Well, the Enochian chess article is all zipped up and shipped out. I got in such a hurry to finally get the files off to chessvariants.com that I accidentally originated the email from my wife's account. Good thing I signed it. I wonder if anyone will notice that an email signed "Jeff" came from an address "amy@blahblah"?

Well, the Enochian chess essay is completed. All that remains is for me to successfully zip and transmit the whole puppy to chessvariants.com. The data is on a new, currently uncorrupted disk. I should be able to submit the essay tonight, assuming the zip software I just downloaded works as claimed. Unfortunately, the qeue at chessvariants is backed up right now, presumably with 44 squares contest material. My Knight Chase submission isn't even up yet.

I've not got a hundred pages of The First World War under my belt. Apparently, the seeds of animosity between France and Germany were sown in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 & 1871. I may have to read a book on that conflict soon. Who knows, maybe the Franco-Prussian War fits my criteria for a "small war", a conflict of scope that I can wrap my non-grognard brain around. (Other small wars of interest to me are the Falklands War of 1982 and some sci-fi conflicts: FASATrek's Four Years War, Traveller's Fourth Frontier War, and BattleTech's Capellan-Supremacy War.) The bigger wars I can only readily grasp tiny slices of, WWI's air combats or the Battle of Jutland, or perhaps WWII's 1st Alamein (the last may only qualify as small as presented by Lou Coatney).

I sat down today to write up a new charsheet for my D&D character, Endrin Greencloak, only to discover I had already done the work several months back and forgot about it. I should post some details of Endrin and the campaign. Anyhoo, in lieu of the charavter work I scanned in a new piece for Star Trek Star Ship Tactical Combat Simulator Millenium Update and Archive. Cleaning up the image so it looks good takes some time, so it may be a week or two before I can get the vessel submitted. In the meantime I am committed to finishing the Enochian chess project tomorrow or Tuesday and continuing the preliminary research on the Jack the Ripper project.

My old TSR boxed sets have this one trait that annoys the bejabbers out of me. A standard 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper doesn't quite fit. The box is slightly too small. I can't get "The Taming of Brimstone", the module from Dragon #71 into my Boot Hill boxed set and my photocopies of the appendices from Richthofen's autobiography won't fit in my copy of Dawn Patrol. What good does having a fairly deep box do me if I can't fit other stuff in it?

I had a great time at Don & Sue's tonight. Sue ran her D&D campaign for the lot of us (Don, Michael, John, Bruce, and me). Her campaign consists of an ongoing series of those 'Adventure Keep' pamphlet modules. This evening she ran her fourth installment The Crypt of St. Bethesda. Good adventure. Sue runs a fun game and the group is good people.

Afterwards Michael flipped on his X-box and he and I played a little Legends of Wrestling II. I managed to get stomped as both Koko B. Ware and Greg 'the Hammer' Valetine, though I lasted longer than I expected.

Sue brought up wanting to play my superhero game and we sent a tentative date of May 14th for "issue" 2. Yippee!

I returned the Red Baron's autobiography to the library today. I've started another WWI book, The First World War by Martin gilbert. It's been slow going so far. This baby is a big, heavy, serious tome.

Finally, the library also had in The Magicians of the Golden Dawn by Ellic Howe, the last book I need for the Enochian chess project. Howe offered no big relevations vis-a-vis Enochian chess, but he did provide some additional corroboration of the existence of the game circa 1896. I'm now ready to put the finishing touches on my essay and send it in, except for last stupid delay. The disk I've been using to truck the data between home and work seems to have become corrupted. My back-up copy is at the office, so it looks like I won't be able to finish the project until Monday evening.

Strange dream...
Early this morning I had a strange and mostly incoherent dream about a visit to a game store or some other place that sold BattleTech miniatures. One mini hanging on the display rack drew my attention because I had never seen one like it before, because I don't think it exists in the real world. So here's what I know about this new mech design, the Jester:

You can tell at first glance that the Jester was done by the people who designed the Awesome. The resemblance is as similar as the Phoenix Hawk to the Wasp. One of the key differences between the Jester and Awesome is the fact tha the Jester is only a light mech. The basic outline of the Awesome is preserved, but it is a much skinnier mech, almost with a "scarecrow" effect like the Vulcan.

The shoulder-mounted armor plates reach up significantly higher on the Jester, such that these plates could possibly protect the head from shots from either side of the mech (at least if those shots originated from an angle of about 90 degrees to the centerline of the mech). The head, while blocky like the Awesome, does not have the same "face" effect because the entire front of the head is a square slab of canopy material, as if the face was covered by a square black veil.

Both arms end in armanent, much like the right PPC-arm of the Awesome. These weapons, which are mounted just below the elbow, appear to be lasers of the same type as used on the Locust, but I couldn't tell if they were supposed to be small or medium lasers. The right torso has a weapon system that looks much like an Awesome's torso-mounted PPC, but the weapon in question is either a large laser or medium laser. It's definitely one size bigger than the arm-mounted lasers, which look puny in comparison. There's no left torso-mounted weapon. Below the right torso laser and above the hip actuators are a pair of rotary machineguns, much like on a Chameleon or Merlin. These could be either two center torso mounts, or one each in the right torso and left torso.

I got the overall impression in the dream that the Jester was an early light recon design, but not as small as 20 tons. Also, its not as fast as later light recon mechs, like maybe it is a 5/8/? mech. I couldn't tell if it had jump jets or not.

I'm going over to Don & Sue's tomorrow night, maybe to play a boardgame, maybe to play a session of Sue's D&D campaign. I'm hoping to jumpstart interest in resuming my Marvel campaign "Home Team".

Since I'm thinking about it, here's my cover image from the first session of the campaign.



Hideously amateurish, I know, but it did help set the mood for the game.

I *heart* Google
Googling "Jack Ripper Aleister Crowley" yielded, among other things, this lovely site. I love these kids and their kooky conspiracy theories. Quator Coronati Lodge is about as Satanic as a church sewing cricle.

Here's another link that might prove handy. Could teenaged Edward Alexander Crowley be one of the PCs?

So yesterday the Golden Dawn book I've been needing to finish my Enochian chess project came into the library after I got back from it. And my schedule doesn't allow for a trip back today. Grrr. At least they got it in. I should be able to complete and transmit the article tomorrow.

Last night I read the main section of The Red Baron, the part containing Richthofen's memoirs and letters. I don't see the overbearing arrogance that Kennett warned about. Maybe he read it in the original German or one of the earlier translations. The rest of the book contains some meaty stuff: a short memoir written by Manfred's brother Lothar, an account of the death of the Baron, and an appendix will plane illos among other things. I plan on photocopying the appendices and sticking the pages in my Dawn Patrol boxed set.