Old Man

Garlic Parmesan Mushroom Steak

Just doing what I do best! Although this time you might have mistaken me for someone else. This is a good point, although I have to mention that spells can do things that clubs and crossbows cannot. It is hard to turn someone into a newt with a crossbow. This is an excellent method to keeping magic mysterious: sheer complexity. And it's something I ought to have thought of myself, given my line of work. But yes, for the vast majority of people, modern devices are akin to magic items. Motorcycles and mobile phones alike are such complex creations that very few individuals would be capable of explaining, in detail and completeness, how they even work. Even those of us in the field are often reduced to the role of Adeptus Mechanicus: lubricating the sacred sprockets with mystical unguents without understanding why, copying the script of the python into the wizard's window in blind faith that it will find meaning in a page of gibberish. Indeed, this is what Vancian magic actually is--distant descendants of a once-advanced society, memorizing and forgetting the last spells with no comprehension of how the spell causes the effect. Wandering the ruined Earth in search of more priceless fragments of knowledge. So you take this phenomenon and apply it to a culture where literacy is so rare that the mere act of reading and writing is viewed as near-witchcraft, with suspicion and distrust, and it almost doesn't matter whether magic/technology is learnable and teachable. Because you don't even know whether it can be understood, let alone understand it. Even now there are technologies and mysteries that have been lost to the ages. We don't know how Archimedes burned the ships at Syracuse. We don't know where Ulfberht steel came from. We think we know what Greek fire was. We think we know what Viking sunstones were. We don't know who built the Antikythera mechanism and we only figured out what it was for in the last few years. Knowledge gets lost; advanced knowledge gets loster. Mechanics aside, that's why I appreciate things like Gloranthan disease spirits--it evokes a time when people simply didn't know what was going on. That, in and of itself, lends a sense of mystery to the setting and the magic within it. It doesn't even matter whether that's canonically how disease actually works in the setting, what matters is that that's how the characters understand things to be. A world that is poorly understood has exponentially more possibilities than one which is not. You don't get to write "Here be dragons" on a thoroughly explored, dragon-free part of the map.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). One of the better ones so far, with very little goofiness and probably the best direction yet. It's a bit uneven--a somewhat noir spy thriller featuring two competing spies who are involuntarily attracted to each other, giving way to a kind of ridiculous war movie towards the end. I definitely preferred the first part and I actually wish the film had leaned into the relationship more. Still, it's probably the second best of the pre-1980s Bond films I've seen so far, after FRWL.

I rarely use this emoji, but you've earned it:

In my opinion, video game magic was effectively invented by the very first editions of D&D. I have an extremely hard time thinking of examples in pre-1970s fiction of wizards casting straight up battle magic like Fireball. The best Gandalf could do was to turn pinecones into Molotovs, and he's one of the frickin' Maiar. It is beyond ironic that D&D would later find itself having to make itself more video game-like in order to compete with the very game genre it spawned. D&D has always needed improvements in balance. 5e did a decent job of improving that*, for a time, but balance promptly fell apart as more splatbooks and subclasses were published. And that's an inherent flaw of any system that does not have an underpinning mechanic or rules philosophy to enforce balance. This very debate occurs constantly on places like /r/dndnext. "How can we make it so the classes and spells are balanced?" "We just need a way to quantify the power of the various abilities." "NO THAT'S POINT BASED KILL THE INFIDEL" and around and around it goes. * Though hardly perfect. Sorcerers sucked out of the gate and the subclasses for Cleric and Warlock vary wildly in usefulness.

For this specific tool? Depends on the law and the people who run the company. But as I explained to a family member who is also in cyber, it is not possible to stop development of AI any more than it would be possible to stop development of, say, video games. The U.S. government could ban AI tomorrow and AI development would promptly move to India or Mexico.

Can he change back?

I was wondering if a switched Glock was involved, that footage would seem to prove it.

Obligatory

Whatever happened to Burrito Boy anyway? The Tourette's Truther--involuntarily says things that are invariably and uncomfortably true, usually at the most awkward moments

So many strongly held opinions about magic! Although that is pretty normal--in the fantasy fiction discussion groups I frequent, "hard" vs. "soft" magic systems are always a topic of lively discussion. Naturally that would carry over to RPGs. My preferences tend to come down on the "soft" side of the spectrum, i.e. mysterious and poorly understood. I find that more well defined systems, in fiction, are uninteresting--being fully understandable, they become esoteric. In some cases this also leads to some strange inconsistencies with the setting. As others have mentioned, mysterious-and-poorly-understood magic is tough to do in any RPG that attempts to be balanced. Hero manages to at least sort of address the subject with skill rolls, Side Effects, and other disadvantages. Other systems, like Ars Magica, address it by leaving a certain amount of wiggle room in the effect. Or in the more lightweight systems, almost not having a system at all. What really sets Hero apart is that its flexibility allows it to cover multiple magic systems. You can have the wizards of the Fire College go up against the Wild Pool Magicians with the assistance of the Vancian Amnesiacs. After four decades of fantasy gaming I have yet to see any other system that can really do this. Usually the best they can do is have you pick spells from a different list. But the point is that Hero can really do both hard and soft magic, and I'm frankly astonished that no other game system has really tried. Clerical magic is a whole other ballgame, as it directly involves the theology of the setting. It's hard to be an atheist when priests are slinging flame strikes and blade barriers. At that point, religion becomes less a matter of faith and more one of devotion and adherence. It's a weird side effect of D&D video game magic, and to me it smacks of football teams granting magic powers to its craziest fans. I have toyed with the idea of requiring clerical spells (prayers?) to be bought with Invisible Power Effects, just to make it a teeny bit less obvious to onlookers that The Gods Walk Among Them. That only works for certain effects, but it does maintain a lot of the mystery. Arcane magic might benefit from the same.

Oh yeah, it's been a lot worse.

Draft order for the first three rounds of the 2024 draft is set. Strangely, all the NGD teams are huddled together in a clump of mediocrity. Do we have a Colts fan I'm unaware of? 1 Carolina Panthers (traded to Chicago) 2 Washington Commanders 3 New England Patriots 4 Arizona Cardinals 5 Los Angeles Chargers 6 New York Giants 7 Tennessee Titans 8 Atlanta Falcons 9 Chicago Bears 10 New York Jets 11 Minnesota Vikings 12 Denver Broncos * 13 Las Vegas Raiders * 14 New Orleans Saints 15 Indianapolis Colts 16 Seattle Seahawks 17 Jacksonville Jaguars 18 Cincinnati Bengals 19 Los Angeles Rams 20 Pittsburgh Steelers 21 Miami Dolphins 22 Philadelphia Eagles 23 Cleveland Browns (traded to Houston) 24 Dallas Cowboys 25 Green Bay Packers 26 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 27 Houston Texans (traded to Arizona) 28 Buffalo Bills 29 Detroit Lions 30 Baltimore Ravens 31 San Francisco 49ers 32 Kansas City Chiefs

Bold of you to assume our cops get training. Can't speak for other countries but the U.S. services do not kid around when it comes to gun control. Every bullet must be accounted for, and when guns go missing (which they sometimes do) people go to jail. As I had to explain to someone on another board, try to open carry on base and see what happens.

Mister Mediocre Everything he does turns out exactly average. Every single time.

Hey I hear the Broncos need a QB.

I play both, but in Hero I tend to play spellslingers simply because I (usually) get to write up the spells. I love axes, but telekinesis is way more versatile than an axe.

Xeriscaping

Vacuum the house

Fantastic Four has been cast.

Less, in fact. Software engineers would be like wizards isolated in their towers, conducting bizarre rituals and never interacting with the real world. Whereas cloud engineers would be hedge wizards, knowing a hodgepodge of random spells that actually get things done.

Sounds like a job description for a cloud infrastructure admin, not a software engineer.

Just think, this is only the second half. IMAX.