Caracara sighting this weekend

I went birding this weekend, taking Chloe on Mikael's neighborhood bird walk. We saw a big raptor give us a nice show: a crested caracara took a long slow flight across our field of view, favoring us with several different angles.

I got a little frustrated during this walk, trying to keep flying birds in my binoculars, but this bird cooperated beautifully. I say this sort of thing a lot, but I didn't know we had any birds like this here...and right in my neighborhood. They're actually year-round residents. A big falcon relative with some gorgeous colors.

Other notable birds that I got to see were a Savannah Sparrow, whose stripes I enjoyed, and a Pied-Billed Grebe. Chloe and I had enjoyed the grebe's diving behavior on a previous trip to this same spot, the Parmer Village model homes area, but we didn't see any of that this time.

I'm enjoying the binoculars I received for Christmas; they've become essential on these walks. It's amazing the views you can get with a little patience.

Explaining Republican Fears, like the Deather thing

Adam Cadre, who is always interesting, has a neat essay here to explain why some Republicans seem to have such outlandish fears of Obama, among other things.

I have mentioned Cadre before, regarding his excellent novel Ready, Okay! and his short story December.

Video of me juggling knives

I posted over on my juggling blog a link to a very brief video of me juggling knives, from the past December's Madrigal Dinner.

DUNE Express free printable dice game

This looks interesting...an easy to make printable dice game based on the Dune series.

Someone is seriously upset about The Golden Girls

Umm, this article is on a Christian site. I guess it's serious? Although it's kind of frothing at the mouth batshit crazy? And the fellow is really quite bothered about The Golden Girls? And says they made lots of kids gay? And he seems to know so very much about gay culture...it's like he's got a mental catalogue of gay roles. Like he's been watching the men very closely.

So I guess this is what tactical nukes means?

I bumped into a mention of some very small nuclear weapons that we built back in the day. It was kind of shocking to see how small these things were. And so inaccurate that it was the radiation damage, not the explosion, that they were used for. Nice name, though: Davey Crockett.

Can every app please copy Chrome's search?

There are so many things to like about the search function in the Google Chrome web browser:

• At the touch of Ctrl-F, it appears as an embedded dialog box, tiny, in the upper-right of your window...rarely obscuring what you're searching through.
• As soon as you type some text, it displays the number of hits, and tells you which hit you're on.
• It has two small arrows, up and down. You can immediately go to the next or the previous hit. I love this. So often I search for something, and because I know the text, I know I need to go backwards to find it....something that often isn't easy to do.

Okay, I have to admit that this was a problem for me in Emacs, not because Emacs won't search backwards, but because I'd never learned that keystroke. So I just looked it up right now. I googled for 'emacs search backwards' and the answer was in the text that Google displayed for the first hit; I didn't even have to go to the page. Ctrl-s searches forward, Ctrl-r searches backward. Simple.

Kenneth Hite on Setting in RPGs

Kenneth Hite says setting is the game designer's primary responsibility....and adds many other interesting ideas to it, in this blog post. I'd forgotten about his blog, found it deep in my delicious links.

ChoiceScript....language for writing choose-your-own-adventure games

I do think about writing a choose-your-own adventure thing now and then. I'm hampered by the knowledge that most of them are terrible. Sure, you could open an infinity of choices for the player, but in practice, the writer doesn't want to spend infinity writing choices, so the writer collapses many options down so they either result in a quick end to the story (often a death), or joins them.

It would be interesting to try this in an online format, though, since pagecount wouldn't be a limit. I imagine pagecount was a big limit on the old Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Wait, they're not old. They have a website for a company called Choose Your Own Adventure.

HTML, of course, makes a choose-your-own-adventure thing pretty easy to make at home; you could simply have each 'page' be an HTML file, and provide the choices as links.

But you can get more interesting than that. Up to now, when I muse about this possibility, of writing electronic choicebooks, I think of TiddlyWiki as format...because it has a lot of features that would help, like being a single-file format, and a built-in editor.

Then I bumped into ChoiceScript: it's designed for doing these things. It's got a simple wiki-like script. And it looks like it makes HTML aided by JavaScript. I liked the company's page about why they make such multiple-choice text games.

Oh, and this might well be a good way to get a kid into programming, with a nicely concrete application. That might get me to actually try it out.

The makers of this script have a fairly interesting game, Choice of the Dragon. It clearly uses variables to make the game text more tailored than a paper game could.