Month: April 2002

Just a brief update from the road. Karen and I are in Camden Town, London, but are shortly heading for Paddington Station for the train to Oxford. We stayed a night with my friend James Wallis in Clapham, then the three of us spent a day at the Tate Modern museum of modern art. Last night we stayed with Karen’s friends Tatanya and Kenneth, who run a web site for ocean rowers–that’s one or two people crossing the ocean in a rowboat. Tatanya’s son Teddy crossed the Atlantic in a solo rowboat a couple of years ago. He told her it soon became easier to row than sleep. He would just have his eyes half-closed, dreaming, rowing alone into the night in the middle of the ocean. Tatanya is from Odessa in the Ukraine, where Teddy still lives. The president of Ukraine was so pleased at the first Ukranian to row across the Atlantic that he gave Teddy an apartment. Teddy’s voyage was apparently the source of no little national pride.

We’re off across the top of the world tomorrow, and I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post from the road. We’ll see!

Meanwhile, here’s a nice though somewhat inaccurate article about the Delta Green computer game, from ign.com.

And here’s a keen image you might dig.

This morning at about 2am I was importing digital video when I found an anomalous moving image on an unrecorded section of the tape. It’s quite peculiar, and in the interests of all things peculiar I’ve posted a Quicktime video of the image for the curious and the damned. Not a hoax or an imaginary story, true believers, just a weird thing that happened. Soon afterwards I heard something moving inside my microwave oven, but these are the things that happen when you keep working 13-15 hour days.

I found good news in my inbox this morning from Sam Schreiber, a friend of mine from high school. Sam and I played D&D together, but bonded over writing. In those days he was working on a swords & sorcery novel, and I served as loyal reader and critic. When the plotting of the novel got too unwieldy, he started over with it as a screenplay. One thing led to another and he’s been pursuing a career as a screenwriter ever since. He’s had various day jobs over the years while working on screenplays, but it looks like he might have finally reached the promised land, as witness this article in today’s Hollywood Reporter:

ChickFlicks pockets ‘Sticks’ script

April 17, 2002

For the second time in the past two weeks, fledgling writer Sam Schreiber has sold a script to Sara Risher’s New Line-based ChickFlicks production company. ChickFlicks has optioned Schreiber’s original screenplay “Sticks & Stones,” with the deal coming just days after the studio fast tracked Schreiber’s “Heart of Summer” script. “Sticks” follows a former pool prodigy who gets back into the game after discovering that her father — who abandoned her years ago — has ridden to the top of the professional pool world on the coattails of another prodigal talent. Risher will produce “Sticks” with Chris Emerson. Schreiber is managed by Jump Rope Prods. Attorney Phillip Rosen brokered his deal.

Go Sam!

I’m thrilled to report that while driving to the studio this morning, there was a sudden jam right ahead of me and I skidded off into a construction zone, running down several helpless traffic cones in the process. No actual personal or vehicular injury occured and I was back on the road in a matter of seconds. But lo, the blood doth pumpeth.

Unknown Armies players, here’s a sneak preview of the draft UA2 character sheet, ready to use in PDF format. Looks a lot better than the horrible, embarrassing, teeth-grinding one I created for UA1. This one is offset to be photocopyable from the book itself without wrecking the binding; I’ll do a final version that’s centered properly for PDF downloading.

Christian Matzke made a terrific short film of Lovecraft’s short story “Nyarlathotep” that played at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival last fall. He’s now hard at work on his next project, an adaptation of HPL’s “Herbert West, Re-Animator.” That story is an episodic tale originally printed in serial form, and he’s adapting one of the episodes under the title “An Imperfect Solution.” Christian is a dynamo at props and visual style, and his web site has lots of great images from the shooting. Check it out! If all goes well he debuts the film at the HPL Fest this October in Portland.

I need a macro that posts a Dispatch here reading: “I’m so slammed with work right now . . .”

Firing on all cylinders though. I really feel like I’m at the top of my game right now. I have three big projects, all of which are great and thrilling and challenging. I’m doing writing, editing, video, audio, web pages, game design, and graphic design, day in and day out. It’s just fantastic. I really thrive when I can be pushing multiple projects forward at once, so there’s real variety in my day. It’s when I’m just pushing on one thing that I get easily distracted.

There’s not a lot to write about in my life at present except for all this work, so in brief:

I spent five hours Saturday night brainstorming Delta Green computer game issues with Paul at Flying Lab. Total progress was somewhat slight, because we spent much of our time exploring alternate avenues to some recent ideas and finding those avenues didn’t work. But it was completely worthwhile because it strengthens the decisions we’ve made recently. Meanwhile, our Phenomen-X project is off and running, and is great fun so far.

We’re recruiting volunteers to host computer game screenshots and such on their web sites. If you’ve got a site of any kind and want some neat graphics and images from the game, send an email and we’ll send you a zip file with a bunch of neat stuff in it shortly.

The Unknown Armies rulebook is kicking mountains of ass. It’s about 2/3 laid out and we’re collecting comments on the final section from some long-time UA writers now. I began proofing the book last night and wow, it’s good stuff. This book rocks on toast.

Mike Daisey’s Off-Broadway show opens for previews tonight in New York, with the official opening May 9. The web site is running great, and I’ve got seven of the short video bits we shot finished and ready to show whenever we pull the switch on that project. They turned out great. Mike is really funny and enjoyable to watch.

Karen and I split the country on Tuesday the 23rd, and I won’t be back home until about May 27. I’ll be online sporadically during our trip, but doubt I’ll be accomplishing much here on the Dispatches. It does look like I’ll take my laptop with me to write on the trip, and when I get home I can share the fruits of that labor. At present, our loose itenerary looks like this:

April 24: Arrive in London, stay with James Wallis of Hogshead Publishing, a capital fellow and gracious host.

April 26: Take the train to Oxford then rent the Exeter, a 42ft. canal boat, and sail up some canal or other for a week. Allegedly it’s no problem for two random tourists to sail this thing alone up and down the canal. We already know that four short blows on the whistle tells the other boats: “We cannot steer!”

May 3: Back in London for a night to impose on James yet again.

May 4: Chunnel train to Paris and on to a town nearby where Monet’s house and gardens are.

May 7 or 8: Train from Paris to Geneva, Switzerland, where we stay with a college friend of Karen’s.

May 10 or 11: Fly (?) from Geneva to any convenient city in Spain.

May 11-21: Visit my aunt and uncle near Malaga, then Edge Entertainment (the Spanish publishers of UA and soon Puppetland) in Sevilla, and finally however much of Spain we feel like seeing in the time available.

May 21: I return to Seattle, Karen stays on for another week in Spain or wherever else she goes. I fly on to Los Angeles that night for the E3 computer gaming trade show to promote the Delta Green project.

May 26/27: Back in Seattle. My work for UA2 and Mike should be pretty well complete, and I’ll have all summer to start something new and fun.

And now I have to get back to work.

There’s a new interview online with Russell Williams, one of the founders of Flying Lab Software, about the Delta Green computer game project, with a couple early screenshots.

Delta Green fans should check this out: www.Phenomen-X.com.

Yesterday I saw something amazing: someone playing the DG computer game. Taylor at Flying Lab sent out a note about how the pathfinding was off to a good start, and I went to see what he had to show. There was far more than I expected. I’d been seeing pieces of this and that–rooms, furniture, agents–but was shocked to see they had come together into an actual playable piece of game. Taylor sent three DG agents down a hallway into a large room, where they found two cultists. Gunfire erupted and within a few moments both cultists and one agent were down. Taylor sent the remaining two agents through the room, into an elevator, and then out into a huge underground temple, where the chunk of game ended.

It looks gorgeous. The graphics are really something else. The furniture and rooms are beautifully executed, and the work they’ve done on lighting code really pays off. The lighting and shadows turn the textures from great to fantastic, giving them an almost photo-real quality that was breathtaking to me.

It’s still just an early stage in the prototype. For the gunfight, the agents and cultists just stood there firing, since we haven’t coded their dodging, taking cover, etc. Some movement commands required more pathfinding than the agents are yet capable of. The dark young is out for repairs. But wow, it was uncanny to see someone actually playing this game we’ve been working on for three and a half months. I’m jazzed.

Spam email has been one of my pet peeves for years. Five or six years ago I set up an autoreply script in my email program to generate a nastygram on command, but was soon thwarted by the faked email headers many spammers used. Then for a while I forwarded all my spam to an address set up by the FTC, for whatever good that did.

Then a month or so ago I took the plunge and signed up with spamcop.net. It’s the first thing that has worked.

Spamcop.net is a service run by one guy with a few servers in his basement. He’s developed a filtering routine that recognizes the majority of spam formats. For $30 a year, I set all my accounts to redirect all incoming email to my spamcop.net address. Spamcop filters my email and strips the spam out into a held-mail directory. Besides the Spamcop filter, you can also choose to turn on a half-dozen filters made by other people and groups. All email passing muster can be retreived by my email software as usual through POP or IMAP. In addition, Spamcop boasts one of the best webmail interfaces I’ve seen. I can log on while away from my main computer and all my email is there, from all accounts. Given that I receive email at three different accounts every day, this is very handy.

How good is the filtering? I’m just using the basic Spamcop filter, none of the extras, but it’s superb. In a typical week, Spamcop removes well over 100 spams from my incoming mail. Maybe 8-12 get through. It’s really a joy–my inbox is my friend again, instead of the terrible tyrant who brings me pain.

Spamcop does block some legitimate email, mostly random stuff from mailing lists I subscribe to that happen to match some characteristics it suspects. But it doesn’t delete anything without my approval. Instead, I get an email report from Spamcop (configurable to arrive on any or all days of the week I want) listing the subjects & senders of all held mail. Using Spamcop’s web interface, I can see all these filtered emails at once. I can mark them all for deletion and/or mark some for release to my inbox. When I release one, it adds the sender’s email address to a whitelist of approved senders whose mail will no longer be filtered out.

But it gets better. Spamcop also has a very sophisticated spam-reporting service. I can take a spam that got through the filter–or any spam Spamcop filtered–and ask Spamcop to complain about it for me. Spamcop takes the email text, including the full headers, and runs a bunch of scripted tracing routines on the upstream providers, web site and email addresses, and so forth, and generates reports to whatever relavent postmasters it can uncover. It then gives you a list of the addresses it’s sending reports to and you can check/uncheck each one, in case you know some are wrong (such as your own ISP, though that hasn’t happened so far). It’s easiest to just stick with its recommended ones, which are the ones the reporting script has the highest degree of confidence in for accuracy, and then you tell it to get busy.

Spamcop sends out email reports to those destinations with all the dirt it could uncover about the source of the spam. Here’s an example from today, showing what it found about a piece of spam I fed it. This isn’t a report it generated, just the detective work it did and told me about on its results web page:

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SpamCop version 1.3.3 (c) Julian Haight, Joel Martin 1998-2002 All Rights Reserved

Saved email:

This page may be saved for future reference:

http://spamcop.net/sc?id=z35248995z52f5600fbcb01d6ab5533bb06f04ba9ez

Converting X-Received to Received:

[show] “nslookup 112.120.118.211.relays.ordb.org.” (checking ip) ip = 127.0.0.2

[show] “nslookup 211.118.120.112” (getting name) no name

[show] “whois 211.118.120.112@whois.arin.net” (Getting contact from whois.arin.net)

   Redirect to apnic:

   [show] “whois 211.118.120.112@whois.apnic.net” (Getting contact from whois.apnic.net)

      whois.apnic.net redirects to krnic

      [show] “whois 211.118.120.112@whois.krnic.net” (Getting contact from whois.krnic.net) (old krnic) Found Admin: b0027848@users.bora.net

      Found Technical: b0027848@users.bora.net

      whois:211.118.120.0 – 211.118.120.255:b0027848@users.bora.net

Routing details for 211.118.120.112

Using last-resort contacts:b0027848@users.bora.net

Whois found:b0027848@users.bora.net

Found link:http://216.240.140.55/datacenter.htm

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

[report history]

Tracking ip 216.240.140.55:

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

Routing details for 216.240.140.55

[refresh/show] Cached whois for 216.240.140.55:infosystems@atmlink.net

infosystems@atmlink.net: abuse.net atmlink.net = abuse@webvision.com, postmaster@atmlink.net, spamtool@level3.com

abuse.net atmlink.net = abuse@webvision.com, postmaster@atmlink.net, spamtool@level3.com

Using best abuse.net reporting addresses:abuse@webvision.com postmaster@atmlink.net spamtool@level3.com

postmaster@atmlink.net bounces (9895 sent : 6883 bounces)

Using postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net for statistical tracking.

spamtool@level3.com redirects to level3@admin.spamcop.net

Whois found:postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net level3@admin.spamcop.net abuse@webvision.com

Found link:http://216.240.140.55/healthcare/627200/

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

[report history]

Tracking ip 216.240.140.55:

[show] “nslookup 216.240.140.55” (getting name) no name

Routing details for 216.240.140.55

[refresh/show] Cached whois for 216.240.140.55:infosystems@atmlink.net

infosystems@atmlink.net: abuse.net atmlink.net = abuse@webvision.com, postmaster@atmlink.net, spamtool@level3.com

abuse.net atmlink.net = abuse@webvision.com, postmaster@atmlink.net, spamtool@level3.com

Using best abuse.net reporting addresses:abuse@webvision.com postmaster@atmlink.net spamtool@level3.com

postmaster@atmlink.net bounces (9895 sent : 6883 bounces)

Using postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net for statistical tracking.

spamtool@level3.com redirects to level3@admin.spamcop.net

Whois found:postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net level3@admin.spamcop.net abuse@webvision.com

Please make sure this email IS spam:

From: “john” (Can you Afford not to have Health Insurance?)

View full message

Report Spam to:

Re:210.164.102.78 (Administrator of network where email originates)

To: miura@acs.co.jp (Notes)

To: okada@ntt.ocn.ne.jp (Notes)

Re:211.118.120.112 (Administrator of network with open relays)

To: b0027848@users.bora.net (Notes)

Re:211.118.120.112 (Automated open-relay testing system(s))

To: Internal spamcop handling: (testrelays) (Notes)

Re:http://216.240.140.55/datacenter.htm (Administrator of network hosting website referenced in spam)

To: abuse@webvision.com (Notes)

To: Internal spamcop handling: (level3) (Notes)

To: postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net (Notes)

Re:http://216.240.140.55/healthcare/627200/ (Administrator of network hosting website referenced in spam)

To: abuse@webvision.com (Notes)

To: Internal spamcop handling: (level3) (Notes)

To: postmaster#atmlink.net@devnull.spamcop.net (Notes)

ATTENTION: Report only email addresses and web sites which you think are used by the spammer. If you are unsure, do not check any boxes which default off. This will send mail to a network administrator. Please do not waste their time if this is not spam. The last thing we want is for administrators to stop taking these spam reports seriously.

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See that? All those addresses in the last few sections are the people who will get the report Spamcop generates about this spam. Hopefully, a few of them will be in a position to shut down access by the spammer.

Spamcop isn’t perfect. It’s becoming very popular, and at times the mail server gets slow or goes down due to heavy access. He’s adding another server this week and will continue to do so as necessary–one benefit of paying for such a service is there’s money for upgrades. But the majority of the time it works great. Getting all this endless spam out of my life, and even having the tools to finally strike back, is a fabulous, wonderful thing.

I love Spamcop! You should to, at http://www.spamcop.net/

I had twenty minutes to kill so I did this.