Sometimes the Internet does me proud.
Well, they finally did it. The pervasive homosexual conspiracy has finally driven a stake through the heart of all that holds western civilization together. Gays have gotten married. Legally. In California. As was widely predicted by folks like the Family Research Council, John Hagee, and the 700 Club, the underpinnings of our culture have been visciously attacked, undermined by sinful hedonists.
This morning I sat on my front porch, shotgun at my side, cradling my terrified son in my arms as Californians everywhere lost all sense of public decency, respect for law and order, and even the value of human life. Roving gangs of disillusioned youths set fire to houses, bad-mouthed their parents, spoke openly of having any random number of daddies or mommies (but seldom both), and are having wanton butt-sex on the streets. Oh, the horror. To think that all of this came from an irrational desire by committed same-sex couples to have visitation rights at hospitals, inheritance rights, health care, and tax protection equal to their God-fearing, honest, righteous, serial-divorcing, wife-beating, child-neglecting heterosexual neighbors. So selfish.
Where were you when we needed you most, Westboro Baptist Church? Off protesting a dead soldier when there was real work to be done?
I leave you with a prediction from H.P. Lovecraft regarding this terrible turn of political events:
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Oh wait, that was the return of the Mighty Cthulhu. Never mind.
Ran into something interesting on Infosthetics this evening, a little brew-your-own word cloud tool named Wordle. Many of you may have seen “tag clouds” or “heat maps” on folks blogs, showing frequently-used tags in larger text than the more rarely-used ones. My gallery has one of sorts built in, with the text size scaled logarithmically. A better example of how programmatic word cloud generation falls apart in practical use is over at Anime なの, where the nature of rabid anime fandom tilts the scale towards only a couple titles at a time, obscuring the cloud’s purpose and reducing its usefulness.
Wordle makes it oh-so-much prettier, though, and can handle an alarmingly large amount of text. The image above is the entire 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, with common words (i.e. “the,” “and,” “or”) removed. There are several typefaces available, a handful of color schemes, and it’s just plain fun to tinker with.
Maybe I’m just a sucker, but there’s nothing quite like reading through a fresh Dungeon Master’s Guide to make a fella want to bust out some note paper and start cranking away at a new campaign. The Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual are generally the most useful of the core rulebooks. They have been since AD&D. They’re where you find that particulars of character creation and advancement, the particulars for any skills or spells that may come into play, the hard numbers and color text for the various and sundry bad-guys. The DMG is mostly used to for a couple of rules that players rarely have cause to worry about, and used to be the repository of magic items (no more in 4e; those are in the PHB now). Once you’re in Dungeon Master mode, the DMG isn’t something you have to lean on much.
But getting into Dungeon Master mode is precisely what it is there for. It is chock-full of advice regarding the adjudication of rules, working with players and player characters, devising adventures and settings and non-player characters, all the things that anybody that has played a roleplaying game pretty much already knows. No shocking new revelations here. So what it is that I find so interesting about reading a two-page treatise on building a basic beginning, middle, and end for a D&D adventure? I already know how to do it. I’ve done it dozens of times, with some modest degree of success. It isn’t hard to set a plot hook: the players know when they’re being pointed towards the plotline. It isn’t hard to plot out a map for some musty old tomb and dig up some critters from the Monster Manual for the players’ characters to slaughter.
The real value of actually reading through the Dungeon Master’s Guide is not in its utility as a reference book. That isn’t its core purpose. The DMG is there to affirm and reinforce your existing good habits, point out your bad ones, and remind you of how you should be handling things that aren’t quite right at the gaming table. Did you forget to throw in a couple of gimme encounters during the last campaign? Fights that the players would just breeze through to make them look extra heroic and cool? Were you a little more miserly than you probably should have been, doling out few rewards for too much effort? God knows I was. I’ll have to work on that next time around.
Recently I’ve been in player mode, showing up for game night with character-sheet in hand, ready to follow the plot where it leads me, lend a hand to the other players, and instigate a little trouble here and there. Reading through the DMG has me wanting to put on the DM hat again, though. Gotta find my graph paper…
Gotta hand it to Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. The man’s got no quit in him. Yesterday he spent over four hours on the floor of the US House of Representatives calling for the impeachment and removal from office of George W. Bush.
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the
following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in
the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its
impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power.
Summary of all 35 counts follows (link to PDF of full resolution with details)
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