A new edition of D&D?! *grumble grumble*

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So the announcement was made earlier today by Wizards of the Coast that they’ve actively begun development on a new version of Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m not quite sure what I think about this…

On one hand, I have concerns that I’m about to become the very person who has always bugged me in this hobby – the guy who rants about how the latest version sucks compared to his own preferred game of yesteryear. I guess in some respects I’m already at that point – I absolutely hate Essentials because I think it’s over-simplifying and over-powered and adds unnecessary tweaks to an already fragile-from-errata game system. I’m also not much of a fan of the Power Cards that were released sometime last year in a vain attempt to add a Magic: The Gathering, gotta buy new packs of cards every single week!-style element to our weekly sessions. So as much as I don’t want to be the guy who passes judgment, it looks like we’re probably already there anyways! 😉

On the other hand, my concerns about “5th edition” after reading the letter from designer Mike Mearls linked above are that with the direction that it sounds like they want to take, I fear that D&D is going to become needlessly complicated again for the sake of trying to recoup losses of older players who left D&D for Pathfinder and the like because they felt that 4e bastardized older versions of the game that they love. Talk has already been circulating around the ‘net of a modular system where DMs and players could pick and choose the rules that they like and leave the rest behind, thus allowing them to create a rule set that more accurately represents what they want to play, but frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it.

The problem I see is, DMs and players already have the option to take and leave parts of the game that they don’t care for – it’s called house ruling and it’s existed forever to allow DMs to be flexible at their tables. Unfortunately, what’s left from here is allowing the option for a DM to remove core fundamentals of the game (i.e. “I don’t like skills, so instead I have this complex system of abilities grouped by activity that players can buy from with points instead…) and I guess I just fear that without the core of the system really being locked down, more or less, it’s going to make for a really muddy playing field for the rest of us who are completely ok with the core rules as they currently exist in 4e…

I got back into D&D in 2009, so I’ve been playing 4e now for about 3 years. Before that, as a kid growing up we played AD&D (2nd edition) and honestly in retrospect, the thing was so damned complicated that I’m not really sure how we ever got anything done at all! In fact, usually we didn’t, instead opting to spend literally hours on end just creating characters and copying over various statistics from tables in the PHB to our character sheets. I don’t miss Magical Defense % and I don’t miss THAC0 with the current version of D&D … believe it or not, it’s actually refreshing to be able to just sit down and play a game that’s not so ridiculously complex because somebody couldn’t get over the fantasy-reality game barrier that the wizards they were fighting against weren’t frail enough when thumped upside the head with an imaginary broadsword!

Plus, frankly I don’t feel like buying more books and having to learn a new set of rules just because I’m old and crabby like that… 😉

Luckily we’ve still got probably a good 1-2 years before anything is ready for shipping regarding the proposed new version, and I do think that it’s pretty cool that WotC is being so open about playtesting because it gives those who want to participate actively in the development of the product the ability to do so from the very beginning. That’s not really for me, both for time and patience’s sake, but I know people who are interested so I’m sure I’ll still be in the loop on how things are progressing. As for acceptance of whatever the final product of 5e ends up being … well, I’d like to say that I’ll be open to change, but I’ve also seen Essentials so we’re definitely going to have to wait and see if WotC does, in fact, force me into being the curmudgeon that (at least with regards to D&D) I’d prefer not to have to be!

When war seems inevitable…

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I can’t help but wonder as I read more and more confrontational headlines … will Iran be the country to finally stand up to us???

A few weeks ago there was the US drone that found its way into Iranian hands – they say because they hacked it, we said, well, first it wasn’t even ours, and then it was, but it just “malfunctioned” and wasn’t actually infiltrated by the Iranians. Then we had the audacity to ask for it back, all the while the Secretary of Defense confirms that we “absolutely” will continue to fly these drones over foreign airspace despite opposition.

This morning, I came across two new headlines that brought this back into the forefront of my mind:

I mean, it’s no secret that our current wave of politicians really wants us to go to war with Iran – it’s like with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wrapping up, they just don’t have anything to keep their hands busy unless they’re spending millions of dollars blowing something up overseas, but I think what scares me is that at this point another war honestly seems just about inevitable, especially when you also factor in examples like those above where it looks like for the first time in a while these guys might actually push back when we continue to maintain this same World Police stance that has gotten us into so much trouble in the past.

For me, it all comes back to our “Do as I say, not as I do” foreign policy that seems arrogant to me as a US citizen, so I can only imagine what it must seem like to people in all of these other countries that aren’t the USA, especially when we’re trying to carry out certain intents that no way in hell would be allowed to happen if the sides were changed and they were over US soil. If a foreign spy plane was seized over Washington, DC and we knew who it originated from, we would go to war. If a foreign navy situated aircraft carriers up and down the Atlantic coast “just in case,” we would go to war. If another nation wanted to dictate what the US could and couldn’t do with regards to science and weapons manufacturing and nuclear technologies, we would tell them to butt the hell out and then threaten to go to war with them…

And so I can’t help but get a little nervous as I read these kinds of stories because frankly it just sounds like the same vicious cycle all over again – America wants to dictate how another country operates, country opposes, America declares war and spends billions of taxpayer money persuading them to change their mind, and at the end of the day it’s we the people who actually end up suffering. It would be one thing if Iran declared war on us or was even making threats, but instead they’re just telling us to mind our own business and of course, we won’t.

Maybe it will turn out that they really are doing some extremely evil shit underneath that mountain  in Qom and all of this military pressure will be fully justified, or maybe in fact we’ll come to find that Texas has been up to some extremely evil shit and other countries would’ve been in their right to place naval forces out in the Gulf of Mexico … you know, just in case.

In search of non-dance-related Xbox suggestions…

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So despite Christmas officially being over and us even being more officially out of money for such frivolities, this weekend on a very random whim we found ourselves at Best Buy purchasing an Xbox 360 Kinect.

Now admittedly the driving force in this particular purchase wasn’t actually me and my love of all things sedentary and digital, but actually my wife and her sister and their combined desire to dance it up, a la Dance Party USA or Dance Dance Armageddon or whatever the hell all of these crazy, jump up and down games are that apparently all the rage right now are called. And though let’s be 1,000,000% clear, yours truly has absolutely no intention or desire to pretend that he actually has any rhythm of any style or sort – when the dancing games go on, the door to my office closes with me on the other side of it! – but nonetheless gyrating games aside, having a new game console in the house once again does open up the doors of possibility towards all sorts of awesome, non-dancing games that I would probably enjoy very much taking part in!

But that’s really where I need some help. Needless to say, it became very overwhelming perusing the Xbox aisle at Best Buy that for years I’ve just skipped over to get to the Wii games, and it quickly became clear that now owning an Xbox makes available a whole slew of, shall we say, more mature games than one would typically find on Nintendo’s beloved family console! I’m all for trying my hands at some games that aren’t necessarily rated E for Everyone … I just need some suggestions as to what I might want to check out.

So far, I’ve been eyeing the following:

I promised myself that I wouldn’t order anything for a couple of weeks so that I can finish a couple of projects that I’m working on, so in the meantime … what else do I need to be taking into consideration for my first pile of new games to play on the 360? Remember that I’ve actually never played either the 360 or the original Xbox, so pretty much anything for either platform is fair game, assuming that I haven’t played it on the PS2 (which if it doesn’t have GTA in the title, I probably haven’t…).

Any and all suggestions welcome and greatly appreciated – help me break in this new console in style!!! 😀

Thin Post : The Last Pizza…

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Oh no no no – don’t even for a minute think that I might be giving up my all-time favorite food of all-time just because it’s making an appearance in a Thin Post here! More so, think of it as the metaphorical last pizza, I suppose…

Sorry to scare you like that – I certainly didn’t mean to alarm anyone! For what it’s worth, I did actually eat pizza for dinner last night, though … probably a lot more than I should’ve, along with plenty of other indulgences as of late, and so the basic idea behind this post was simply a public declaration that I’m finally done indulging in food for a while!

Between cookies and candies and snacks and sweets, it didn’t really come as much surprise to me that I sorta let things slip over the holidays. Especially with traveling home, I tend to be pretty nostalgic when it comes to food, and thus our vacation also became an opportunity for me to indulge in my favorite potato chip brand from up north that I can’t get anywhere close to down here, and the old pizza place that we used to order from all of the time, and even the grinder shop that I kind of grew accustomed to before I left, too! Add to that plenty of homemade favorites like sweet & sour meatballs and broccoli cheese casserole and even simple cheese & crackers, and well…

Needless to say, even when we got back home last week I kinda found myself having a hard time returning my diet back to earth, what with all of the super-sized portions that I’ve gotten used to eating over the last month or so. I don’t even want to think about how many extra pounds I might’ve possibly gained back during the whole ordeal … at this point I just want to start getting back on track again!

I think I’ve got a fairly good shot from this point out – my wife went grocery shopping last night and is prepared to start making us healthier meals for dinner starting again next week, and the majority of the cookies and treats from Christmas have just about dwindled down to nothing, thanks in particular to my D&D group who had no trouble whatsoever helping me polish off an entire container of Christmas cookies during our latest game last Friday night! The palate is just about clear, and thus next week I can actually start to truly begin the healing process…

But never you fret, pizza – I’ll no doubt see you again soon. Maybe with far more veggies and not nearly as many slices at one time, but I know in my heart that we’ll meet again soon, friend. I just need to get skinnier first so that I can still be enjoying you another 50 years from now, that’s all. 🙂

“the government makes mistakes”

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Reading this kind of story makes me all the more infuriated that this still somehow actually got signed.

Sure, it’s all fine and dandy to say that you’re only going to indefinitely lock up the terrorists, that is, until you accidentally lock somebody up for SEVEN YEARS when they’re actually not really a terrorist at all.

Would you be willing to spend seven years of your life erroneously locked away at Guantanamo Bay, being tortured every day while your children grow up without a parent, all under the unsubstantial guise of “protecting freedom”?

Seven years is a long time…

Warren Buffet on Personal Finance

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I found myself stumbling across several clips of this Yahoo! interview with billionaire Warren Buffet from last summer, and I liked this one in particular because it’s some very good, very simple advice on how to manage your own money…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idr6c8NHuWs

Of course, the sad truth is that most Americans will carry one type of debt or another their entire life. I’m no stranger to that – lately it seems that just as we pay off one bill, another something swoops in to take its place … but it’s still a fantastic thing to keep in mind because as much as we want to pretend that we’re investing in our future by pumping money into retirement accounts instead of paying off debts first, it just seems silly to get excited about making 8-10% in the future when you’re paying 18-24% in interest for any outstanding credit card debts today!

What’s in a word count?

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I’m not normally one to really get caught up on word counts or anything, but a couple of months ago I discovered a nifty, little plugin for WordPress that will count and summarize by month everything in the database for you, and I guess I just couldn’t help but spend the next hour or so installing it on each of my sites to tally up how much writing I actually do each year!

Simply put, I do A LOT of writing each year.

Looking back at 2011 exclusively, I published about 213,000 words – almost 122,000 of them were for this blog that you’re reading right now, another 38,000 were 12 months worth of The Humor Column; believe it or not, I pumped a whopping 17,000 words into that goofy, seasonal pumpkin blog of mine; and the remaining 36,000 were for various other projects near and far, some of which I’m still scrambling to fully wrap up and officially launch here in 2012.

Now to say that I was a bit taken aback by those results would indicate that I was just about floored when I looked back at my full archives and found that over the last 13 years, I’ve written just shy of 1.2 million words here on the Internet … and that’s not even counting all of the freelance work that I did for the newspaper up in Michigan, which I’m sure at an estimated 500 articles over the course of 3 years would easily push me up over the 1.5 million word mark! 😯

I guess it’s just kind of crazy to look back over such a history, one where I was really only just getting started, and still see such an impressive mountain of stuff left behind as a result … it reassures me that apparently I have been pretty busy all this time after all! It’s also exciting to think that as big as my count was for 2011, I’ve actually got even bigger plans to beat that one here in 2012 … and considering that my 2011 numbers were almost 25% higher than 2010 (which was 50% higher than 2009), it helps to prove to myself that I actually do have the momentum to take this where I’m trying to go if I really keep my nose down and get the work done.

And mind you, I’m certainly not saying that I’d even consider word count to be a bragging point for most of the things that I do. It’s neat to me from a blogging standpoint because I traditionally view this site as more of a journal/brainstorming arena/place to just write about whatever, so purely for the type of blogging that I enjoy, more IS better because it’s a direct representation of how much random writing I put into it each year. For something like my humor column, though, that has a regular schedule and more or less I found also maintains a pretty consistent word count, I guess it’s interesting to see those numbers included in my grand total for the year from a writing is writing angle, however just because I wrote 40,000 words instead of 35,000 doesn’t necessarily mean that it was better work in that regard.

Anywho, just wanted to ramble a little after tallying up the numbers because I still can’t believe the numbers on the page! To help quantify, my first printed humor book was 210 pages long, which is a little over 30,000 words … meaning that essentially I wrote enough to fill 7 more books of that size in the last 12 months!

On second thought – that makes me feel even more guilty for not actually getting out my second humor collection last year… 😳

To make up for it, though – just between you and me because we’re buds like that – 250,000+ words in 2012, and I promise to finally get that new book out!

:mrgreen:

The Celebrity Apprentice, Season 5

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So they recently announced the latest cast to jump through hoops for The Donald on The Celebrity Apprentice and surprisingly enough, it looks like this year might actually have a better chance of retaining my interest than the last! Season 4 was a bit rough for me because although there were a select few favorites (namely the finalists, Marlee Matlin and John Rich), the majority of the cast just really didn’t do much for me and so it was sometimes a little hard to get excited about the show when it just had so many obnoxious people on it!

That said, this year there are actually already a handful of people who in my mind could make for a fun, or at least an interesting season…

  • George Takei – Although I never really watched Star Trek, the man is freaking hilarious on Facebook and Twitter … plus, quite the saucy fellow, which could get interesting in its own right! Oh my…
  • Penn Jillette – Outspoken and ever-opinionated, this guy is going to have some great arguments with people because he actually brings logic and reasoning to the table!
  • Lou Ferrigno – Hulk Smash!!!
  • Arsenio Hall – Out of the whole bunch, maybe it’s just me but it seems like Arsenio is the one who should be a little too famous to be on this show. I mean, the man interviewed Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog back in 1990!
  • Paul Teutul, Sr. – Believe it or not, way back in the day when it first started, I actually used to watch American Chopper. I’ve since heard through the grapevine that these guys are kind of jerks, but it could still be interesting to see Big Paul outside of his element.
  • Adam Carolla – Although I’m not sure that I’d agree with much of his political views these days, Adam used to host The Man Show on Comedy Central, and it was pretty great when I was in my early 20s!
  • Tia Carrere – No clue what she’s been doing since then, but way back in the day she used to date a pretty cool guy named Wayne Campbell, so this is another blast blitz from the past that I’m curiously looking forward to…
Season premieres on February 12th, so who knows what kind of Hollywood drama could be leaked about all of these guys together between now and then?! 😉

a new year, a new paywall?

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It’s kinda long, but I think this is one of the most complete critiques I’ve read in a while with regards to exactly why paywalls truly are a horrible idea as an attempt to help “save” mainstream newspapers in the digital age. Ironically, although it may be sad to see the medium itself eventually dry up altogether, it’s kind of interesting to think of this new generation of media distribution which, although may not bear the same (blind) numbers that traditional papers used to command, will actually end up producing more engaged readers and as a result, probably more valuable content for those passionate fans to enjoy.

Now what everyone else will be reading in the meantime, I don’t know, but then again, there really was never much proof of what they were genuinely engaging with in newspaper, either…

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.

Thin Post : Thoughts on a Recurring Resolution

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It’s not really any secret that most people highlight weight loss when they’re putting together their New Years resolutions each year. What can I say – I’m not much better … I seemed to be doing ok last year, but still only managed to lose about 25 of the excess 60 pounds that I had to shed, and so here we are again this year, poised to give it another go.

The funny thing is, as cliche as it may be to say keep citing diet & exercise on my resolutions year after year, I’m trying to frame it in a positive manner and take advantage of all of the exercise enthusiasm that seems to be in the air here in the first couple of weeks of January before the masses realize yet again that losing weight is really hard and just sitting on the couch watching American Idol is a much easier way to wind down at the end of the day than doing time religiously every night on the treadmill!

One thing that I’ve been trying to teach myself over the last couple of years is really the importance of focusing on the positive. No, I may not have technically met very many of the goals that I set out for myself last year, including that one about losing it all right before Christmas that in hindsight was really just kind of silly, but I did manage to drop 25 pounds off of that target, which is still better than how I started the year back on January 1, 2011.

I stopped drinking diet soda entirely, something that for the better part of a decade I would’ve thought was completely impossible.

I finally admitted to myself that I can’t in good conscience continue to eat potato chips like I always have and actually expect to lose weight.

And frankly, from the looks of these blog posts, I’ve just been a lot more conscious about all of these things that together make up my weight loss efforts, both the ones that have failed as well as those that succeeded.

So while I may not necessarily be quite where I want to be just yet, I also can’t exactly look back on 2011 and write it off as a failure, either. I did a lot of growing last year, and finally in the good way for a change!, so as I mentioned a few days ago when I first talked about my 2012 New Years Resolutions, I think my real goal just needs to be to continue working towards that goal that I already started last year. And though I do need to both push myself harder and in different ways this year, I think it only makes sense to ride this collective enthusiasm that everyone seems to have for resolutions for the next couple of weeks and see how far it will take me…

Happy New Year, everyone – now let’s go lose some weight together! 😀