This post is a summary of a Call of Cthulthu session I ran with some friends last month. It’s intended as an introduction for new players at our next session, or a refresher to the players from the last session. A subsequent post will introduce important background for the next game.

At the deathbed of respected Misaktonic University literature professor Rupert Merriweather, 4 of the professor’s acquaintances met and learned the professor’s secret: years earlier, he and a group of 5 other naive students, under the guidance of an older mentor, Marion Allen, formed a group dedicated to the study of spirits and the occult, called the Dark Brotherhood. After several failures, a new artifact (and associated ritual) provided by Allen gave the group its first and last success: they were able to summon an otherwordly Thing in a farmhouse outside Allen’s Corners, Massachusetts, which promptly beheaded one member of the group and drove the other insane.

Fleeing in terror, the group concocted a plausible story for the death of one member (and the catatonic insanity of the other) and vowed never to speak of the night’s events again. Nearly 40 years later, as Dr. Merriweather reached the final stages of terminal lung cancer, he summoned the 4 investigators to his hospital room, knowing that after his death any binding magic on the Thing would fade and it would be free to roam the countryside, unchecked. Giving them Marion Allen’s artifact and journal notes from the Dark Brotherhood, he urged them to help dispel the Thing he had so recklessly summoned years before.

The 4 investigators were drawn from various backgrounds, linked only by their mutual acquaintance to Dr. Merriweather. They included:

• Thurber Upton, a veteran and former battlefield medic, handy in a pinch with a revolver and schooled in the treatment of the serious physical trauma likely to be encountered in a war zone. Equally at home shooting a hobo through the femoral artery or treating the wound to prevent him from dying.
• Stanley Clark, snake-oil salesman extraordinaire, skilled in the art of misdirection, persuasion, and outright lying. Claims to have sucessfully sold an icebox to an Eskimo acquaintance. Valuable when you need a diversion, to convince someone to take a cheap bribe, or a shot of an “all-natural, fantastic, homeopathic elixir to cure hair loss, vapors, the gout, and rickets”.
• Cale Graves, a businessman who operates a successful bookstore dealing in rare volumes, while drawing the bulk of his finances from a private (and equally successful) bootlegging operation. Having both legitimate and illegitimate business, Graves possesses a wide variety of skills, including a working knowledge of chemistry from his bootlegging business as well as unparalled library research skills gathered while establishing a successful rare book emporium.
• Dr. Thelonius Doom, academic and respected professor of Psychology at Miskatonic University, skilled with ancient languages and gifted with a working knowledge of the fledgling skill of Clinical Psychiatry.

The investigators accepted Dr. Merriweather’s request and handily succeeded in dispatching the Thing lurking in the farmhouse attic. Along the way, the investigators explained the disappearance of Maggie McPhirter, local farmer’s wife, ensuring her soul could rest at peace when Cale Graves destroyed her reanimated body with a shotgun blast at close range. An unlucky hobo, Red Jake, had a more frantic meeting with the investigators, and ultimately sealed his own fate after bolting from the protection of the farmhouse to be subsequently killed and reanimated by the Thing and then killed again by a second blast from Graves’ trusty boomstick.

Over the course of the investigation, the group discovered several odd pieces of information that continue to defy explanation. While most of the original Dark Brotherhood died after the farmhouse incident due to natural causes, Marion Allen’s case was not so simple. During the investigation, the group discovered that the existence of the mysterious artifact Allen provided to the group, a small Egyptian sarcophagus originally containing an insect trapped in amber, was not a secret known only to the Brotherhood:

1. Before Allen’s death, he complained to police that he was being pursued by a group bent on recovering the artifact.
2. Soon after, his body was found near the docks, his clothing showing signs of being in or near a fire, and his tongue cut out with a sharp-bladed knife.
3. Strangely, neither the fire nor a bladed weapon were the cause of his death; the coroner was unable to find a definitive cause, citing foul play via coronary arrest, induced by unknown means.

The artifact itself is now safely locked in Cale Graves’ safe, although since the creature once contained in it has been dispelled, it possesses no occult properties. However, it is still a curious and valuable piece of antiquity, being made of solid gold. In the course of their investigation, the group learned the following facts about the artifact:

1. The inscription on the artifact’s case is Middle Egyptian, cryptically referring to a “Seeker of Wisdom”; after translation, the text is best represented in English as:
   

   "Seeker of Wisdom, Servant of Yoag Setheth,
   Deliverer of the people of the water,
   Bearer of the spirits of Nyar-loth-hotep,
   child of Thoth, Seeker of Wisdom."
   

2. Another inscription on the inside of the artifact’s lid is not Egyptian at all, nor is it a language any of the investigators can identify, despite thorough attempts with the aid of local libraries and academics. As best as they can identify, the language is similar to script found on artifacts that are claimed by less-reputable scholars to be from the ancient continent of Mu, said to be the location of fictional lost cultures such as Atlantis.

Returning to Boston after dispatching the Thing (and respectfully disposing of the rather messy remains of Maggie and Red Jake), the members of the group struggle to understand and explain what they saw in the farmhouse.

Unable to let the mystery rest, some begin to search for clues to the history of the artifact and how a mere dilettante in the occult like Marion Allen came to possess it…

Let’s talk. I know we haven’t spoken much lately, but I’m ready now. The thing is, we’ve changed. We used to fit together so well. Everything about you was new and exciting to me. You completed my sentences. You helped me discover all sorts of fun things I never knew about. You were an eloquent and knowledgeable partner. You opened the world up to me. And who could forget those steamy nights?

But lately, we’ve been distant. To be honest, you’ve become a little shrill. I spend a lot of time now just trying to filter all of the stuff you spew at me every day. You’ve always been a little slangy and cliquish, but I have to admit that I’m beginning to honestly despise what you’re doing to the English language. Because I hang out with you all the time, I have to put up with it, but honestly, can you try to control yourself a little bit?

You’re caught up in fads. I don’t want to gossip all the time, and I don’t need to know the minutiae of all your friends’ lives. How do you even have that many friends? Why are you telling me what some girl you went to kindergarten with is going to see at the movies tonight? You talk an awful lot, but say little. I think you’re giving me ADD, if such a thing is possible. It’s always little soundbites with you. You can’t talk about a single topic for more than 30 seconds.

So I think we need to go on a break for a little while. I’ve… I’ve decided to read some books and stay away from you for a while. Look, I know we have to see each other at work, and I know I can read books on you too, it’s just… I need some space. Let’s just try to be adults about this. It’s only a few novels, and maybe, a little nonfiction. Just give me some time. We can work this out. Wait, why are you laughing? What do you mean, ironic?

My coworker Grace recently blogged about the reality of personal branding on the internet in these, our modern times, citing an MSNBC article about a Cisco interviewee who tweeted about his potential job before it materialized. I couldn’t help but start thinking about the way the internet has changed since I was young, and the inevitable commercialization of it.

When I was young, the internet was virtually unknown. At that time, enterprising geeks networked locally; dialing into BBSes with their low-baud modems and racking up phone bills. Going online involved sending messages to other BBS users, downloading interesting files, and playing mostly text-based BBS games like “Drug Wars”. When you wanted to download files of any appreciable size (say more than a megabyte or so), you started it up when you went to bed and hoped that you weren’t greeted by a “NO CARRIER” message when waking up. Your friends, assuming you had any that weren’t also tethered to their computers after school, got used to busy signals when they tried to reach you. You and your parents reached an understanding - if you pick up the phone and hear weird sounds, hang it up quickly before you screw up my download.

Then the internet penetrated into geek culture - BBSes slowly replaced by local ISPs, small businesses that could outlay the significant capital required to get a decent network connection, who would then sell it to you via a modem. Instead of dialing in to a destination, you connected to a service that made the internet available to you. E-mail was a big revelation around this time, although it seemed like a natural outgrowth of BBS technology. The implications were astounding, largely because the internet at this point was, in some respects, an outgrowth of BBS culture, which was mostly based around shared interests and hobbies. You got to know your fellow BBS members, and even trust them. The culture overlapped with academic circles, universities being the other big presence on the internet. There was an almost communal, instinctive feeling of purpose and identity. Information was now a free-flowing stream, where you could collaborate with almost anyone you liked, assuming they had internet access. Concepts like globalization, now discussed in bestsellers like Friedman’s “The Earth is Flat”, were not unknown, but were still hazy and abstract in popular culture. People were still figuring out how to make money on the internet.

We were still figuring out a lot of things.

It was only natural that the technology would eventually be commonplace. The nature of a global information and communications network is that it eventually eliminates many of the barriers geographic distance imposes, and anything that can be represented as information can exist anywhere, having no physical reality at all. People spend their free time playing WoW, contributing hours, days, weeks, or even months of their waking (and, lest we forget, finite) lives to manipulating bits in a central Blizzard database, and paying Blizzard a monthly fee to do it; analysts crunch spreadsheets to produce forecasts and reports on which huge sums of money pivot; entire companies are born, grow, and die on the premise of manipulating data in their own particular way. Even the money that these activities generate is pure information flow: a database somewhere subtracts some number from some other number; another database somewhere increments, and money is transferred. Our lives are measured now not only by the tangible things we produce and leave behind - families, relationships, physical works - but by the particular way in which our existence perturbs information in a vast global network.

And so, we now have the concept of a personal brand. Since you don’t exist on the internet in any form other than information, you can poke and prod that information in various ways: you can create webpages, blog posts, LinkedIn profiles, Lijit accounts, Twitter streams. You can generate content for someone else, like making a forum post somewhere or commenting on a blog post. Even your social interactions can be quantized, filtered, and monetized. And all of this information comes together in your personal brand, the “internet you”. And since much of this information is interpretive and subjective to recipients, the “internet you” is open to marketing - it becomes less about the information itself, and more about where you put it, how you move it. Is the right person following you on Twitter? How much would it be worth to attract the attention of a big-name blogger like Guy Kawasaki and have him mention you? If a potential employer Googled you, would they find anything untoward?

So, you have to watch yourself. You can’t tweet your impressions about a potential job offer; even on a service like Twitter that ostensibly is about connecting with friends and people you trust, because the information becomes public, becomes part of your personal brand. Content you produce now becomes part of your “permanent record”, but loses context over time. Like sound bites, a poor choice of words or incorrect turn of phrase can be tremendously damaging, perhaps years after the fact. Social networking isn’t about friendship, trust, or the free flow of information: it is networking in the business sense. How many Facebook friends do you have that you would really consider friends? How many people do you know who treat their Facebook friends’ list or Twitter follower list as a scorecard, following random people in the hopes they will follow back and thus add 1 to their score?

I realize I’m not saying anything new. Maybe I’m not saying anything at all; after all, our human desire to understand and ultimately control complex systems extends far beyond concrete examples like the internet.

But as I find myself thinking before I hit the “submit” button on my blog posts or tweets or friend updates about whether the content I’m about to post is potentially damaging to my personal brand, I can’t help but wish, sometimes, that I was connected to a BBS again, waiting - along with everyone else - to discover what I could learn today.

I would tell you one of my resolutions is to post more, but I’d be lying. Suffice it to say that I’ll do my best.

I haven’t posted in a while, because life has been busy! Aside from all the usual work stuff, over the past few months I’ve been wrapping up some long-term personal goals in the form of buying a house. I’m very happy to announce that as of yesterday, I’m a homeowner. Huge success.

A couple years ago I set the goal for myself of buying a house “soon”, within the next couple years. This was a pretty arduous process that included monitoring my credit, saving money, and getting my professional life in a more stable place than where Lijit was at the time (which was the six of us in an office working very late nights trying to get the first iteration of our website out the door; and it did a totally different thing then from what it does now). We didn’t even know if we’d still be around in another year, so making a long term commitment, especially financially, was an iffy procedure.

Many people helped me throughout this process, answering my incessant (and probably, to them, very obvious) questions and listening to me being neurotic about pretty much everything. If you’re reading this blog post, you know who you are, and I thank you for being patient with me and helping me along.

Over the next month, the tumult from buying and moving should die down, and I hope to start posting more then; but if history has shown me anything, it’s not to hold your breath for the next post. I do have some things I wanted to blog about - new product impressions, various game stuff, and techie things - but somehow working with blogs and bloggers all day makes it difficult to contribute to my own blog outside of work. I’ll do my best.

Tara asked me to try to do some guest posting. As she gets pulled into conferences and other community catalyst (it’s her title!) type tasks, it’s nice to have some blog posts “in reserve”. I decided to do a small and very basic series on website optimization. You can find the first post here and the second here.

I recently read this book, by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in 1955. Spoilers will follow. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want the plot spoiled for you, don’t continue reading. It’s a really old book, but lately I feel like I’ve been using my blog more just to write stuff I want to get down (and practice writing), so in that vein, here’s the post.

This book is one of the most interesting I’ve read. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a fiction novel more well-written than Lolita. It’s simultaneously witty, funny, horrifying and tragic. The author uses the English language in a wonderfully skilled way, with highly detailed prose and clever use of pacing and timing. On the other hand, the protagonist of the book, Humbert Humbert, is a man of profound evil, willing to go to through many mental contortions to rationalize his obsession with Lolita, a child. You’ll read a sentence, long and winding and indirect, laughing at the intricate connections between the words, and as you finally parse it, you realize it’s Humbert describing his lust for a 12-year-old girl he intends to possess and sexually ravish. This is a man who is willing to go to great lengths to hide from himself how much of a monster he really is, and you will sometimes find yourself forgetting that fact, only to be reminded of it a page or two later. He’s essentially willing to psychologically traumatize a child, who has no real escape, in the pursuit of his fantasy.

In short, the book is phenomenally written and quite disturbing because of it.

To quote from the afterword, taken from Wikipedia:

In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov’s “love affair with the romantic novel,” Nabokov wrote that “the substitution of ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.”

I would recommend it. It’s guaranteed to provoke a few visceral emotional reactions in you.

As Tara kindly put it:

You’re guest posting now?

Yes, yes I am. I tend to write overly sarcastically when I’m trying to be funny. So hopefully you don’t mind sarcasm. Holler at ya boy: Flixflops reviews Zolar: the Extreme Sports Movie. This review is a joint effort by Jay and I. Feedback is always appreciated.

First off, sorry it’s been so long since I posted. I have some good stuff coming up soon, but it’s been a busy few weeks. We’re cranking hard on some nice new features at Lijit, which should be visible to you guys (assuming you’ve heard of Lijit and are users - or employees), and I recently went to Lake Tahoe, NV, to hang out with my friend Nick, scheduled to be married sometime next month.

In the meantime, there’s a huge glut of games to play: the new Smash Bros. game just came out on Wii and there are a few Xbox 360 treats, including Army of Two (who Daniel will get to someday) and Bully: Scholarship Edition, also out for Wii. I never played the original Bully release on PS2, and never knew much about it, but it got consistently high reviews, so I decided to pick it up for 360.

And it’s fun as hell. It’s basically Grand Theft Auto, but set in a school, and without cars, guns, or really brutal violence. Or, at least as brutal as things got in high school, which, looking back, was actually pretty brutal. There are missions, minigames, factions, weapons, vehicles - the whole shebang - backed by a well-executed and very detailed sandbox (Bullworth Academy and the surrounding towns). What’s so fun about Bully, once you pick up the control scheme, is that the game is essentially an endless series of minigames. You can complete quests, make money with side missions, play games or ride rides at the carnival, spend time buying new clothes and outfits for Jimmy, the playable character, attend class for weapon and social skill upgrades, hit on girls, or just prank students with eggs, fire crackers, bottle rockets, etc. There’s a ton of stuff to do, and each individual thing doesn’t take too long, so I can pick it up for a half hour or and hour, have fun, and feel like I’ve accomplished something in-game. There’s big collection quests for people who like those things, and the icing on the cake is a good story with developed characters and consistently high quality voice acting.

There are a few bugs and framerate issues - I’ve had the game freeze on me a few times - but Rockstar says a patch should be out soon. If you’ve already played it, I’m not sure whether the added content is enough to warrant a re-purchase. If you never played Bully, like me, but like the sandbox genre, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s been a blast.

This post is incredibly nerdy. Just putting that out there up front.

Here’s my vimrc file.

Here’s what it looks like in OS X terminal with white text on black.

Here’s some of the things I’ve customized that have proven useful in my workflow:

• ,t (that’s comma-t) for a new tab; ,< for moving to the previous tab, and ,> for moving to the next tab. The comma comes from the mapleader variable, so you can switch it to whatever; I prefer comma because it’s right next to > and sharing the < key which makes tab switching fast.
• F7 toggles paste mode (vim won’t change the formatting or indentation of the text you’re about to type in insert mode; it assumes you’re pasting from a source that already has that).
• CTRL-N in normal mode will toggle highlighting from search on and off.
• I’ve got some template files for common filetypes (.php, .rb, .py, etc) that get inserted for me when I edit a brand new file of that type.
• I work with a few languages in vim and like omni-completion support on some of them, but not others (it’s really wonky in PHP). So I use a function when pressing tab in insert mode: if it’s a filetype that has omni support, omni support is used, unless the filetype is in an exclusion list. If the filetype doesn’t have omni support, or is in the exclusion list, it uses regular keyword completion. If completion doesn’t apply when pressing tab (like you’re in the middle of whitespace), you get a tab.
• ,y “yanks” or copies to the OS X clipboard in visual mode. ,p “puts” or pastes from the OS X clipboard in normal mode. This makes it easy to work with the regular clipboard.
• When working with PHP, :make should tell you about syntax errors and let you move through them with the usual vim error-navigating stuff (:cnext, etc).

If you are also a gigantic nerd and like some of the stuff here or have suggestions, I’d love to hear about it.