DShomshak

So, first jab yesterday. (Moderna, if anyone's interested.) A lot easier than I expected: The clinic my brother attends called him a week ago to ask if he'd like vaccination, which none of us expected. He got the jab. When he got home, he realized he should have asked if he could set up an appointment for me. I called the clinic, because what could it hurt, and they said, "Sure, come on in." So my brother drove me there right away. Tiresome paperwork, then wait for them to enter the information, then a small prick on my shoulder, then more waiting while they made sure I didn't drop dead.

It may even have been Team Knight Rider that the RPGNet discussion referenced. Like I said, I didn't see the discussion myself; a friend told me about it. Fortunately, while I saw Knight Rider and hence remembered it, I somehow never knew that Team Knight Rider existed. Apparently I am fortunate in this. Also fortunately, my poverty-row dial-up connection blocks the temptation to watch it on Google Play. <eyeroll> Fear not, Duke Bushido: My brain cells are safe from that threat at least. Apropos of nothing, the only other time I've heard Knight Rider mentioned was

Horrabin, from Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, might be worth a look, too -- though he's more grot4esque, and deep in the sort of occult weirdness Powers does so well. Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker shows a more contemporary London demimonde, in a context of high weirdness (though that demiminde is not itself part of anything supernatural). Dean Shomshak

Addendum: But I agree with Old Man that many of the subclass options are wackadoodle even within the inner logic of D&D. Mere grab-bags of features with little connection to the supposed concept of the subclass, which sometimes is only tenuously connected to the base class or just leaves me baffled why anyone thought this was interesting. But then, the writers who design these subclasses have the disadvantage of not being me. <shrug> Dean Shomshak

That's what They want you to think! Dean Shomshak

At this point, D^D is no longer trying to emulate anything in particular. It is its own thing. Character classes are developed according to notions of resource management and other matters internal to the game, as from any underlying inspration from myth or fiction. Which is fine, so long as you don't care about emulating anything in particular from outside the game system. Like "vancian" magic, whose only connection to Jack Vance's The Dying Earth is the notion of spellcasters needing to prepare a limited number of spells, which disappear from memory as they are cast. This is noth

IIRC Diamond was also distributor for Hero Games. And the reason Darren couldn't pay me if full for Ultimate Mystic, Mystic World and Arcane Adversaries for several years was because Diamond wasn't paying him. While I wasn't pleased with Darren, really, what could he do? He was getting screwed, too! So I am pleased to hear about any trouble for Diamond. Dean Shomshak

I can't comment on the "Kane" series because I've never read it, but Opal reminds me of a discussion a friend of mine read on RPGNet: on the inverse relationship between literary merit and gameability. Like, Anna Karenina: the RPG? No. It would never work. But Knight Rider: the RPG? The game practically writes itself. The PCs all work for the mysterious Foundation, which equips them with an artificially-intelligent super-car. They fight crime! Dean Shomshak

I'm reading G. K. Chesterton's "Father Brown" mystery stories. In one story, it is repeatedly said of a certain man that "He read his Bible." The wily priest comments on this that it is not enough to read your Bible: You must read other people's Bibles, too, because people who read the Bible tend to find what they already want to believe. And some of those Bibles are not very nice. Dean Shomshak

ADDENDUM: I just Googled "occult Canberra" and here's what I got on the first page. Indeed, someone has already found Masonic origins and an arcane street layout. Have fun! THE OCCULT HISTORY OF CANBERRA - YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_24NRylDU a comparison in symolism between australia and america Is There an Occult History of Canberra | Clowning Around ..

Incidentally, I derived much inspiration from David Ovason's The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital. Core argument is that Freemasons laid out Washington, D.C.'s street plan to map stellar alignments as a way to shape destiny, and develops from there. Dunno what the crackpot scene is like in Australia, but someone might have already produced an occult study of Canberra. Search for terms such as "ley lines" or "Freemasonry." Dean Shomshak

I particularly noticed the complaints about loss of revenue. Jeez, if you can't make money selling hate and inspiring atrocities, what's the point? Dean Shomshak

Self-declared conservative Evangelical blogger David French makes pretty much the same point, I am told. The only grievance he can extract from his fellow white Evangelicals is a vague feeling of being disrespected. Which he does not consider much of a grievance. It's really quite strange. If you truly believe you are a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, why would you care about your status here on Earth? You are due to receive literally infinite benefit -- and you're upset that other people (the heathens!) aren't saying enough nice things about you? Dean Shomshak

Well... A fellow in the NYTimes last week argued the Republicans don't actually care about legilation anymore because they now have such a dominant position in Federal courts that they can achieve their plutocratic agenda without passing a single law. All they need to do now is block Democrats for a while. I am not sure I accept this. The GOP is far more hive-mindy than Dems, but this argument assumes a degree of internal cohesion and mental discipline that I find difficult to believe in any large group of people. Some of the shrewder politicians may think this way; I can see it fo

I dare say it's because Treknobabble was trying to sound like real physics... badly. Muons, incidentally, were discovered in 1936. They've been fairly mysterious almost from that moment, because there is no obvious reason for a "heavy electron" to exist. You can read the full story in the Wikipedia article about muons. They're made in cosmic ray showers, though, so in Champions it might not be amiss to connect muons to cosmic ray-induced origin events. Dean Shomshak