Chatter #34 - August 24, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

More History

There has been a lot of feedback from the people of the RuneQuest-Rules Digest about the History of RuneQuest piece. It's mostly nice, but a bit daunting; clearly I could end up creating a much larger article, and it will never satisfy everyone. Since the piece is a bit opinionated anyway, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Also, I'm not really sure how much rumor to report; I've met most of the RQ/Glorantha biggies, but I doubt they'd remember me (except maybe as the publisher of Interregnum...maybe). I wasn't in on their various imbroglios (how's that for a ten-cent word?

); all I've heard is rumors. So if I start passing on all sorts of rumors I am sure to get them wrong, and somebody will come along and bust my chops royally for lying. Then I'll feel all bad and stuff.

Anyway, I've started work on the Basic RQ booklet that I mentioned below. It's just preliminary, but if you'd like to see the work in progress, I'm keeping the Word document here. Once it's complete I'll convert it into HTML and Acrobat, of course. Need I mention that if anyone wants to help me with this, I'd be glad to have you aboard?

I picked up this handy little Windows tip online someplace, and I've been using it a lot since. Maybe you already know it.

If you're like me (and may the gods help you if you are

), you often keep several documents open within the same application. Word, for example, or Excel. At this moment I have several pages of the site open in FrontPage Express. Anyway, switching between those documents is a pain; it's actually less convenient than switching between different applications with Alt-Tab!

But there's a really simple keyboard command that will switch/cycle between all the documents open in almost any Windows app which allows multiple files to be open at once. Ctrl-F6. It's that simple. Go figure!

The site has won another award: a Gold Award from GameScanner. Unfortunately their link to the award graphic is broken, and they haven't yet responded to my email about that. Also, the site was apparently referenced in a weekly email newsletter from a game store called Gator Games; however, they don't archive the newsletter online right away, so I won't know what they said for a while.

Let me see, what else...oh yes! I've received some new RQ character sheets to post. They're in Word. I started to turn them into Word forms that could be filled out and saved, but that's a fairly laborious process and I haven't had the time to finish it. Also, the Sheets page badly needs to be re-organized; it's one of the older corners of the site, and very clunky.

Last but not least, Tony Den (recently of several large and excellent entries in the Chaos Project) has started his own RuneQuest web page (I don't have access to the URL here and a Google search for "Tony Den" only finds porn, so I'll have to add the link here and to the Links page tonight). Best of luck, Tony—RQ webbing can be challenging, but it's also a lot of fun. But I hope this doesn't mean we won't see more of your stuff on the Project!