That Tuesday in November thing

I made no fewer than three attempts to vote today. I figured trying on the way to work might be a good idea, but there was a longish slowly-moving line out the front door of the building. (I heard from a couple of people later on that the line took about an hour and a half to get through at that point.) I came back again at lunch, but the line looked to be at least half an hour long (all still inside) and I didn't have that long. At 5:15 it took only about 20 minutes to get through, with the only complication being the two of me on the voter rolls. The magic ballot-eating machine said "1475".

XML: The Mercifully Uncollectible Specification

ET had a CCG-style game entitled Cthulhu: The Mercifully Uncollectible Card Game. It had the important feature that you had two key stats, Sanity and Knowledge; you started with 50 SAN and died if you dropped to zero, but whenever you lost a SAN you gained a KNOW, and you could use your KNOW to play cards out of your hand.

This corresponds scarily well with my job. Like, I've confronted the horror that is W3C XML Schema: it doesn't disgust me any more, which is probably bad, but mostly because I've converted the SAN loss from reading the spec into knowledge. Which then brings us into the fine world of Lovecraftian W3C specs...

XML Schema. KNOW 6 / 5 SAN. Specification. An oily black cloud that validates XML documents.

WSDL. KNOW 3 / 3 SAN. Specification. A screaming headless specification with a thousand young. Gain 2 KNOW if WSDL and XML Schema are both revealed.

Infoset. KNOW 2 / 4 SAN. Specification. A terrible tree-shaped mound of square brackets that devours all it comes across. +2 to attack any other specification.

The one terrible problem, of course, is the analog of Lightning Bolt, in which every player gains a single momentary glimpse of the horror of the entire web services specification series...I can't decide whether this should be Semantic Web or WS-Unspeakable.