About a week ago, the Washington Post printed a list of existing and proposed regulations businesses identified as having a negative impact on job growth. The identifications were solicited by a Republican congressman from California, who will no doubt use them as a target list. I cannot imagine that he will invite close scrutiny of […]
[Note: unsure whether a square root symbol (√) will appear properly in any given browser, I will use an older typographic convention in its place. sqrt (x) here indicates the square root of x, presumed to be the positive square root unless otherwise stated. It’s a bit cumbersome, and definitely ugly, but not as ugly […]
Also in my quest for inspirational pulp adventure, I checked out Lost Horizon, not realizing until it was in the DVD player that it was a Frank Capra movie. Yerk. Couldn’t even sit through the whole thing. This was not two-fisted adventure; it was one-fisted, and that for about half a second, in a performance […]
I lead a parsimonious life. Never liked spending money, and rarely find myself wanting consumer goods. Living too long as a struggling college student, and later without income as a homemaker only served to intensify my miserliness, but it’s been part of me for as long as I can remember. Now I’m bound for a […]
Seeking inspiration as a GM, I settled for Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow. While not exactly two-fisted pulp adventure from the serials, it seeks to imitate them, and it’s readily available. “Settled for†is the appropriate term: I could recall little of the movie besides not liking it, but thinking it looked pretty […]
Just saw a web page for an RPG titled Maid at maidrpg.com. Player characters are all maids in the service of a single master, who by default is a lonely and socially underdeveloped young man teenage boy, though an old lech or a marble patriarch may be easily substituted. In addition PCs are also exotic […]
I had Sulla’s commentary on what went wrong with Civilization V pointed out to me recently. He gets some important details wrong, especially in his gripes list—for example, you do continue to pay gold-per-turn agreements even after declaring war. I also don’t understand how he can insist at length that ICS is an easy—too easy—path […]
What happened to all those two-fisted pulp adventures? I’m considering running a role-playing game in that vein, but I confess I don’t know the genre all that well. Roleplaying supplements are available for the curious: GURPS Cliffhangers and the FATE-powered Spirit of the Century, for example. But I also wanted to go to the source, […]
Caught my kids cheating on their homework yesterday. Five kids got the same wrong answer. That’s only to be expected now and again when they work together, and I’m perfectly happy that they should work together, but this was a stupid wrong answer, the kind of wrong answer that kids working together and not merely […]
Lots of friction in last night’s session. My character, Deacon, is a badass of the “judge, jury, and executioner†school, who views himself as the avenging hand of God. Last night, he decided somebody needed putting down, and saw to it in cold blood. My fellow players had known something like this was coming, and […]