The Negative Voice
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2002-11-06 -

Poor Parenting and Planned Indifference

Today was another Liralyn babysitting day. We successfully executed our plan to leave McDonalds early, which allowed us to watch Beauty and the Beast and then play some of the games on the supplemental material. Liralyn's on a serious Disney kick these days. I guess she just happened to hit the right spot in her developmental curve for it.

Thank Ged we were able to leave the place early, because there were several kids there yelling and screaming as they ran around. I'm all for kids having fun, and I don't especially mind kids breaking the official "no running" rule in the playland. But for the sake of keeping me out of the psych ward, parents, when you order that Happy Meal, don't forget to get your kid a super-size order of SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or feel free to do what Julie and I do, which is to parent responsibly and teach our child when it's OK to yell and scream and when it's not. When Liralyn gets loud, all I have to do is say, "Hey Liralyn, indoor voices please." And that's that.

OK, enough of that.

I'm on the beta team for a program called Hero Designer, which helps people to create characters for Hero System RPGs. The author has had trouble finding a good printing solution, and the current system uses ASCII templates into which the program inserts your characters information. Getting a good printout remains on the to-do list.

I pay a lot of attention to this problem, because eventually I expect to print the characters out and use them in a game. Ever since the topic came up on the forum I've been poring over the information I have and can find about ASCII-based page-layout programs. I'm tempted to try to do some work in LaTeX, just to be perverse, but it would be mostly pointless. LaTeX makes some of the nicest-looking hardcopy ever generated by a personal computer, but it requires a huge download, a learning curve, and multiple passes by the typesetting engine to get there. Even if I made a character sheet so beautiful that MOMA demanded the first printout, I'd still be the only person who ever used it. So now I'm looking at all the page-layout work being done for XML, and confronting the fact that what I know about XML ends at the expansion of the acronym. So I need to either buy more books or decide not to care. Given the price of books on computer, their indifferent quality, and my need for a new house, I have a feeling that not caring will win in the end.

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