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A couple of people on the flist might appreciate this...

Ed Diment has produced a replica of the Liberator in Lego!

(Courtesy of The Brothers Brick.)

I've just found out, courtesy of muskrat_john , that the man that co-created Dungeons & Dragons, and therefore my favourite hobby, has just died. He was 69 (and rather coolly, passed away on GM's Day).

At least I had the chance to meet him once...

I am absolutely shattered at the moment: the trouble with twins is that when one finally decides to go to sleep at 3 am, the other can wake up and carry on the torture :p

On top of that, aeryn_chick  has been very tired today, so I had to look after the babies by myself for the afternoon, which was ... interesting - this is a first for me, but it meant I had to put off Stardust for a day or two :( Her mum has been staying with us to help out but she was out at the time.

Things they didn't tell us when we could have done with knowing:

• Having a low iron level in the blood retards the production of milk - so that's why the babies insisted on feeding for so long...
• All babies lose around 10% of their weight in the first few days - this was extremely upsetting for
  aeryn_chick  as she thought she had been doing something wrong!
• A breach (head up) or transverse (sideways) second twin is not that likely to turn after all during the birth (they should be head down). We'd been given the impression Erin's position was not that much of a problem - it led to aeryn_chick's agreeing to have a planned Caesarean.
• The Caesarean was also recommended because aeryn_chick had an infection dangerous to the babies - we found out about this after we'd already agreed to it!

Ah well, I guess we were lucky really :)

And it all came out well...

There are more baby pics on the website btw: http://www.intermundia.co.uk/315.html

My new company seems to be doing its best to make me feel part of the family - we got a huge bouquet of flowers from them today. I'm not even on the payroll until Monday!

At 7.42 yesterday evening, Matthew was born by Caesarian section. Erin followed two minutes later.

I spent the rest of the night trying to sleep on the floor of the recovery room, as Nicola had a couple of complications (all cleared up now, thank the universe!) and am absolutely shattered. (Which is bouncing with energy compared to the proud mum...)

The babies are well and, as most babies are, are both cute and ugly at the same time!

I am very, very happy and very, very proud...

Pics are at http://www.intermundia.co.uk/315.html.

Dropped my network railcard on Sunday and, despite retracing my steps, I was unable to find it. Having (finally!) found the receipt, I was all set up to splash out a fiver on a replacement, when the original arrived in the post. It seems I dropped it on the bus and the lost property department decided to send it straight to me! Most people would have just left it to be collected, so I'm well-impressed...

Two interviews tomorrow, one at the BBC (yay!) and the other is my second interview at the Royal Geographical Society, both in London. I'm a little nervous about them (and everything else), but I'm feeling positive!

...that nobody on the flist has commented on the Sarah Jane Adventures.

My thoughts were that it was pretty much what I expected - Dr Who for the young-uns. Lots of schoolkids, slitheen fart-gags aplenty and a very simple plot (slitheen trying to destroy the world). The relationship between Sarah Jane and her new charge was very well worked out ("I've never been a mum before...").

Nice, but very targetted at a specific market. More palatable than S1 Torchwood!

In an effort to help make some room for the impending arrivals, I've been doing some weeding on the RPG library. This has involved pulling out items that I've already replaced with later versions and stuff I'm never going to use for play or reference for boxing up in the garage, and also removing some stuff to be kept handy in boxes in the wardrobe for reference purposes.

While doing so, I came across my (copious) notes for my old AD&D campaigns ("Al Qadim", "Waterdeep Nights", "The Land Under Shadow" and others) and couldn't resist paging through them. I'm not one to boast... who am I kidding, I love to boast :)... but I ran some good stuff in those days!

Now, I've got a nostalgic hankering to run an epic D&D campaign again ;)

This has been on the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons site for the last day.

Speculation has been rampant on several of the forums I use that 4th edition is on its way, and the announcement is scheduled for 6.30 tonight (local US time) at Gen Con. Most posters assume the new edition will be based on the new Star Wars Saga RPG game.

I suspect this announcement may have broken an embargo!

It doesn't bother me much, I gave up on D&D not long after 3E appeared, but it'll be interesting to see what will happen next to the granddad of all RPGs!

Please forgive the rant, but I've come to the conclusion that the Uk season 2 release of BG has the worst user interface I've ever seen.

On loading, we get the usual lengthy series of "don't copy this" warnings, followed by a lengthy opening animation.

Click on "play all" and you're straight in (which is fine) but you can't switch the DVD display from episode/chapter to elapsed time. More significantly, it seems to be impossible to set a save point, which is kind of essential unless tou want three hours uninterrupted viewing.

That's ok, thinks I, I'll use the episode menu: whereupon I'm confronted with a menu consisting of episode 1 and a return to main menu link. About three seconds later, it changes to episode , then 3 and 4 in a continuous cycle. Not exactly convenient!

Did they not user-test it or something?

It's back to the bad old days of "look what we can do". It's especially wierd when you compare it to season 1 - which went straight into a no-nonsense, no animation menu...

Ok, rant over.

BBC interview tomorrow - kind of looking forward to it!

God, I hate Wimbledon fortnight...

It's only been on for a day and already it's pissed me off twice. First, the Snows' enjoyable Battlefields show is put off for half-an-hour because Tim "I can't cope with any pressure at all" Henman's match overran and he might just only lose by one set instead of three, thus pushing my intended early night back by another thirty minutes. Secondly, the repeat of Balderdash & Piffle (missed on Friday for a number of reasons) is put back by an hour for unscheduled highlights! Naturally, I've only just discovered this because I'd set the video for the original time.

I'm having flashbacks to trying to catch Star Trek in the eighties.

In other news, I didn't get the Sussex job ("you did well ... outstanding candidates ... given it to someone with more experience" - have I heard this somewhere before?). All hopes now focussed on the BBC (yeah, right).

On the upside, I got to spend some money on DVDs after my birthday last week: Battlestar Galactica season 2 (£18 in Virgin), Alias season 4 (£23 in Virgin - wish they'd had season 3!) and Babylon 5 Movies Collection (£15 from a second-hand dealer in Newhaven market).

Saw FF: Rise of the Silver Surfer on Sunday. Just as much fun as the original - although I so want to see some crossovers in the current flood of supers movies. I know the X-men are out (obviously a completely different universe), but why on earth would Spidey not have been at the wedding? Some pre-publicity for Iron Man would probably have slotted in ok as well (again, Tony Stark is a shoe-in for a guest). I don't want comic level multi-movie crossovers but guest appearances would be fun.

And the website's had a bit of a revamp if anyone's interested! This includes the re-posting of the old Couro Prido pages - this is the first step to actually relaunching the whole thing!

Incidentally, my ISP has decided to award all existing customers with a free .uk domain name after some major spam hassles. Wonder what I should go for?

I've been able to see and feel our unborn babies kicking over the last couple of days (aeryn_chick has commented on this herself).

Quite a welcome birthday present!

We've recently acquired a couple of newer PC games and the desktop won't run them - it seems 900 MHz is just too slow these days (who knew?)...

This means it's upgrade time again! Given that my machine is home-built, I suspect I only need to worry about the motherboard and CPU, but what should I be going for these days? What's a good speed, RAM etc?

We're not heavy gamers, but it's Civ 4 that's causing the problem - it needs a 1.4 GHz minimum. Other than that, there's a couple of space combat games and a couple of flight simulators. I might like to expand the system in the entertainment/tv direction in the long run, so it would be nice to make allowances for that, but it's not a priority right now.

Budget is an issue - I'm unemployed and aeryn_chick doesn't earn a lot - plus I keep coming across comments that it's simply cheaper to buy a new "barebones" PC!

Any recommendations from the serious techies? What to buy? Where to buy it?

Thanks!

You know, I definitely don't have the knack of regular posting...

I've been meaning to post for a couple of weeks now, so here's what I would have done in more detail!

I am now unemployed again. My contract at the Institute ended last week and I'm actively hunting jobs. Two applications in and more to go. No interview offers yet, but I am hopeful. This has, however, reminded me why I never temped for a career - I hate applying for jobs and I hate the uncertainty of not knowing what I'm doing next.

Did my back in on Tuesday (reaching to turn the shower on of all things): this is the third time I've had the same injury when stretching horizontally to do something - I must have a weak muscle there. It's left me with a tendency to ache when I'm standing or sitting upright and incapable of lifting much with my right hand. I'm getting better now, but it still hurts.

Still, at least I'm getting the chance to finish watching B5 on DVD!

The Curse of the Golden Flower was, as expected, a superb film (no spoilers here!). Glorious colour, spectacular action (the final battle put Peter Jackson to shame) and an incomprehensible plot. It was basically a tragedy and panned out much like a full-blown Shakespeare. Highly recommended, although if anyone can explain why the Emperor was poisoning his wife in the first place, I'd love to know!

Spider-man 3 was also pretty much what I expected and I enjoyed it alot (again no spoilers). Hopefully the rest of the year's blockbuster sequels will prove as rewarding! Despite what the critics are saying, it wasn't too long (the other two are around the same length and pacing) - but it did try to pack two movies' worth of story into one - and I think it did suffer for that (Harry and Kent both suffered from this). The humour moments were a little too contrived, but were often hilarious, especially the whole John Travolta sequence. The Sandman was a superb piece of special effects and Venom seemed spot on to me (as somebody who never read the comics). They're talking up further movies and they're definitely planning them - I only know of Gwen Stacey in connection with one event in the comic - and it didn't happen in this film...

Heroes - I'm now up to date as far as episode 18 (pre-hiatus) and waiting with baited breath for the chance to see the rest of the season. I'm loving it: most of the characters are very well realised and I'm eager to find out what happens next. I especially like Hiro, Claire (can I just say, ew!) and DL so far. Not impressed by Jessica/Niki or the politics brothers. One question: how does everybody know the Haitian is the Haitian when he never speaks (except to Claire)? (There are at least two cases of people calling himself that when they couldn't possibly know - the accent would be the only give away.) One thing bothering me about the setting is that there are no costumes: yes, I know the whole point is that these are normal people, not exhibitionists, but people have been getting these powers for at least 15 years. And Hiro is the only one that got it into his head that he's a superhero? Surely at least one nutter will be whizzing around New York wearing a cape and mask? I suppose that Primatech might have got to them, but I suspect they'd have made the evening news first.

In bad news, I definitely won't be going to Confounding Tales - I simply can't afford the travel. So, to everyone who's going: enjoy yourselves, and put in a couple of roundhouse punches for me!

... and had to turn it down :(

The job was a part-time post in Ealing, which I didn't expect to get anyway. It would have been a two and a half hour commute each way, and the travel costs would have meant we were little better off than we are now. We would have considered moving, but it wouldn't have been practical for at least six months (apart from anything else, we're going to need aeryn_chick's maternity pay, which she'd have lost in this case) and then certain new arrivals would have made moving very difficult. And in the meantime I wouldn't have seen much of them.

So, I had to say no.

On the up-side - I got a job offer! That's got to bode well for the future :) And there are several local jobs coming up...

Oh yes, and aeryn_chick had her 12 week scan on Monday. Pics are at http://www.intermundia.co.uk/album-children-u11_6.html if you're interested. They're moving!