, pass the four remaining cards left face-down, and continue in this way until all cards are drafted. There is a round of betting before drafting the third, sixth, and seventh card; also, a final round of betting occurs after the seventh card is selected. All players still in the game after this last round then reveal their seven face-down cards, and then score the best five-card hand they can make from their seven face-down cards, using the standard poker hand order. The winner takes the pot (tied co-winners splitting it evenly).

Why this may be more fun than other poker games: Both the “public cards” information and the variance are spread out very differently among the players. In Hold ‘Em, everyone knows about the same cards that are in their opponents’ hands; in yoker, each player knows what he passed, can guess which downstream opponents took those cards, and may be able to infer things about his upstream opponents’ hands based on what they’ve passed him. Variance is spread out too, in that I can know that I passed A♠ to my left-hand opponent (probably improving his hand) so I could take the 9♥ that gave me a three-of-a-kind.

Possible changes:

• Some rule about when you can look at your face-down cards is necessary. I’m leaning toward “any time” but maybe the right answer is “only during betting rounds” or maybe even “only at the showdown” to keep the game moving along.
• It’s possible that the game works better if the dealer button gets passed to the right after each round of betting concludes, rather than just between rounds.
• Perhaps there should be more round(s) of betting? Not sure how that would be handled yet without clashing with people’s poker intuitions too much.
• Adding one or both jokers as wild cards might or might not be fun — I am leaning toward “not”.
• The game could be expanded to eight players either by shuffling two decks together (more variance, not recommended) or drafting six cards (not as much scope for skill, æsthetickally displeasing as poker usually has five- or seven-card hands).
• Seating order matters more than usual in other poker games. Maybe there should be a rule for re-seating the players from time to time? Or switching the pass direction?
• For two- or three-player games, replace the drafting mechanism with something like Winston Draft, q.v. I think that having just two players left in the game after the third pick, when two or more have folded out, still leaves enough hidden information to have a fun game, even though those two players are just passing packs back and forth.
• Oh yeah, one other thing that would potentially be awesome: hi-lo hand scoring.

The good news: loathsome pork-barrel parasite Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was (finally) convicted of making false financial statements. He faces up to 35 years in prison, five years for each of seven counts.

The bad news: he will almost certainly not serve a day. He even gets to keep his pension! We may be quite certain that on the outside chance that he is sentenced to prison, he will not be treated as a member of the general population, searched intimately after each visit from his family, subject to the punishing depersonalization that prisons do and ought to impose on their inmates. Stevens was not completely wrong to believe that his seniority in the Senate — put plainly, his persistent, lamprey-like rasping and sucking grip on taxpayer wallets — would immunize him from the full force of the law. His status as a legislator, even as a convicted felon senator, may be counted on to overawe the human agents of the law.

Topping all previous displays of hubris, Senator Stevens did not make plans to suspend or redirect his re-election campaign in case he was convicted. In fact, he has announced that he will continue to run for the Senate despite the fact that, after his felony conviction, he can no longer vote for himself. Quoth the AP:

Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel him on a two-thirds vote.

“Put this down: That will never happen — ever, OK?” Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. “I am not stepping down. I’m going to run through, and I’m going to win this election.”

He is depressingly likely to be right. So remember to do your part and Vote Freshman on 4 November. No matter how much you think you like your incumbents, the consequences of serial incumbency are so dire that you can’t afford to send them back to Washington. It’s best to blindly pull any lever that doesn’t have that fatal “(I)” next to it.

Oh, and when we get around to amending the Constitution to add term limits for Congressional representatives, can we please maybe add something that bars convicted felons from serving, especially if the felony in question is committed in office? It just seems like a good idea. Actually, I thought of an even better reason why convicted felons should be allowed to serve. Never mind.

Update again, 30 October: Turns out Senator Stevens will, by some tortuous legal reasoning, probably be allowed to vote.

Surely it has happened to you: you’re out somewhere and need a random number, or a whole bunch of them. For me, this mostly happens at restaurants, when I would like to consult an Infallible Oracle as to which of N tasty possibilities is right for me on a given day. But maybe you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons in free-fall (this makes conventional dice less than useful). Perhaps you have found yourself diceless and kidnapped by a capricious yet mathematically sophisticated evil overlord, who will not free you until you have completed a Monte Carlo simulation by hand. I would like to help you, and if you’re that last guy I mentioned, buy you a drink.

Text “rolldice somestuff” to 41411, where somestuff is either a number or a D&D-style specification of how many dice to roll, and how many sides each die has. If you say just one number, you’ll get a reply with a random number between 1 and your number, inclusive, so sending “rolldice 6″ is like rolling a single, ordinary six-sided die; “rolldice 3″ will help you decide among the apple-glazed pork chop, the mahi-mahi on pan-fried noodles, and the five-spice steak. To use a D&D-style dice specification, put a “d” between the number of dice and the number of sides, so you would say “rolldice 3d10″ to get three random numbers between 1 and 10 (”three ten-sided dice”), or “rolldice 3d6″ to roll up your character’s stats old-school in that aforementioned free-fall role-playing scenario.

The way this was done is fairly cool, by the way: I used the free, ad-supported web service TextMarks to handle all the SMS-gateway logic, and then threw together a simple cgi script to handle the dice-rolling logic. Setting aside the time I spent figuring out that my newly-installed FTP client was set up wrong and mangling my script, the whole exercise took less than half an hour, which is nothing short of amazing – TextMarks 41411 is a marvel of simplicity.

giddy giddy.

What greeted me in my Amazon orbit today: New Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, dropping 9 Sept. The Ninth is a Tuesday, and the book is 2″ thick in hardcover, so there goes that Tuesday. If you see me in person or on the Internets, I do not want to know anything else about it, OK? I have seriously injured men for less.

For the uninitiated: Stephenson is a super-excellent science fiction writer who has written the best works in a handful of subgenres (techno-thriller: Cryptonomicon, cyberpunk: Snow Crash, retro-scifi/steampunk: The Diamond Age, alternate history: The Baroque Cycle). Whatever he’s doing, I enter into reading it with the very highest of expectations. It goes without saying that I recommend his earlier works (from Snow Crash onward and including the psuedonymous, collaborative techno-thrillers Cobweb and Interface) and that you could do a lot worse, come September, than having Anathem queued up.

Some unordered thoughts on the topic:

• More and more material keeps popping up on Google Books: Bladé’s Contes Populaires de la Gascogne republishes the chapter from the Quatorze Superstitions on the Mass of Saint Sécaire. A generous sampling of Gareth Medway’s Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism is available online — this is a breezy, skeptical look at the topic, despite the rather sensationalistic title.
• I called the Saint Sécaire contre-messe “peculiar” when compared to other accounts of black masses. Just to be clear, the chief peculiarity is the matter of the host; in other reports, the host at a black mass is a fully consecrated one, stolen from a “legitimate” church. This tradition calls for a purpose-made black host, which, as Bladé might have said, is «quelque chose de bien plus rare». Which is a more complete reversal of the sacrament?
• Boingboing had an article today pointing to a master’s thesis, by a certain Cecile Dubuis, on libraries and the occult, which I’ve begun reading. Synchronicity indeed.
• Everyone’s favorite occultist/creepy uncle, Aleister Crowley, wrote a short story inspired by the Mass (creatively entitled “The Mass of Saint Sécaire”). I’ve acquired a copy and am considering my options for making it available. For the record, Crowley cited Bladé’s Quatorze Superstitions — his scholarship was at least impeccable, even if his prose wasn’t. That said, the plot would be of interest to fans of (say) White Wolf’s Mage roleplaying game: a grasping woman conspires with a corrupt priest to have the mass said for a soldier who campaigns in Africa. Nothing appears to happen at first, but eventually the soldier sickens and dies — coincidentally? — of the then-new-to-science tropical disease trypanosomiasis, which (of course) the doctors can’t do anything about. Good times!

I suspect that many reader’s of James Frazer’s omnibus The Golden Bough were, like me, arrested by his description of a peculiar black mass tradition:

Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

And now, every time I think of an owl, it is one of Frazer’s, moping and hooting among the blackened, bare rafters of a burnt church. They just don’t do scholarly works like that any more.

But where, precisely, did he find out about this Mass? The widely available single-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough lacks a scholarly apparatus, and the multi-volume Bough is six feet of shelf and a hundred pounds. An interested scholar is forced to simply search the Net for mentions of the spurious Saint Sécaire, and until very recently, the search was not rewarding.

Then, just in the past few weeks, Google Books came to the rescue by digitizing C. J. S. Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic (1973). Thompson referred directly to Quatorze Superstitions Populaires de la Gascogne (1883), by the Gascon ethnographer Jean-François Bladé, and that was the break I needed. The book was published as a scholarly edition of 50 copies 125 years ago, so calling it a “break” is a bit of a misnomer. The inter-library loan search was undoubtedly the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken. But in the end, I chased down a copy in the Cleveland Public Library — Special Collections, in fact, completing the Lovecraftian superfecta of a rare antique book, written in a language other than English, detailing a forbidden ritual, held in an inconveniently-located library.

And so it is, through the magic of scanning (thanks to Rhonda Green at CPL), that I was able to (finally) check the original source — Bladé had his account from “the late Cazaux,” one of his informants, apparently a man well-known to his family. One wonders whether the late Cazaux withered away, the doctors unable to diagnose or treat him… anyway, for your enjoyment, please find a scan of the (signed!) title pages, and of the relevant section of Quatorze Superstitions, in French. My translation of the section is also available, and I’ve been at work on the Wikipedia entry.

Primary season has been a real downer here in California’s 14^th. Not only did our serial incumbent Representative Anna Eshoo not draw a competitor within her own party, she doesn’t appear to have even drawn a Republican challenger! We don’t have a shot at either of our Senators, and all of the Presidential candidates are basically identical. Surely there must be some good news, right?

There is! Arizona Republican Representative Rick Renzi had already announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election this year, and now we know why… and can be sure that he’ll actually keep his promise, a rare and beautiful treasure among Congressthings. He’s been indicted on charges of abusing his power as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee to secure sweetheart federal land deals for his co-conspirators, showing again how any power a government has, even something as simple as owning land, is bound to lead to corruption sooner or later.

The disgraced Congressman has appeared on the radar of many corruption NGOs over the past few years, and the group CREW has apparently featured him on their “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list (fascinating read) for the last three years. Congressman Renzi, great job, and thank you for supporting term limits and the “Vote Freshman” campaign!

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.