Tag Archives: dungeons and dragons

A Weekend’s Worth of Amusement (Offset by Some Real World News)

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This entry is part 85 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

It’s been a little trying here in the real world. Lots of not-so-great things going on if you pay attention to the news. More not-so-great things going on for some people I give a damn about. ANd my own feelings of utter stagnation really aren’t helping any.

So… To The Internet!

There’s no shortage of feel-good, restore your faith in humanity, mind blowingly cute, utterly hilarious things out there. Thankfully, a lot of those turned up over the past few days. Seems that sharing them has done more than a few people a bit of good.

Of course, there’s also the real world news stuff that I can’t in good conscience completely ignore. (Once a news guy, always a news guy.) But there’s also some genuinely good news of good people doing good things (that whole ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been a small goldmine of creativity and good will) some even doing good things at great risk to themselves (like they guys running aid and rescue missions in the mountains of Iraq).

The world can seem to be a really nasty place. It’s what we’re sold on TV–both in the news and in our entertainment. Visible, violent conflict is exciting (when it’s not happening to you or people you know). It gets eyeballs on the screen, which means eyeballs on the ads, which means money in someone’s pocket. “If it bleeds, it leads” remains true no matter where things are showing up.

But that’s not a fully accurate representation of the world. If it were, we’d all have been dead of one thing or another long, long ago. (And anyone who thought it was a good idea to bring a child into that fully bad world would be struck down by appalled mobs… who’d only be proving how bad things are.)

We’re still here. We’re still moving forward. There are still people fighting the good fight and many, many more quietly changing the world for the better.

Little by little, if we look, the light is there, holding the darkness at bay.

It’s still up to us to look, though. At both sides. To find the balance.

Here’s the feed…

Just a Whole Lot of Stuff

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This entry is part 58 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I meant to update Thursday… and even Friday… but… well… it was a holiday weekend and I figured I’d use it to catch up on things.

And by “things”, it turns out I meant all those games I bought during the Steam sale. Because I really didn’t do much else for most of that long weekend.

The feed from Thursday features a bunch of music (via YouTube) because I was in a classic rock kind of Throwback Thursday mood.

Then there were all sorts of questionable political things that went on (or kept going on, as the case may be), as well as some astounding (both in good ways and bad ways) social stuff.

So, this extra long rundown is a real mixed bag. Kind of like life.

Food, Real Heroes, Diversity in Comics, Movie Trailers, Net Neutrality, and some Randomness

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This entry is part 30 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

It was a busy weekend. One that probably should have been busier, as I still didn’t get everything accomplished that I wanted to. Almost caught up now… almost.

My college and my home town have both made the feed recently. The first for being named “geekiest” by (DC) local nerd mecca Think Geek. The second for being the host of a full on rave-type festival this coming weekend. That second one is kind of surreal… as that’s exactly the sort of thing that would have never even been considered before the performing arts center on the Woodstock site (Bethel Woods) was put in place by a “local boy who done good” (by making a few million dollars in the cable TV industry (he sold his local empire to Time Warner over a decade or so ago).

More important news has come up, of course. There’s still the ongoing net neutrality fight. But the FCC is also dealing with a spectrum auction for wireless space. It’s going to be all former TV broadcast spectrum–so it can mostly make it through concrete buildings–and is reported to open the door for better cell service because of it. The words “super wifi” were also thrown around in a few articles. Very interesting, indeed.

And, returning a little to geeky news, the new trailer for Marvel’s next blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy, dropped today. I think it’s looking pretty amazing. Every time I see something new about this film, I love it more. It’s going to have an full on action/comedy feel and (director) James Gunn is looking like he’s pulled it off perfectly. That’s not much of a surprise. The man has a great grasp of genre and how to twist it just right to add the perfect amount of humor (check out Slither to see what he did with horror and Google PG Porn to see what happened when he took all the sex out of porn film ideas).

There’s also a new version of Dungeons & Dragons on the way in July. It’ll be the fifth edition. I played about one and a half sessions of 2nd Edition AD&D in college (before we abandoned it for Cyberpunk and RIFTS) and a handful of sessions of 3.5 a few years back when a friend was running a custom world setting using those rules. I’ve dabbled in it a little (as the OGL) while looking at some other game settings, and I can firmly say I’ve never cared much for the D&D system. So I’m thoroughly unimpressed that we’re getting a new version (priced at about $50 per core rule book, at that!).

In the past few years, I’ve checked out over a dozen different role playing systems and I’ve liked most of them better than D&D. Of course, I’m more story and character oriented than a lot of the classic D&D stuff seems to be… and I’ve never been interested in fully optimizing a character to just kick ass like a lot of people I know who played D&D seem to (at least once upon a time) be into. I like flaws in characters and games where combat doesn’t necessarily happen every session.

Ah, well… guess we’ll see how that all plays out. I expect some mighty nerd rage (just like when 4th edition came out).