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I wanted to be mature and witty and polite and strike up a conversation with Anna Wintour, I really did. But like, it was the end of the day? And I was exhausted, in so many ways? And not prepared to enter a room as the last one to be seated and find out two seconds before sitting next to Anna Wintour that I was sitting next to Anna Wintour? And I was wearing the sweater Kathleen Hanna gave me and felt kind of in the middle of an overdramatic identity crisis, like I had no right to wear the sweater OR sit next to Anna Wintour? And when I did look around a bit, no one looked happy and it was kind of a huge downer? So I let myself be kind of shy and quiet that night, to join the rows of sullen-faced people who looked as though they secretly wanted to be at home with their pets wearing comfortable clothing and eating fattening food.
Of course, it's more the idea of Anna Wintour than the person, who was just a lady with a bob in a sophisticated dress sitting with her daughter at work. But that's kind of what Fashion Week is, a lot of facades and all that. At this point it would be really helpful if that Doors song had a lyric mentioning smoke and mirrors or something, but it's mostly stuff about sex and a guy killing his dad, so, uh, nevermind.
Fashion Week is weird. It is very high schooly. Someone will take that and decide that it means Fashion Week highschooliness is getting me down hard without realizing how highschooly what they're doing is. I love fashion but it's disappointing when you have to sift through a lot of junk before you get to, like, the clothes, and the whole point of it all. It's more disappointing when the clothes aren't very interesting. Lately I've been looking to other places for a creative outlet and for inspiration. I miss following magazines and obsessively checking style.com the way I used to but something is different about it now. A year ago I got to go to Paris to interview John Galliano at Dior, and a couple weeks ago today he said he loved Hitler and got fired. Fashion photographs look more posed and the Rayanne Graffs I meet at school more inspiring. I only really miss being obsessed with fashion the way you miss any aspect of a former self, in a nostalgic way, not necessarily as part of a desire to go back. Now I'm more intrigued by mixing fashion with the other stuff I've been enjoying. What's that idea that one person had, about combining your ways of thinking so that you could hear a song as a color and taste a food as a pitch in a song? To me that's much more interesting than relating fashion to fashion, to like, combine mediums, and absorb as many songs and movies and stuff that I can and let all the references intertwine until it's something that makes sense to me. I guess that's what my moodboards are, and outfits are a way to translate it so it feels like part of my identity.
And it's nice to not always share all of that. It's nice to keep some things to myself. It's nice to go to school events and V-Day in the church basement and start a band and make collages and zines and mixtapes and keep a diary and write love letters and snail mail.
I guess the Anna Wintour thing just made a lot of that much more obvious. It wasn't until I got home that I realized how vast the difference is, and how one side of it is nicer to just visit every once in a while, get out of it what I get out of it, ignore or laugh at the rest, and bring the enjoyable stuff back home to add to my collection of all that stuff I'm trying to absorb.
That fell apart into being really train-of-thought, but once I used the "reflection" metaphor in the first paragraph I started feeling really ridiculous and overly serious. None of this was supposed to dramatically hint at anything, other than maybe that my blog is turning away from fashion a little, naturally. How depressing would it be if I was that obsessed with only fashion for three years? That's how old my blog will be in a few days. Strange.


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This easy chicken dish, from Alice Waters' fantastic new cookbook Art of Simple Food II, is just the kind of comforting one-pot main that calls my name this time of year. The chicken is tender, moist and infused with a subtle herby garlic flavor - plus all those roasted garlic cloves are heavenly squeezed onto little toasts. And oh my is the sauce delish... you can't help but mop it up with a smile on your face.
As Alice suggests, you'll only need a simple arugula salad (sauteed spinach is also nice) and toasted bread on the side and you're done. Family meal accomplished.
printable recipe
- 4 chicken legs, or one whole chicken cut into pieces
- sea salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- olive oil
- 40 unpeeled cloves garlic (from 3-4 heads)
- 10 sprigs fresh thyme
- 1 bay leaf
- for serving: toasted slices of crusty bread {Bay Area GF folks: Mariposa baguettes are quite nice here}; simple arugula salad or sauteed spinach
Note: If possible, generously season the chicken with salt and pepper the night before cooking.
Heat two tablespoons olive oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. First, deeply brown the skin side of the chicken - 10-12 minutes. Flip the pieces and brown the underside for another 4 minutes or so. (In order not to crowd the chicken pieces, I do the browning in a couple of batches.)
Preheat oven to 375.
While the chicken is browning, separate garlic cloves leaving their skins on but removing excess papery skins. Place 40 individual garlic cloves in the bottom of a lidded baking dish. Add thyme sprigs, a bay leaf and 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Toss to coat.
When the chicken is nicely browned, nestle it on top of the garlic and herbs. Cover the pan with foil, then the lid. Place pan on the middle rack of your hot oven. After 50 minutes, take off the lid and foil and let the chicken cook another 10 minutes to crisp the skin a bit.
Serve slices of toasted rustic bread with the chicken to dip into the delectable juices in the bottom of the pan.
Serves 4


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Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Retrospective: Dragons of Despair
I do, however, hate the shift in adventure design -- and Dungeons & Dragons itself -- that it heralded. When it was released in 1984, Dragons of Despair was a revelation to me and, I suspect, many other gamers. We'd already seen glimpses of the coming paradigm shift in earlier work by Tracy Hickman, such as "The Desert of Desolation" series and, of course, Ravenloft, but neither of those precursors was as ambitious or as ultimately successful as was the Dragonlance series of modules.
Consisting of fourteen modules published over two years, the DL adventures chronicled -- and that is the right word -- the exploits of a group of pre-generated heroes as they attempted to battle the forces of evil that arose in the aftermath of an apocalypse that left the world of Krynn bereft not just of hope but of the power of the gods themselves. Along the way, these heroes acquire not only experience and power but also a variety of plot complications that propel them into the heights of fantasy melodrama that left many gamers begging for more. Whether they knew it or not, Dragonlance was exactly what a sizable portion of the D&D-buying public wanted and these modules were among the most successful ever made by TSR.
I fell under the sway of Dragonlance too, but the magic of these modules wasn't all-encompassing. Even at the time, I chafed at the pregenerated characters and their predefined relationships and story arcs. I also found the world of Krynn a bit too "twee," as our UK friends might say. So, I chucked the setting and the characters and transported the core of the adventures to a world of my own construction, using characters of my players' own devising. Thus, there was no Tanis Half-Elven or Tasslehoff Burrfoot in my Dragonlance -- indeed they were no kender at all (or tinker gnomes, for that matter). There were characters in my campaign that were somewhat like their Dragonlance counterparts, but that was inevitable, given that Hickman drew on the same fantasy archetypes as my players. The main difference, as I recall it, was that my players -- then, as now -- tended to create somewhat more morally ambiguous characters than those first appearing in Dragons of Despair. This worked rather well, since the cleric of the party (he had no spells, as per Dragonlance canon) was something of a con man and snake oil salesman. That he should become the first true cleric in a generation -- and the cleric of the goddess of healing, no less -- made for some great roleplaying. Indeed, watching what was, in many ways, a rather typical D&D adventuring party slowly become heroes in spite of themselves was one of the primary joys of my ill-fated experiment with Dragonlance.
And that's a terrible shame, because I think, in principle, that Dragonlance could have been one of the most amazing things ever attempted with Dungeons & Dragons. It could have been a glorious framework for the creation of a grand epic involving your characters in your campaign world rather than an exercise in heavy-handed auctorial fiat. My own Dragonlance campaign eventually died, because, as more modules were released, it became ever more clear that each character had a plot arc that the modules simply assumed would be accepted, even when that arc involved the death of said character. That made it increasingly hard for me to adapt the rest of the module material, however much I liked it (and liked it I did in several cases). After a while, it didn't feel like we were playing D&D anymore so much as acting out a fantasy novel that someone else had written.
Of course, that's exactly what Dragonlance was and it's the reason I talk such smack about it. I don't think the idea of Dragonlance is a bad one -- far from it. I do, however, think the implementation of it by TSR was exceedingly poor and fostered and encouraged many baleful trends in the hobby. Had this series included more -- any! -- tool kit material to help the referee adapt it to his own campaign and players, I'd probably still be a Dragonlance fan today. I know, in hindsight, that what I wanted could never have happened in 1984. Heck, I'm not convinced it could even happen in 2008, given both gamer tastes and the difficulty in producing what would essentially be a customizable series of campaign aids rather than an "epic in a box."
Still, a guy can dream, can't he?
33 comments:
No doubt Xak Tsaroth was a well-done dungeon, but this is where I do have to start hating in earnest when it comes to Hickman.
While I found Ravenloft and the Desert series to be more useful game content than not, this is really where that balance shifted the other way, and that I can't find it in me to be apologetic for. That is a just plain fatal flaw for a D&D module; a "dealbreaker", if you will.You're right, of course, that this is Ground Zero for the shift in dungeon design and for that it does deserve a fair dose of opprobrium. My only "defense" of Hickman and company is that they probably didn't realize what they were doing would have such far-ranging -- and deleterious -- consequences. They may have wrought great chaos, but they did so accidentally.
At least, I hope they did.I remember when Dragonlance was first published. I was in high school and some of my gaming friends explained it to me. I was immediately turned off to the idea of pre-generated characters and a canned plot. I didn't like the smell of it and I never bought a single module.
Nevertheless, I eventually bought into the idea of RPGs needing to have pre-planned stories. But not as rigid as Dragonlance. It got to the point where I decided that I couldn't be a good GM without being a good writer. Combined with having to write up stats for characters, balancing it for fair play, I eventually gave up on gaming altogether.
When I got back into gaming in 2005, I enjoyed being a D&D player again. And last year when I wanted to start my own group, I re-examined what gaming was all about. It wasn't until recently that I realized that I enjoyed that 2005 campaign so much because it was what I now know as essentially an old school styled sandbox campaign. And you don't have to be a brilliant writer to DM a sandbox campaign. Just a basic working sense of improvisational creativity. (As you explained in your "Secret of My Success" blog entry.)
As I've said before, how can adventure paths be called a game? Especially with the Dragonlance series. What's the point of rolling any dice at all? It just becomes a game of guessing the rest of the DM's story. It's gaming entertainment. Not a game.Enjoying the books, I was looking forward to getting my hands on the modules. I was expecting a D&D campaign that had inspired the books.
I was disappointed when I got DL1 and found the opposite.
I expected the characters from the book as pre-generated PCs. I didn't expect to be advised to use them rather than my players making their own PCs. This was the first sign to me that the truth was novel → module rather than module → novel. Providing pre-gens, sure. Recommending them?
That may have been the first moment a thought like "this is not D&D" floated through my brain.
Still, I also ignored that stuff. Like any good gamer. Smile and nod at the designer's quaint ideas, then ignore them. I still think there's a decent module in there if you skip those bits.
It was when I got DL2 that I gave up on the modules. It was just too clear to me that these modules were pretty much the opposite of what I'd expected.
I wonder about their success. I mean, no doubt the whole DL franchise has been successful. I don't know a lot of gamers, however, who played or enjoyed the DL modules much. If DL really changed the landscape, perhaps it was more through influences on FR and later products than through the DL modules themselves.I gotta wonder about their success as well. Are there two types of gamers? Those who are happy to go to a con or whatever and run some pre-gen a time or two; and those who are only happy with characters they design, or DM's players design, themselves? Characters they will always remember, and proudly display the figure on the book shelf?
To me the biggest joy of the hobby, 30 years ago and now, is that players create and grow a character. I feel that making modules with pre-gen a necessity is a giant step away from what I get out of gaming.
I have always had the same game world since childhood, and I have been able to adapt any module adventure, including those for Runequest and other games, into my world. I really want to check these modules out to see how hard they would be to cram somewhere in my world for a long-term campaign.I purchased the first five or size modules, and the hardcover. I don't think I ever use much from the modules.
I definitely recoiled from the heavy handed plot of these modules. These modules weren't my first encounter with this style of "gaming entertainment" (to use M.gunnerQuist's words), but they certainly signaled this style was gaining popularity.
It was after this time (late spring of 1987) that I started to abandon AD&D. The next two years, I mostly ran Cold Iron (with some interludes for Traveler and Top Secret S.I.). In 1990, when I moved to North Carolina to start work, I sold most of my AD&D books (all but the PHB) and the modules I saw little use for. I wouldn't play D&D again until late summer 2003 (and even then, Arcana Unearthed not D&D 3.x).
Now through all that time, I have borrowed heavily from D&D modules, sometimes even heavily plotted modules. I did really welcome Dungeon magazine because it's shorter modules didn't tend to have room to force much plot. Also, shorter modules are much easier to convert to game systems with complex combat systems (which sort of stuns me that by the 3.x days, the Dungeon adventures had become longer and not as well suited to the new game...). I am happy that the ending of Dungeon magazine occurred about the same time I abandoned Arcana Evolved. I would have agonized over letting my subscription lapse having been a charter subscriber.
Now that storyline games seem to have gained popularity, I have become a lot more careful of which games I buy. I got sucked into Deadlands and 7th Sea. Top Secret S.I. was my first game with only heavily plotted modules in support, but I got some decent play out of using Top Secret modules.
FrankWondering out loud, I think it would be interesting to know for how many groups was Dragonlance the death knell for AD&D showing up at their table.
Speaking as a player in DL1 when it first came out, I bailed halfway through it. The rest of my buddies bailed somewhere farther down the line. I don't believe any of us went back to a regularly(or at all) played AD&D game after the DL "experience".
We had no shortage of other RPGs to play even in the fantasy world (Elric, Rolemaster, Runequest, etc.)For me, while the growth of storyline modules did coincide with my abandoning D&D, and did affect my purchasing habits and such, there was actually a different cause of my abandonment of D&D.
The problem was I got tired of the overpowered magic, and the fact that I was radically changing rules to keep magic in check. These days I realize what had really happened. I had jumped on the bandwagon of "appropriately challenging" encounters, and dropped the fluff encounters. The problem is that D&D doesn't work in this environment because a single encounter that's challenging enough to make the mage sweat as to whether he has enough spells isn't playable. So what happens is you have a challenging encounter, the mage fires spells with wild abandon. Then the PCs go off and rest. It's damned hard to keep the pressure up.
These days I realize that all that filler stuff, random encounters, loads of traps, and such serve to make it costly to have this shoot your wad in one encounter then go hide until you recover.
On the other hand, the other games I was playing, Cold Iron and Rune Quest, allowed for a single challenging encounter.
FrankI do think it would be interesting to know how many people bought DL stuff and played it vs. people who bought it and just read it.
I pretty much agree with James on this. I'll add one stupid little thing that bugged the hell out of me: the first module said that steel was so scarce that it was used as currency instead of gold. That seemed so cool to me, until I realized that everybody still had steel armour and weapons. That bugged me to no end.For me, while the growth of storyline modules did coincide with my abandoning D&D, and did affect my purchasing habits and such, there was actually a different cause of my abandonment of D&D.
I just wanted to add that for us as a group, AD&D was already on it's last leg. The DL modules was just the final punch (to the groin?).
I'll add one stupid little thing that bugged the hell out of me...
This is all from my foggy memory, but I think for me it was one of the boxed text (for a PC, nonetheless) entries, that had the PC respond "Dragons!?!?! Ha Ha Ha, There's no such thing as Dragons!" which is a bit hard to swallow as a player in a Dungeons and DRAGONS game in a module called DRAGONlance. But it's an old saw we pull out time and again in various different games and have a chuckle.
The other memory I have of playing the DL modules (or in my case, module), was the few people that had read the books and then played the modules, were pretty much sitting around not doing anything as they were bored out of their skulls by the similar(exact?) plotline as compared to the books...Wait, you actually HAD to kill one of the PCs if you followed the storyline?! Is that really true? How did they manage that? Did anybody accept that with no bitterness?
I wonder if this is the source of all the "module-hate" I discovered in the online gaming world. I always really liked modules, but I stopped buying them way before the DL stuff came out and considered them to be fundamentally malleable. So it sort of surprised me to hear the entire format quite regularily denigrated.That the non-Gygaxian influences, and Hickman/Weis line and the Dragonlance line in paticular, are the central influence flowing into AD&D 2E in my charts, is no coincidence. While the rules as developed in 2E were mostly derived from 1E via the Oriental Adventures-derived line, the core assumptions and spirit of 2E were entirely from Dragonlance and such "novel-driven" works.
Lots of folk blame Forgotten Realms, but the real culprit was Dragonlance; though Forgotten Realms became the true novel machine in time, in the original work you can see how classical the structures were, even in the face of the setting's origins long before as a setting for Greenwood's stories. He designed FR as a setting for his own writing, but when he ran it as a D&D setting, he let the players make their own stories (this I know from several conversations with him), he did not dictate that the setting drove their stories. Much like Gygax and Greyhawk, though in FR even in the day the retired hero/Mary Sue factor was turned up to 11 (versus the 8 to 10Gygaxian factor for Bigby/Mordy, etc.)
Marry the predestination gaming of Dragonlance to Forgotten Realms, and there's the 2E spirit...I had all 14 DL modules and we ran several of them BITD (I remember running at least DL1, DL2, DL7, and DL8, and perhaps 1 or 2 others). We used the pregen characters and treated them as a series of tournament-style one-offs, more or less. We didn't keep track of treasure or XP; if a PC died in one module but was listed in the pregens for the next one he showed back up, etc. I remember DL1 and DL8 both being pretty fun (especially the latter because we ran it including all the optional Battlesystem scenarios), the others less so (especially DL2, where literally half the module goes by before the players are actually allowed to make a choice). Nowadays they're boxed up in my mom's basement back in Indiana, alongside my 2E stuff, old Dragon and Polyhedron issues (both c. 1988-92), and whatever else I decided I no longer wanted that I can't even recall anymore what it was.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I wouldn't really blame FR for anything. I never used a lot of the supplemental material anyway, and FR was close to the time when I left AD&D for other games. So, I really can't speak much about it.
I did used to really love Ed Greenwood's Dragon articles when we got glimpses of FR long before it was considered for publication.
For me and my group at the time, DL was really a non-entity. We played one session of DL1. We kept playing AD&D and even some 2e including one really good and lasting (for us) campaign.
Two or three of us who read novels read the DL novels and enjoyed them, but DL never really had a direct impact on the game for us.Another point that perhaps marks my group's experience with these modules as a little different from everybody else's: we read and played the adventures before reading the novels. I distinctly remember liking how in the first part of the first novel they followed the adventure exactly -- you could trace their path through the module, and I was surprised when they did some things differently than how our group had -- and being disappointed when the novel ended abruptly at the end of the second module (not least because I liked the third and especially fourth module (with the floating dwarf-fortress) and was looking forward to seeing them "in action." I'm also pretty sure we had already played through DL8 before I read (or at least finished) the second novel, again being disappointed that there was basically nothing about exploring the High Clerist Tower dungeon, and surprised when Sturm died (because I was 9 years old and not familiar enough with literary cliche to realize that he had "doomed" written all over him from page 1) -- he didn't die when we played it! Either DL10 or DL12 (note DL11 wasn't an adventure, it was a strategic scale wargame) was the first module I read after having already read that part of the novel, which likely suggests why we never had any desire to play through those last few modules (even though IIRC there was some fairly cool (i.e. seemed cool at the time to my 9-10 year old self) stuff in DL12 that wasn't in the book).
ReplyDeleteAre there two types of gamers? Those who are happy to go to a con or whatever and run some pre-gen a time or two; and those who are only happy with characters they design, or DM's players design, themselves? Characters they will always remember, and proudly display the figure on the book shelf?
I do in fact believe that there are at least two distinct types of gamers and attempting to cater to them all at once is one of the things that's done a lot of violence to games widely perceived as "generic," like D&D, since the game tries to be all things to all men and, in the process, loses sight of its origins and purpose.Wait, you actually HAD to kill one of the PCs if you followed the storyline?! Is that really true? How did they manage that? Did anybody accept that with no bitterness?
I honestly can't recall how it was handled in the module. I remember very clearly, though, that at least one PC from earlier modules -- Sturm Brightblade -- is simply dropped from the list of pre-generated PCs on the assumption he died in an earlier one. It's been years since I owned this modules, so perhaps I am misremembering.I don't believe you were actually required to kill off Sturm, but you were absolutely required to split the party up early in DL6, sending half of them south then west into the rest of DL6 and DL7-9, and the other half east into DL10-13 (before everybody meets back up for DL14). The pregenerated PC lists in those modules only included the appropriate half of the party (i.e. you couldn't play Tanis or Raistlin in DL7 and couldn't play Tasselhof or Gilthanas in DL12).
ReplyDeleteWhat gets me is that, with so much Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms fiction on which to draw, the D&D movie was so lame. The DL novels in particular seemed to appeal to a wider (especially more female) demographic than the game.
The modules rubbed my group of AD&D players decidedly the wrong way, though. Sing alongs? "Let's not, and say we did!"- AnonymousDecember 12, 2008 at 8:56 AM
Dwayanu, it's not surprising the D&D movie was lame. Hollywood as a general rule does not "get" fantasy, and D&D, strictly adapted, does not lend itself to great screen entertainment (there's no real "plot" and certainly no definable structure).
Second, the DL novels are also lame. :-) They're not good writing, and wouldn't make good films, either. As some here have done, you might be able to use some of the basic ideas or fundamentals of the DL campaign world and craft a fun movie, but the novels are about the same level of quality as other gaming fiction. I did used to really love Ed Greenwood's Dragon articles when we got glimpses of FR long before it was considered for publication.
I did as well. They were absolutely a joy to read and inspired me like few things back in the day. It's a pity that the Realms eventually proved so successful that TSR (and then WotC) wound up destroying most of what made it such a charming setting.I don't believe you were actually required to kill off Sturm
You've probably seen the modules more recently than I. My recollection was that he disappeared as a pregen character and this coincided with when I read the book where he died, so I may have simply connected the two things unnecessarily. In any event, the modules simply made too many narrative demands on me and my players to work, so we abandoned them and went off in our own direction, eventually creating a campaign that was wholly unlike Dragonlance.And that's a terrible shame, because I think, in principle, that Dragonlance could have been one of the most amazing things ever attempted with Dungeons & Dragons. It could have been a glorious framework for the creation of a grand epic involving your characters in your campaign world rather than an exercise in heavy-handed auctorial fiat.
That's a question that my Silver Age novel series has raised in my head. It came up as "how do I play the Belgariad without Belgarath, Polgara, or Garion". Lately it has been how do you write a quest module that is as easy to drop into a campaign as a location based module.
My current thought is a series of encounters which have a "natural" linear organization but also have variant paths described. Instead of locations you can drop into your campaign it would be a bunch of encounters to drop into your locations. Like a location module it need to have not doing it as an option.For me, when I want to run an epic campaign these days, I just try to create epic bad guys. I set up their machinations. Then I have them react once the PCs decide to engage. (Which, with my current group, they will do.)
In the last one, the PCs took a path I would've never anticipated. It didn't matter, though, because I'd only planned what the bad guys would do. I didn't plan what the PCs would do.
I think I could take the same NPCs, their goals, their motivations, their minions and their strongholds and drop them into just about any world without too much work.
That said, I'm coming to terms with running a more "railroad" style of epic campaign. My current group can enjoy that type of thing, so why not? Of course, unlike Dragonlance, I'm perfectly willing to let a PC die or even let the whole party fail to live up to their "destiny".
In fact, it can be interesting when the next party has to deal with the consequences of the last one failing.- AnonymousFebruary 13, 2010 at 4:07 PM
You don't have to kill off Sturm. He disappears as a pre-generated character in DL10-13 because those modules are about the other half of the party, who went east from Tarsis when Sturm, Laurana, Gilthanas, Tas, Flint, and Elistan (and the two other Solamnic knights who joined them in Tarsis, Derek Crownguard and Aran Tallbow) went south to Icewall. Sturm is on the list for DL14, when the whole party reunites for what should be the final battle of the War of the Lance, and the incursion into the Temple of Neraka that will determine the fate of Krynn. Raistlin doesn't have to turn evil, either, and didn't the time I ran the series all the way through to its conclusion (and certainly won't in my current game, where I'm his player -- I don't do evil PCs).
The modules, while they have a very strong, "railroady" story-line, do in fact diverge far more from the novels, especially after the first book, than you are remembering, and have a good deal of flexibility for taking the story off the original rails entirely, depending on the outcomes of the battles of the High Clerist's Tower, Istar of the Deep, and Neraka (all of which were meant to be run with the Battlesystem Mass Combat rules, with at least some of the PCs on the field as commanders or heroes).
The High Clerist's Tower, especially, can go a bunch of different ways, and the Dragon Orb is actually the weakest of the artifacts the heroes may find in the Tower -- if they get hold of the Crown of Yarus and the 33rd Khas Piece, the most likely outcome of the next engagement is the total destruction of the Blue Dragonarmy as a coherent fighting force, in which case Kitiara and Skie probably have to desert and drop out of sight to avoid being executed for incompetence by Ariakas. (To be continued: comment got too long for the site to accept.) - AnonymousFebruary 13, 2010 at 4:09 PM
As a matter of personal taste, I disagree with almost everything that's been written in this thread. I love narrative gaming, and I love the Dragonlance modules -- I've DM'd them twice, and I'm playing Raistlin right now in a campaign derived from the Silver Anniversary "Saga" edition (which is different enough from the originals to keep it interesting and ensure a few surprises) that started with characters at 1st level, and is about to launch into "Dragons of Despair" now that we're all at or very close to fifth. The group doesn't including any of the original pre-gens except the Majere brothers, but our next session will begin with the fateful reunion at the Inn of the Last Home -- we'll have to see who actually shows up in this iteration of the story. One of these days I'm going to run the modules again, using the Sovereign Press 3rd-edition updates.
My experience with the pre-gen characters has been that that using them leads to more interesting, story-oriented role-playing. A lot of players (including some of the ones I'm playing with now, unfortunately) don't give a lot of thought to developing the characters they make themselves into more than just a miniature and a statblock -- but give them one of the Companions, with a Larry Elmore portrait and a whole page of background on the character's history, personality, and quirks, and even if they haven't read the books they tend to start acting the part instead of just rolling dice and worrying about tactics and wealth acquisition.
It probably didn't hurt, the second time I ran them, that half the players were theater majors. It also didn't hurt any that Annie and Amanda, the players running Goldmoon and Laurana, respectively, had both the looks and the dramatic talent to have played them in a live-action movie (not that we'll ever get one, after the well-deserved failure of the execrable animated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight), or that Amanda was dating the guy who ran Tanis in real life. That campaign only lasted through DL4, because real life intervened and the group split up, as tends to happen with gaming groups that large, but man was it fun, for everyone involved, while it lasted.
On balance, I'd much rather ride a railroad through landscapes as interesting and varied as those of Krynn than wander around in a sandbox that, because the vast majority of DM's do not have the creative chops of even a modestly talented hack novelist like Hickman, rarely has much in it other than sand. I'm loving the Paizo adventure paths for the same reason -- when I'm not playing Dragonlance, I have one character running through Rise of the Runelords, and am about to start another in The Shackled City. No DM I've ever met or expect to meet has either the talent or the time to create a setting as detailed and fully-realized as Sandpoint or Cauldron and their environs. Vive la Railroad!


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A good deal of credit for President Obama's re-election has gone to his campaign's sophistication at interpreting data about potential voters and its use of behavioral research to get supporters to actually vote.
And because success in politics spawns imitators, the approach could well shape how future campaigns are run.
Remember, Republican strategist Karl Rove's and George W. Bush's campaigns of the 2000s get credit for early mining of consumer data. Obama's campaign, however, is credited with taking the data analysis to the next level, refining the process campaigns have used to score potential voters on their likelihood to turn out for a particular candidate on Election Day in much the same way credit issuers score consumers on their likeliness to repay debts.
This meant mining consumer data and other information from millions of would-be voters to find patterns that indicated political leanings and how persuadable they might be.
The election results, in which Obama captured 332 electoral votes and virtually every competitive swing state, "testify to many dramatic changes, particularly demographic and ideological ones, that mark life in Obama's America," wrote Sasha Issenberg in an article in Slate. "But within the practice of politics, no shift seems more dramatic than the role reversal between the two parties on campaigning competence," wrote Issenberg, whose book, The Victory Lab was required reading this election cycle for its explanation of how social science is changing elections.
"Today, there is only one direction in which envy can and should be directed: Democrats have proved themselves better — more disciplined, rigorous, serious, and forward-looking — at nearly every aspect of the project of winning elections," wrote Issenberg.
What exactly did the Obama campaign do? Using techniques gleaned from social science experiments aimed at determining how to get occasional voters to the polls, it targeted Obama backers with weak voting habits who were most likely to vote with enough persuasion.
And there were the reported 66,000 daily computer simulations the campaign ran to model Election Day variables to help it decide where to expend more time and money.
"We had to win this on the micro stuff," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said at a post-election conference of political consultants, according to Buzzfeed.
It's not like the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney wasn't also using data and modern political science tools to try to maximize turnout for its candidate. It just seemed to have less success.
The frustrations Republicans had in getting out their vote on Nov. 6 was symbolized by the Election Day crash of Project Orca, the GOP's digital voter turnout and monitoring system.
While it's impossible to quantify how much data-driven and social-science approach accounts for the president's success, Obama's strong showing surprised many political observers, and certainly many in Romney's presidential campaign. They had assumed Obama couldn't match, let alone exceed, his strong 2008 showing with key parts of his coalition, especially African-Americans and young voters. But he did.
"I think the broader challenge is incorporating the science into the culture of the Republican campaign professionals. I know that it's been an uphill battle at times even within the Democratic Party," said John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University and a lead contributor to The Monkey Cage blog, in an interview. "Grizzled consultants who have done this for years don't like being told by nerds that their stuff doesn't work. It's going to take some explicit investment by GOP activists and leaders to begin to transform how the party conceives of voter mobilization and persuasion."
But James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, said it's going to take more than political moneyball for Republicans to be competitive in national elections going forward.
"I think it's going to take them a long time to catch up because they're basically the Confederate South and the Plains states, if you look at the map," said Thurber. "They're basically white males and evangelical Christians. They've got to reach out. It's not just statistics. It's reaching out with the right policies as well as message to the future of America."
Issenberg and other journalists in Slate, Time, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all have noted the data-driven and messaging work done in the Obama campaign's back office to figure out where the campaign should focus its resources.
But a great deal of how the Obama campaign prepared its get-out-the-vote effort was more traditional, and also showed the benefits of incumbency.
Obama's operation never closed many of its campaign offices in battleground states after 2008, for instance. It also had significantly more of them than Romney. That allowed Obama's campaign to remain a neighborhood presence and develop relations in critical precincts and counties.
But there was also the political equivalent of moneyball: the use of data to focus on which fair-weather or first-time voters to target. And Issenberg says the Democrats' greater embrace of techniques tested by social scientists gives the party a significant and maybe durable advantage over Republicans.
"The gap between the sides may be too large for mere enthusiasm to close it anytime soon," he writes.
Not all Republican political consultants and political scientists are panicking. They acknowledge that Obama's campaign operation had a few steps on Romney's, but they see the advantage as strictly temporary.
"The Republican Party will not have a difficult time catching up ... if they make some systematic changes," said Cyrus Krohn, who once headed the Republican National Committee's e-campaign efforts and is co-founder of Crowdverb, a consulting firm for political campaigns and corporations.
Krohn advised that after taking some time to recover from the bruising campaign, Republicans make the kind of improvements to their use of technology and data that will at the very least put them at parity with Democrats. The GOP must start, he said, even before it fully sorts out the inevitable leadership changes that come after losing a presidential election.
Some political scientists shared Krohn's view that it wouldn't be long before Republicans were at parity or beyond, at least on the technology front.
"I'm less convinced than Issenberg and others that Democratic techniques are all that transformative and made a big difference in the election," said Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College, in an email interview.
"Most of these ideas are out there in the public realm, and Republicans can read journal articles," he said. "There are plenty of right-leaning academics who do this kind of stuff."
And after the nation's most expensive presidential race, Klinkner noted: "Money talks. I'm sure there are plenty of otherwise lefty academics who will work for GOP groups in return for nice consulting fees or access to good data."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Microsoft's New Review and Compensation System - Now With More Cash!
"I am not a number, I am a free man!"
Well, at least we don't have a Six to give out.
Goodbye E/A/U + 20/70/10[I/II] and hello 1 to 5.
Kim, we just don't have a Limited to give to you anymore.
So we have a new review model. And a rework of our compensation. With cash, cash, cash. Forget that Microsoft stock because it's dead in the water and today's Microsoft employee is all about the paycheck. And if you actually work on creating products at Microsoft, you're getting an extra R&D bump.
And with the new 1 to 5 review score we have a new curve, too. 20% of you get a 1 (whoo-hoo!), 20% of you get a 2, 40% of you get a 3, 13% get a 4, and 7% get a 5. And probably fired.
Your review score is now a composite of: your results (where results, not effort, matters), what you did to get your results, and what your proven capability is. With an ideal that teamwork and feedback is now part of the review system, though it's not clear if feedback is mandatory via peer based reviews.
It's too bad that the internal InsideMS blog has been eradicated and wiped out of existence. It could have lived on a little bit longer so that the review system could be discussed there.
So what are your reactions?
Is the InfoPath-based review form dead? Please? Can we go back to a simple little Word form out of respect to our new simplified review score?
The next thing I think of, as a manager, is how is calibration now run. We used to do two stack ranks for the two review scores. Now we either do one or we do three (results, what was done for the results, and proven capability). Three seems crazy.
Next is whether this will indeed help retain employees. We've been losing a lot of good people and the Puget Sound area is ramping up in hiring. Google has always been draining people away. Facebook is now grabbing some great developers and Amazon is hiring like crazy.
So now you have some mystery amount of cash in your future to look forward to. And a simpler review score. But is that what you really want? Is that what you told LisaB during her Listening Tour? Given that Microsoft stock is in the toilet, does the future influx of cash coming in September make you feel better about working at Microsoft and will this make up for having reduced benefits (e.g., a new medical plan with more of that new cash out of your pocket)?
Will you be honestly told during the whole year how well you're doing so that you have frank feedback that helps you be fulfilled with your job? A problem with Stack Ranking is that leadership (once burnt by the review model) holds back praise due to the peer relative Stack Rank pushing a person down and then creating a "surprise" gap between the past praise feedback given and the review result earned. That's not fixed.
Anyway: let's celebrate saying goodbye to the 10% / Limited rating. Since the 10%-ers were not actually fired you ended up keeping people on staff who were designated as now plateaued and limited in there career at Microsoft. They had reached the end of of the ladder. These now demoralized individuals with no hope for future rewards or promotions should have at least been given a Peter Principle plaque or something.
Old school: with respect to the new Scarlet A, I assume that a 4 is the old 3.0 and that a 5 is a 2.5 and that having either a 4 or a 5 now limits other group's interest in your career, which kind of means that we've gone from making 10% of the employees unattractive to making 20% of the employees unattractive. We'll see if that's the case as this plays out of over time.
So, chair-rearranging or just what you were looking for?
Mini-Microsoft Microsoft -- Comments


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The United States and five other nations are embarking on a new program to limit pollutants connected to global warming. But they're not targeting carbon dioxide with this effort — instead, they're looking at methane gas, and soot.
NPR's Richard Harris filed this report for our Newscast desk:
"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the U.S. is teaming up with Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Ghana and Bangladesh to get countries thinking about some potent contributors to climate change."
"For example, soot from diesel engines and wood-burning stoves contribute significantly to global warming. But if you can cut back on it, you can make a difference quickly. Methane is another gas in that category. So are refrigerants called HFCs."
"Most global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, so dealing with these other gases alone won't solve the problem. But a United Nations study last year identified inexpensive ways to cut these other gases. Now the State Department is pledging $12 million of seed money to get an international conversation started."
The new plan follows a strategy recommended by an increasing number of climate scientists, who are tired to banging their collective head against the wall of carbon dioxide.
For example, in a report last month by Christopher Joyce, he spoke to Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, who said that particularly in a weak global economy, placing limits on carbon dioxide — seen as a byproduct of economic activity — is too problematic.
Here's what Zaelke told Christopher: "I mean, it's like picking a fight with the biggest bully in the schoolyard. You know, you get your lunch money stolen, you get your pants pulled down, and you get sent home humiliated. We've made about that much progress with CO2."
So, the focus shifts to methane and soot. As NASA climate scientist Drew Shindell told Christopher in that same story, "these things really have an immediate and quite powerful, in many cases, effect on climate both at global and regional scales."
The Washington Post has more information about the new program, which will also benefit from a $3 million contribution from Canada. Or, you can visit the State Department's site.
Methane was in the news last week in Germany, where a new energy plant makes biogas from fruit and vegetable waste.
As a report in Gizmag notes, "while two thirds of the biogas produced at the Stuttgart plant is methane, around 30 percent is carbon dioxide, which is also used to cultivate the algae. Meanwhile, the remaining sludgy fermentation residue is delivered to the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where it is also converted into methane."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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AngloHaskell 2009 is taking place on the 7th of August at MSR Cambridge, with further activities on the 8th. It's free, and everyone is invited! Simply add your name to the wiki and we'll see you there :-)
Organisational contact: Neil Mitchell, 07876 126 574. If you are lost or confused just give Neil a ring. If Neil's phone is busy, you can also drop Sam Martin a line on 07947 249 476. If you need help when you arrive at the train station, Peter McArthur (07804 596282) lives just nearby.
We're still looking for people willing to put someone up for the night (even if on a floor) would also be much appreciated. Any volunteers?
Date and Venue
7th-8th of August in Cambridge, UK, starting with talks at Microsoft Research and with more planning to happen below.
Directions to MSR
MSR has some directions, which can be best summarised as 'get a taxi'. Here is (hopefully) a Google Earth location of MSR, as well as a Google Maps link. (J J Thomson Avenue is immediately west of Clerk Maxwell Road.)
If the weather is co-operative, the best way to get around Cambridge is by bike. If you're bringing a bike, you could ask Peter McArthur to be your guide.
If you do take a taxi and the driver doesn't know where it is, tell him or her to drive down Madingley Road until you reach the West Cambridge site, J J Thomson Avenue. The Computer Laboratory (next door) has marginally better instructions.
The fastest way to MSR (on foot and public transport) from the station is to cut through to Trumpington Road via Bateman Street (don't follow the driving directions!), and take the Citi 4 or Uni 4. There's a bus stop just across the road from Bateman Street.
To get to the city centre by bus, take the Citi 1 or Citi 3. Do ask to make sure they're going in the right direction though! There are also a number of clearly marked shuttle busses between the centre and station running during the day every 10 minutes or so.
To walk to the centre (20 minutes not carrying luggage), go straight down the road facing you when you come out of the station, bear right when the road ends at some traffic lights / a WW1 memorial / the botanic gardens, and keep walking straight (Hills Road / Regent St / St Andrews St) for quite a while until you reach a pedestrianised bit, at which point you are in the centre.
From the city centre to MSR, you can catch the number 77 Madingley Road Park and Ride which goes from bus stop M on Emma St. (Or find your way to Pembroke or Silver Street, and catch the Citi 4 / Uni 4 from there.) (Note that the 77 doesn't stop by MSR any more, it goes to the park and ride from which you have to walk back, 10-15 mins. This caught me out the other day --SimonM)
To be verified:
Some parking spaces will be available around the back of the MSR building. To get out again, drivers will need to talk to reception to obtain a token.
Per last year, all attendees should bring or make a nametag that identifies you by your real name and/or IRC name. If anyone wants to drag a roll of stickers and a pen along that'll help!
If you can't make the start on Friday, or can only make it on Saturday, that's fine. If you're not sure where everyone's going to be, give one of the contacts a call or a text.
- Philippa Cowderoy
- Neil Mitchell
- Eric Kow
- Tom Schrijvers
- Eric Macaulay
- Peter McArthur
- Tristan Allwood (Friday only)
- Neil Brown (Friday only)
- Sam Martin
- Thomas Schilling
- Edwin Brady
- Tony Cowderoy
- Ashley Moran
- Richard Smith
- Tom Ellis
- A O Van Emmenis (Friday only)
- Joe Edmonds
- Derek Wright
- Lennart Augustsson
- Magnus Therning
- Michael Dever (Travelling over from Ireland, so if anyone else is going, get in touch :) )
- Cal Paterson
- Jón Fairbairn (probably only Friday afternoon)
- Michael Furniss
- James Rowe (Friday only)
- Richard Barrell
- Jon Pretty
- Chris Doran
- Jeremy Yallop (Friday only)
Wifi signup
Wifi accounts are available on request. The signup deadline's the 31st of July. Everyone wanting an account should provide:
- Full name
- Institution
- Country of residence
- email address
Signups here:
If you'd prefer not to give details here, please email Philippa at flippa at flippac dot org with the subject "Wifi signup".
- Philippa Cowderoy, flippac.org, UK, flippa at flippac dot org
- Ganesh Sittampalam, Credit Suisse, UK, firstname.lastname@example.com
- Neil Brown, University of Kent, UK, firstname.lastname@example.com
- Eric Kow, University of Brighton, UK, kowey at darcs dot net
- Peter McArthur, dysfunctor.org, UK, peter dot mcarthur at gmail dot com
- Tristan Allwood, Imperial College, UK, email@example.com
- Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews, UK, firstname.lastname@example.com
- Tony Cowderoy, MML, UK, tony dot cowderoy at mml-net dot com
- Richard Barrell, ???, UK, mycatverbs at gmail dot com.
It's likely that there'll be people in need of crashspace and so forth, so please organise here! Both offers and requests are good.
- I live in a studio flat near the station. I could accommodate one person, but if you value your personal space or privacy then this isn't the place for you. Peter McArthur
Nearby Colleges
Many of undergraduate colleges offer cheap accommodation over the holidays. Locations near MSR include Churchill College (online booking), Wolfson Court (an annexe of Girton College), Fitzwillian College, Robinson College, New Hall Murray Edwards (female only; recently renamed) and Burwells Field (an annexe of Trinity College). (This map might prove useful.)
There's a fairly inexpensive YHA hostel in Cambridge.
Another guest house right next to the station is Tenison Towers (01223 363924).
Planning will be taking place on IRC as per previous years: #anglohaskell on irc.freenode.net
If you're having trouble following things on IRC, the discussion page on the wiki might be a good place to leave comments and questions.
Previous years in Cambridge we had talks in the day on a Friday, followed by pubbage in the evening and assorted activities on the Saturday. This seemed to work, so we'll follow a similar model this year. Sadly we can't have talk space at MSR on a Saturday.
This is somewhat preliminary and subject to change as talks are confirmed or otherwise, but the overall structure should hold:
Day | Time | Event |
Friday | 10am | People start arriving at MS Research |
10:30 am | Tea, coffee and biscuits | |
11am | Keynote | |
shortly after | Talk 1 | |
~11:30 pm | Talk 2 | |
~12:00 pm | Talk 3 | |
~12:30 pm | Talk 4 | |
1pm | Lunch | |
2pm | Future of Anglohaskell | |
2:??pm | More talks | |
3:30pm | Tea, coffee and biscuits | |
4pm | Remaining talks | |
4:??pm | Functional Grit - small talks that may grow into functional pearls. Open session, anyone can give a quick talk! | |
When people get hungry or MSR kick us out | Food! Likely we'll head out for a curry | |
Beer o'Clock | When everyone's finished eating, we'll head for a nearby pub | |
Saturday | 11am | Brunch, chat and impromptu hacking at The Regal - at least someone will stay on until 1pm, next activity may start earlier though, anyone who may show up late should keep phone numbers for one or more of the contacts |
1pm | Afternoon activities - Monad workshop |
Volunteers please! Previously we have had a largely more practical set of talks than you might find at Fun in the Afternoon or an academic event. This was a good thing, and some of the best talks were from people who were far from considering themselves as experts, so feel free to tell us about your experiences.
In the event that more talks are offered than we have time for at MSR, we'll have to work out what we can do to find more time.
Talks planned and/or offered:
- Neil Mitchell - hopefully "Make Considered Harmful"
- Tom Schrijvers - "Monadic Constraint Programming"
- Tristan Allwood - "Using the GHC API to automatically find errors"
- Neil Brown - "CSP Models on the Cheap" (like several others, I spoke last year -- so others should have priority if we get too many talks)
- Sam Martin - "Functional languages in games development: plotting the coup"
- Peter McArthur - Saturday afternoon workshop: "From Map to Monads" Monads for the nervous
People giving talks should add these as they have them :-)
- Monadic Constraint Programming
A constraint programming system combines two essential components: a constraint solver and a search engine. The constraint solver reasons about satisfiability of conjunctions of constraints, and the search engine controls the search for solutions by iteratively exploring a disjunctive search tree defined by the constraint program.
The Monadic Constraint Programming framework gives a monadic definition of constraint programming where the solver is defined as a monad threaded through the monadic search tree. Search and search strategies can then be defined as first-class objects that can themselves be built or extended by composable search transformers. Search transformers give a powerful and unifying approach to viewing search in constraint programming, and the resulting constraint programming system is first class and extremely flexible.
- CSP Models on the Cheap
Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes and the model-checker FDR provide a way to check implementations of concurrent programs against formal specifications and also to check for deadlock-freedom. The Communicating Haskell Processes (CHP) library already provides a way to implement CSP-style message-passing concurrency in Haskell using a CHP monad. In this talk, I discuss substituting the definition of the CHP monad for one that emits a formal model of the program, never requiring the full program to be executed and bypassing the need for source code analysis. This model can then be checked for deadlock or refinement of a specification. I will explain how several features of Haskell make this work possible, particularly monads, purity and lazy evaluation.
- Make Considered Harmful
The hardest part when writing a compiler for a functional language seems to be the make system - how to compile the compiler. GHC has rewritten its build system from scratch at least 3 times. Yhc died under 10,000 lines of Python Scons scripts. There have been many alternatives to make proposed (SCons, CMake ...) but none of them seem to work as well as one might hope. This talk discusses an alternative approach, writing a make system as a Haskell program with a suitable make library providing a convenient DSL. Practical experience suggests that this approach is the only sensible choice for a build system.
- Functional languages in games development: plotting the coup
As a games developer by trade, my experience of the industry leads me to suspect games development is approaching a tipping point where functional languages could enact a successful coup. The revolution would claim a chunk of C++-owned territory for the victor and mark an important milestone in the development of functional languages. It will not be easy. Games development is notoriously demanding and the successful functional language would need to meet stringent performance requirements, have clearly demonstrable 'killer apps', jump through hoops of fire and tell jokes at parties. This talk will discuss how close Haskell is to meeting these demands, the challenges that remain, evidence of functional languages already in games, and how Haskell compares against its nearest competitors.
- Irulan: Using the GHC API to automatically find errors (WIP)
A description of a work-in-progress tool that automatically constructs expressions using exported function symbols from a module, with the aim of finding expressions that cause a user error. This talk will overview what the tool does now, and some of the optimisations it makes when exploring the very large search space of possible expressions.
- From Map to Monads
Saturday afternoon workshop.
Monads are a major stumbling block for most Haskell newcomers. Metaphors don't help. This workshop tries to approach Monads edge on through a series of examples, starting from familiar territory.
Please bring a laptop. You will need to be able to load a .lhs file at the Haskell interactive shell (hugs or ghci). Some familiarity with Haskell, including type classes, is assumed.
Functional Grit
In previous years there has been a successful 'functional grit' section. Usually an informal session for people to briefly talk/demo works in progress, no need to pre-register, just turn up and talk. Think small stones that might turn into functional pearls. If there's time it'd be great to do again this year.
Future of Anglohaskell
In previous years there's not really been much of a plan - the first year was classic benevolent opportunism when the GHC maintainer interviews brought a number of people together, and then someone offered to run the next year in the pub each year. There was a bit of a hiccup this year. At the same time, four years starts to seem like tradition. Time to work out what the tradition should really be, no?
Rather than a talk, this'll be a discussion session. Any and all ideas welcome. Organisers for future years doubly so!
Other activity
After Friday's talks, food and drink would be a good idea! Curry is traditional and probably the default, but we're open to other suggestions. After that, we'll retreat to a pub for the evening.
Repeating previous years, I suggest we go to The Regal for brunch on Saturday to kick off with. That's the Wetherspoons from previous years. After that, punting again if it's not raining too much? Any suggestions for if it's wet?


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- Send or request money: When you send or request money through the Services, we collect Personal Data such as name, postal address, telephone number, and financial account information about the participant who is receiving money from you or sending money to you. The extent of Personal Data required about a participant may vary depending on the Services you are using to send or request money.
- Pay or request someone else to pay a bill: If you use our Services to pay a bill for the benefit of someone else, or if you request a User to pay a bill for you, we collect Personal Data from you about the account holder such as name, postal address, telephone number, email address, and account number of the bill that you intend to pay or request to be paid.
- Add value to your accounts: If you use our Services to add value to your Account or any other account you may have, or if you ask a User to add value to any of these accounts, we may collect Personal Data from you about the other party, or from the other party about you to facilitate the request. For example, if you use our Services to reload a mobile phone, or to request value be added to your mobile account, we may collect Personal Data and other information including mobile account number from the other participant.
- Information about your public profile and your friends and contacts – It may be easier for us to help you transact with your friends and contacts if you choose to connect your contact list information with your Account or if your Account profile is publicly available. If you establish an account connection between your device or a social media platform and your Account, we will use your contact list information (such as name, address, email address) to improve your experience when you use the Services. When your Account profile is public, other users can find your profile to send you money by searching for you by name, username, email, or mobile number on PayPal and confirm it's you by viewing your photo. You can make your Account profile private anytime in your PayPal.me settings.
- Information that you choose to provide us to obtain additional Services or specific online Services – If you request or participate in an optional Site feature, or request enhanced Services or other elective functionality, we may collect additional information from you. We will provide you with a separate notice at the time of collection, if the use of that information differs from the uses disclosed in this Privacy Statement.
- Personal Data about you if you use unbranded Services – certain Services are available without being required to log in to or establish an Account. We will collect Personal Data when you are interacting with and making payments to merchants using our card payment services that do not carry the PayPal brand and when you checkout with PayPal without logging into an account. For our unbranded payment services, your interaction is with the merchant, on their platform. If you are an Account holder, or create an Account at a later date, we may collect information about unbranded transactions and associate them with your Account to improve your customer experience as an Account holder and for compliance and analytics purposes. If you are not an Account holder, we will collect and store all information you provide and use such information in accordance with this Privacy Statement.
- Information about you from third-party sources – We obtain information from third-party sources such as merchants, data providers, and credit bureaus, where permitted by law.
- Other information we collect related to your use of our Sites or Services – We may collect additional information from or about you when you communicate with us, contact our customer support teams or respond to a survey.
Non-Account holders
If you use our Services without creating or logging into an account, we'll still collect personal data, which may include your payment information, device information, and location. When you use our Services without creating or logging into an account, we will use this information to process transactions, prevent fraud and comply with the law. We may connect this information with your account, if you have one or if you create an account at a later date.
3. Why Do We Retain Personal Data?
We retain Personal Data to fulfill our legal or regulatory obligations and for our business purposes. We may retain Personal Data for longer periods than required by law if it is in our legitimate business interests and not prohibited by law. If your Account is closed, we may take steps to mask Personal Data and other information, but we reserve our ability to retain and access the data for so long as required to comply with applicable laws. We will continue to use and disclose such Personal Data in accordance with this Privacy Statement.
4. How Do We Process Personal Data?
We may Process your information for the following reasons:
- To operate the Sites and provide the Services, including to:
- initiate a payment, send or request money, add value to an account, or pay a bill;
- authenticate your access to an Account;
- communicate with you about your Account, the Sites, the Services, or PayPal;
- create an account connection between your Account and a third-party account or platform; and
- perform creditworthiness and other financial standing checks, evaluate applications, and compare information for accuracy and verification purposes.
- keep your Account and financial information up to date.
- To manage our business needs, such as monitoring, analyzing, and improving the Services and the Sites' performance and functionality. For example, we analyze User behavior and perform research about the way you use our Services.
- To manage risk and protect the Sites, the Services and you from fraud by verifying your identity. PayPal's risk and fraud tools use Personal Data, Device Information, Technical Usage Data and Geolocation Information from our Sites and websites that offer PayPal Services to help detect and prevent fraud and abuse of the Services.
- To market to you about PayPal products and Services and the products and services of unaffiliated businesses. We may also Process your Personal Data to uniquely tailor the marketing content and certain Services or Site experiences to better match your interests on PayPal and other third-party websites.
- To provide personalized Services offered by PayPal on third-party websites and online services. We may use your Personal Data and other information collected in accordance with this Privacy Statement to provide a targeted display, feature, Services or offer to you on third-party websites. We may use cookies and other tracking technologies to provide these online services and/or work with other third-parties such as merchant's, advertising or analytics companies to provide these online services.
- To provide you with location-specific options, functionality or offers if you elect to share your Geolocation Information through the Services. We will use this information to enhance the security of the Sites and Services and provide you with location-based Services, such as advertising, search results, and other personalized content.
- To comply with our obligations and to enforce the terms of our Sites and Services, including to comply with all applicable laws and regulations.
- To make it easier for you to find and connect with others. For instance, if you let us access your contacts or when your Account profile is public, we can suggest connections with people you may know and help others connect with you to send you money by letting them find your profile when they search for you by name, username, email, or mobile number on PayPal. We may also associate information that we learn about you through your and your contacts' use of the Services, and information you and others provide, to suggest people you may know or may want to transact with through our Services. Social functionality and features designed to simplify your use of the Services with others vary by Service.
- To respond to your requests, for example to contact you about a question you submitted to our customer service team.
5. Do We Share Personal Data?
We may share your Personal Data or other information about you with others in a variety of ways as described in this section of the Privacy Statement.
We may share your Personal Data or other information for the following reasons:
With other members of the PayPal corporate family: We may share your Personal Data with members of the PayPal family of entities to, among other things, provide the Services you have requested or authorized; to manage risk; to help detect and prevent potentially illegal and fraudulent acts and other violations of our policies and agreements; and to help us manage the availability and connectivity of PayPal products, Services, and communications.
With other companies that provide services to us: We may share Personal Data with third-party service providers that perform services and functions at our direction and on our behalf. These third-party service providers may, for example, provide you with Services, verify your identity, assist in processing transactions, send you advertisements for our products and Services, or provide customer support.
With other financial institutions: We may share Personal Data with other financial institutions that we have partnered with to jointly create and offer a product, such as with Synchrony Bank in connection with the PayPal Extras credit card. These financial institutions may only use this information to market and offer PayPal-related products, unless you have given consent for other uses. We may also share Personal Data to process transactions, provide you with benefits associated with your eligible cards, and keep your financial information up to date.
With the other parties to transactions when you use the Services, such as other Users, merchants, and their service providers: We may share information about you and your account with the other parties involved in processing your transactions. This includes other Users you are sending or receiving funds from merchants, and their service providers when you use the Services to pay for goods or services. The information includes:
- Personal Data and Account information necessary to facilitate the transaction;
- information to help other participant(s) resolve disputes and detect and prevent fraud; and
- aggregated data and performance analytics to help merchants better understand Users and to help merchants enhance Users' experiences.
With other third parties for our business purposes or as permitted or required by law: We may share information about you with other parties for PayPal's business purposes or as permitted or required by law, including:
- if we need to do so to comply with a law, legal process or regulations;
- law enforcement, regulators, government officials, or other third parties (in Singapore or elsewhere) in relation to a subpoena, court order, or other legal process or requirement under Singapore law or regulation, or the laws and regulations of other jurisdictions that are applicable to PayPal or one of its affiliates; when we need to do so to comply with such law or credit card rules; or when we believe, in our sole discretion, that the disclosure of Personal Data is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical harm or financial loss; or to report suspected illegal activity or to investigate violations of a user agreement;
- to protect the vital interests of a person;
- to protect our property, Services and legal rights;
- to facilitate a purchase or sale of all or part of PayPal's business;
- in connection with shipping and related services for purchases made using a Service;
- to help assess and manage risk and prevent fraud against us, our Users and fraud involving our Sites or use of our Services, including fraud that occurs at or involves our business partners, strategic ventures, or other individuals and merchants;
- to banking partners as required by card association rules for inclusion on their list of terminated merchants;
- to credit reporting and collection agencies;
- to companies that we plan to merge with or be acquired by; and
- to support our audit, compliance, and corporate governance functions.
With your consent: We also will share your Personal Data and other information with your consent or direction, including if you authorize an account connection with a third-party account or platform.
In addition, PayPal may provide aggregated statistical data to third-parties, including other businesses and members of the public, about how, when, and why Users visit our Sites and use our Services. This data will not personally identify you or provide information about your use of the Sites or Services. We do not share your Personal Data with third parties for their marketing purposes without your consent.
6. How Do We Work with Other Services and Platforms?
A significant benefit and innovation of PayPal's Services is that you can connect your Account with a third-party account or platform. For the purposes of this Privacy Statement, an "account connection" with such a third-party is a connection you authorize or enable between your Account and a non-PayPal account, payment instrument, or platform that you lawfully control or own. When you authorize such a connection, PayPal and the third-party will exchange your Personal Data and other information directly. Examples of account connections include:
- linking your Account to a social media account or social messaging service;
- connecting your Account to a third-party data aggregation or financial services company, if you provide such company with your Account log-in credentials; or
- using your Account to make payments to a merchant or allowing a merchant to charge your Account.
If you choose to create an account connection, we may receive information from the third-party about you and your use of the third-party's service. For example, if you connect your Account to a social media account, we will receive Personal Data from the social media provider via the account connection. If you connect your Account to other financial accounts, directly or through a third-party service provider, we may have access to your account balance and transactional information, such as purchases and funds transfers. We will use all such information that we receive from a third-party via an account connection in a manner consistent with this Privacy Statement.
Information that we share with a third-party based on an account connection will be used and disclosed in accordance with the third-party's privacy practices. Before authorizing an account connection, you should review the privacy notice of any third-party that will gain access to your Personal Data as part of the account connection. For example, Personal Data that PayPal shares with a third-party account or platform such as a social media account may in turn be shared with certain other parties, including the general public, depending on the account's or platform's privacy practices.
7. How Do We Use Cookies and Tracking Technologies?
When you visit our Sites, use our Services, or visit a third-party website for which we provide online Services, we and our business partners and vendors may use cookies and other tracking technologies (collectively, "Cookies") to recognize you as a User and to customize your online experiences, the Services you use, and other online content and advertising; measure the effectiveness of promotions and perform analytics; and to mitigate risk, prevent potential fraud, and promote trust and safety across our Sites and Services. Certain aspects and features of our Services and Sites are only available through the use of Cookies, so if you choose to disable or decline Cookies, your use of the Sites and Services may be limited or not possible.
Do Not Track (DNT) is an optional browser setting that allows you to express your preferences regarding tracking by advertisers and other third-parties. We do not respond to DNT signals.
Please review our Statement on Cookies and Tracking Technologies to learn more about how we use Cookies.
8. What Privacy Choices Are Available To You?
You have choices when it comes to the privacy practices and communications described in this Privacy Statement. Many of your choices may be explained at the time you sign up for or use a Service or in the context of your use of a Site. You may be provided with instructions and prompts within the experiences as you navigate the Services.
- Choices Relating to the Personal Data We Collect
- Personal Data. You may decline to provide Personal Data when it is requested by PayPal, but certain Services or all of the Services may be unavailable to you.
- Location and other device-level information. The device you use to access the Sites or Services may collect information about you, including Geolocation Information and User usage data that PayPal may then collect and use. For information about your ability to restrict the collection and use of such information, please use the settings available in the device.
- Choices Relating to Our Use of Your Personal Data
- Personalized Services offered by PayPal on third-party websites and services. You may manage your preferences for other PayPal Services that are personalized and offered to you on third-party websites from your Account. We may also provide you with instructions and prompts on how to manage your preferences within the Service experience.
- Finding and connecting with others. If available, you may manage your preferences for finding and connecting with others from your account of the Service you use.
- Choices Relating to Account Connections
- If you authorize an account connection to a third-party account or platform, such as a social media account, you may be able to manage your connection preferences from your Account or the third-party account or platform. Please refer to the privacy notice that governs the third-party platform for more information on the choices you may have.
- Choices Relating to Cookies
- You may have options available to manage your cookies preferences. For example, your browser or internet device may allow you delete, disable, or block certain cookies and other tracking technologies. You can learn more by visiting AboutCookies.org. You may choose to enable these options, but doing so may prevent you from using many of the core features and functions available on a Service or Site.
- You may have an option regarding the use of cookies and other tracking technologies when you use a Service or visit parts of a Site. For example, you may be asked if you want the Service or Site to "remember" certain things about you, and we will use cookies and other tracking technologies to the extent that you permit them.
- You can learn more about our cookies and tracking technologies by visiting the Statement on Cookies and Tracking Technologies page.
- Choices Relating to Your Registration and Account Information
- If you have an Account, you generally may review and edit Personal Data by logging in and updating the information directly or by contacting us. Contact us if you do not have an Account or if you have questions about your Account information or other Personal Data.
- Choices Relating to Communication
- Notices, Alerts and Updates from Us:
- Marketing: We may send you marketing content about our Sites, Services, products, products we jointly offer with financial institutions, as well as the products and services of unaffiliated third parties and members of the PayPal corporate family through various communication channels, for example, email, text, pop-ups, push notifications, and messaging applications. You may opt out of these marketing communications by following the instructions in the communications you receive. If you have an Account with us, you may also adjust your communication preferences in your Account settings. For messages sent via push notifications, you may manage your preferences in your device.
- Informational and Other: We will send communications to you that are required or necessary to send to Users of our Services, notifications that contain important information and other communications that you request from us. You may not opt out of receiving these communications. However, you may be able to adjust the media and format through which you receive these notices.
- Notices, Alerts and Updates from Us:
9. What are your Rights?
Subject to limitation set out in Data Protection Laws, you have certain rights in relation to your personal data. You have the right to request access to your data, rectification and data portability. Please contact us if you want to exercise these rights.
You may have the right to review automated decision making. You may also revoke consent. Revocation of your consent may affect our ability to provide services to you. If you want to exercise any of your rights, contact us. If you wish to complete a request for access to all personal data PayPal holds about you, remember that you may be required to prove your identity.
If you have an Account with any of our Services, you will generally be able to review and edit Personal Data in the Account by accessing the account and updating the information directly. You can also contact us if you do not have an Account or if you have questions about Account information or other Personal Data.
10. How Do We Protect Your Personal Data?
We maintain technical, physical, and administrative security measures designed to provide reasonable protection for your Personal Data against loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, and alteration. The security measures include firewalls, data encryption, physical access controls to our data centers, and information access authorization controls. While we are dedicated to securing our systems and Services, you are responsible for securing and maintaining the privacy of your password(s) and Account/profile registration information and verifying that the Personal Data we maintain about you is accurate and current. We are not responsible for protecting any Personal Data that we share with a third-party based on an account connection that you have authorized.
11. Can Children Use Our Services?
The Sites and Services are not directed to children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect information, including Personal Data, from children or other individuals who are not legally able to use our Sites and Services. If we obtain actual knowledge that we have collected Personal Data from a child under the age of 13, we will promptly delete it, unless we are legally obligated to retain such data. Contact us if you believe that we have mistakenly or unintentionally collected information from a child under the age of 13.
12. What Else Should You Know?
Changes to This Privacy Statement.
We may revise this Privacy Statement from time to time to reflect changes to our business, the Sites or Services, or applicable laws. The revised Privacy Statement will be effective as of the published effective date.
If the revised version includes a substantial change, we will provide you with 30 days prior notice by posting notice of the change on the "Policy Update" page of our website. We also may notify Users of the change using email or other means.
Transfers of Your Personal Data to Other Countries
Our operations are supported by a network of computers, cloud-based servers, and other infrastructure and information technology, including, but not limited to, third-party service providers. We and our third-party service providers store and Process your Personal Data in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world. We will protect your information as described in this Privacy Statement if your Personal Data is transferred to other countries. By using our Sites and Services, you consent to your Personal Data being transferred to other countries, including countries that have different data protection rules than your country. We do not represent that our Sites and Services are appropriate or available in any particular jurisdiction.
13. Contact Us
You may contact us if you have general questions about our Privacy Statement and practices or questions about your Account information or Personal Data.
We want to make sure your questions go to the right place:
Click here to contact us about your PayPal account or transaction, or a card payment made to a merchant.
- Click here to contact us about your Xoom account
Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted Online or by post at 5 Temasek Boulevard 09-01, Suntec Tower 5, Singapore 038985.
If you are resident in the EEA you may contact PayPal (Europe) S.à.r.l. et Cie, S.C.A., 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg's Data Protection Officer which acts as a representative of PayPal by post or Online. Please mark your letter "to the Data Protection Officer".
14. Definitions
Account means a PayPal or Xoom member account.
Device Information means data that can be automatically collected from any device used to access the Sites or Services. Such information may include, but is not limited to, your device type; your device's network connections; your device's name; your device's IP address; information about your device's web browser and the internet connection being used to access the Site or Services; Geolocation Information; information about apps downloaded to your device; and biometric data (e.g., Touch ID/Fingerprint to verify your identity).
Geolocation Information means information that identifies with reasonable specificity your location by using, for instance, longitude and latitude coordinates obtained through GPS, Wi-Fi, or cell site triangulation. Some of our Services may ask you for permission to share your current location. Some of the Sites and Services require this information to provide a specific product or online Service. If you do not agree to our collection of the geolocation information, our Sites or Services may not function properly when you try to use them.
PayPal means PayPal Pte. Ltd. and subsidiaries or affiliates. In this Privacy Statement, PayPal is sometimes referred to as "we," "us," or "our," depending on the context.
Personal Data means personal information that can be associated with an identified or identifiable person. "Personal Data" can include name, postal address (including billing and shipping addresses), telephone number, email address, payment card number, other financial account information, account number, date of birth, and government-issued credentials (e.g., driver's license number, national ID, passport, Social Security number and Taxpayer ID). Personal Data does not include information that does not identify a specific User.
Process means any method or way that we handle Personal Data or sets of Personal Data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organization, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, and consultation, disclosure by transmission, disseminating or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction of Personal Data.
Services means any products, services, content, features, technologies, or functions, and all related websites, applications and services offered to you by PayPal or Xoom.
Sites means the websites, mobile apps, official social media platforms, or other online properties through which PayPal offers the Services and which has posted or linked to this Privacy Statement.
Technical Usage Data means information we collect from your phone, computer or other device that you use to access the Sites or Services. Technical Usage Data tells us how you use the Sites and Services, such as what you have searched for and viewed on the Sites and the way you use our Services, including your IP address, statistics regarding how pages are loaded or viewed, the websites you visited before coming to the Sites and other usage and browsing information collected through Cookies.
User means an individual who uses the Services or accesses the Sites.
15. Additional Information
The information provided in this section may be specific to customers depending on your region or is provided to PayPal from third parties whom you may interact with when using the Services. You can contact us if you have any questions about the details in this section.
Google ReCaptcha
PayPal uses ReCaptcha on the Sites and Services. Your use of ReCaptcha is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
ReCaptcha is only used to fight spam and abuse.


text:
What's great about Gmail Mobile 2.0? It works offline: you can preload messages from the inbox and from all your labels to read them when you are offline. You can also compose messages when you don't have an Internet connection and Gmail sends them when you are online.
The application notifies you when there is new mail in the inbox, so you don't have to constantly click on Refresh. It's now possible to save the credentials for more than one Gmail account and switch between the accounts directly from the menu. What's more, Gmail Mobile 2.0 supports Google Apps accounts, which previously required a separate application.
Some cool things to try:
* scroll using the left or the right key of your phone
* the updated interface for contacts which has more powerful search
To install the new version, go to m.google.com/mail from your mobile phone's browser. From what I noticed, this version is less responsive than Gmail Mobile 1.5 and it uses more data.


text:
Peter Som Spring 2010.
Just another reason to love this collection, and this movie, and hate the fact that the director of TRANSFORMERS is doing a remake. He should totes get together with the, for lack of more perfect word, dumbass remaking Bonnie & Clyde and they can have a party where they plot to ruin more perfect movies. Their ladyfriends Megan Fox and Hillary Duff will be there as well, and they will offer to play the Edies in their mentors' new project, a remake of Grey Gardens.
Oh wait, taken.