I haven't been able to get in as much gaming this holiday season as either I or the kids would have liked, largely because I haven't been able to prepare things. However, we did get to play through part of the Triple Ace Games adventure The Tale of the Fabulous Four. Luckily, there were actually six pre-generated characters supplied, since there were actually six kids playing. It's set in Boston in 1915 and is about a bunch of kids who overhear some criminals planning to steal a diamond and decide to thwart them.

The roster was:

• L.B. playing Nancy Hestletwain
• T.A. playing Lucius Munroe
• E.A. playing Samantha Hardcastle
• M.A. playing Oscar Whitfield
• T.B. playing Arthur Abrahams
• O.B. playing Brent Hardcastle

We played through Act 1 and Act 2, though I compressed much of Act 2 because we had a very limited amount of time for the session; I skipped Scene 3 entirely, and wrapped things up completely differently.

I was definitely off my game, and six screaming kids didn't help things — for some reason I had more trouble keeping them settled down and on track than usual.

There were some good moments, though, and I think the kids had fun.

As for the adventure itself, I had a few problems with it. I suspect that if I'd had more time to adapt it things would have gone better. Oh well.

We'll probably finish this off this summer, when T.B. and O.B. are back visiting.

• Farming As I Have Known It: 60 Years in Central Appalachia, by S. Thomas Bond, copyright 2007; first edition.

  This book, on farming and farm life, was written by my father over 10 years in his spare time, and is an absolutely fascinating look at farming from the era of my great-grandparents and grandparents through to the present day.

  Although I grew up on a working farm and spent most of my time before I graduated from college working on it, I was never as deeply involved with farming as my father, something I now regret deeply. This book gives a very good idea of the determination, hard work and deep thought required to build and keep a family farm in West Virginia.

  Dad had copies of this printed and some of them were Christmas presents for 2008.

  The book is available on the web.

• The Mint, by T. E. Lawrence, aka John Hume Ross, aka T. E. Shaw; copyright 1935, 1955 by Doubleday & Company, Inc; first published in Norton Library 1963 by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc; ISBN: 978-0-393-00196-9.

  Interesting and quite different than Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The usual GM in my adult group wasn't available this month (for very good reasons), so I ran the “Dead Men Tell No Tales” one sheet for Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds based game Pirates of the Spanish Main for them. I had a lot of fun, and they seemed to enjoy it.

If you happen to be using Windows Emacs and Cygwin Python there's an annoying interaction where “M-x run-python” hangs. The easiest way to fix it is to mount the directory where you have your emacs installation into the Cygwin file name structure. For instance, I have my emacs installation in C:\emacs\emacs-22.2, and in a cygwin shell I did mount -b ‘C:\emacs' /emacs, and now running the Cygwin python works.

The emacs function run-python adds the emacs data-directory to the PYTHONPATH in the emacs process-environment before running python; unfortunately, since this is the MS Windows emacs, its data-directory starts with a drive letter and a colon. When the Cygwin python initializes sys.path it splits PYTHONPATH at the colons, which means sys.path ends up with the drive letter as one component (usually interpreted as a relative path) and everything after the colon as another component. It that's a valid Cygwin pathname for the Emacs data directory (which is what the above mount command did), things work (accidentally).

It turns out that if you execute the command xterm-mouse-mode (or evaluate (xterm-mouse-mode 1) in your initialization file) when running Emacs under Screen it allows “non-modified single clicks” to work. Normal mouse functionality is still available by holding the Shift key while clicking. I use the PuTTY ssh client for remote access to various servers, and this works well Emacs in Screen under PuTTY, too.

I was very pleased to discover large parts of µstr compile and seem to work under VMS v5.5-2 with GCC 2.7.1, which is almost the only compiler available to me on that machine. The other is VAX BASIC, which has adequate simple string handling, but lacks advanced string handling and has only very painful facilities for dynamically allocating complex data structures and working with them.

Coding Horror points out the hotfix for the:

⚠ Windows - System Error
Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

error when trying to suspend a Windows XP machine with 2 gibibytes. The hotfix is hosted by Owen Cutajar and is from Microsoft KB909095.

Update: 2008-12-11: Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. Even after applying the hotfix, one of my laptops still won't hibernate.

I really need to run more Fudge games. Fudge Bunnies & Burrows in particular.

• Kull: Exile of Alantis, by Robert E. Howard, copyright 2006 Kull Productions, LLC; illustrations copyright 2006 Justin Sweet; Del Rey Books/The Random House Publishing Group/Random House, Inc.; first printing; ISBN 0-345-49017-7.

Well worth reading, and not just as a precursor to Conan. The essay “Atlantean Genesis” by Patrice Louinet, included in the book, argues on p. 288 that with the three Kull tales that were published during Howard's life, Howard had invented a new literary subgenre: “Heroic Fantasy”, “Epic Fantasy”, or “Swords and Sorcery” by modernizing fantasy through eliminating “…the chivalrous aspects, the flowery language, and stilted personalities, writing violent tales in a realistic style…” and that seems reasonable.