T w e n t y S i d e d
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Best blond joke I’ve heard in ages.
Hit tip: Chizumatic.
Steelers make the Playoffs
It was impossible to grow up around here during the seventies without being a Steelers fan. Sure, I never watched the games and I had no idea how the sport worked, but it was an easily observable fact that when the Steelers won a Superbowl (which they did quite a bit in those days) it was recognized by all as being a Very Good Thing. I still have a vivid memory of a day we spent with friends in Pittsburgh. The Steelers won the Superbowl, and the adults were all happy. Then we drove back to Butler and found the main street packed with cars, horns blowing. This was before cars were equiped with polite “pardon-me-but-could-you-move-over-a-bit-if-it-isn’t-too-much-trouble” little European beepers. This was when everyone had big, loud, “move-it-or-lose-it buddy” American-style horns. The football fans in town (that is, everyone) were blowing these things nonstop, up and down the street while waving yellow towels out of their car windows. From my perspective as a three-foot-tall boy sitting in the back seat of my Mom’s car, all I could see was a great boiling ocean of yellow fabric and hear the cries of thousands of warriors as they returned home after a glorious campaign of conquest abroad.
When I realized that all of this excitment, all of this energy, and all of this intensity was the result of the football game I’d been ignoring all evening, I realized that there was something important about this game and this team that I’d been missing. It took me almost three decades to figure out what it was, but I’m getting the idea now.
As I’ve mentioned before, football is a strange and wholly unique sport. I never really took an interest until last year (er, I guess two years ago, since it’s 2006 now) when I started to learn about the game. Football is unlike other sports in that you can’t sit down and intuit the game by watching it. Soccer, Basketball and Hockey are, at a fundamental level, the same sport. They are obvious and easy to comprehend: The Thing Goes In The Net. Your team makes it go in, and the other team tries to stop you. Baseball is more complex, but a time-traveler from the past or an alien from another world would probably have a pretty good grasp of what’s going on after watching a game, even if they don’t speak the language. The same is not true for Football. I tried many times over the years to understand what it was about this sport that made my younger brother so nuts. I watched a game every few years but it seemed like total confusion. How did any of these people understand what was going on? To enjoy football, someone has to teach you.
What helped me out quite a bit was playing Madden 2005 on the Playstation. Having the sport translated into computer game where I could see the action clearly, where I could absorb each play without advertisements for beer and cars breaking my concentration, where I could direct the action on the field and see how it all reacted: this allowed me to grasp and appreciate the game in a way that would not have been possible on my own. I’m sure the NFL and EA Sports imagined that this was a video game for Football fans. For me, it worked the other way. It turned a video game fan into a Football fan.
So anyway, the Steelers made the playoffs.
Even as a newcomer to the sport (or, I should say, as a newcomer to the Fandom of the sport) I have no interest in any other team. I don’t have a “second favorite”. If the Steelers are defeated, I won’t switch to rooting for another team. I will stop watching football alltogether, until next season.
I have no illusions about our Superbowl chances right now. There are many fine teams out there, and the odds are long that the Steelers have what it takes to go all the way this year. I’ll be happy if we get one or two more weeks before football season ends for me. However, I feel certain that if we did win, I would drive right into town, wave a yellow towel, and blow the horn until the battery went dead.
Session 9, Part 4
19th of Last Summer (Late afternoon)
Back in the main hall, the other members of the party are surprised to see Thodek return so soon. In fact, Eomer has not yet finished giving an account of his meeting with the Queen when Thordek arrives.
Thu’fir has left the Citadel on an errand. Upon hearing that they should bury Noreeno’s jewelery, he remembered the ring they recovered from General Tarvis. He suspects this ring is exactly the sort of thing she was talking about, and he has hurried off to find a suitable place to bury it.
Before the others can Question Thordek about his short interview, a bell rings and a female voice announces, “Enoch and Skeeve.”
The iron door opens, and Enoch and Skeeve enter the darkness. They seek the red light, just as their companions did. At last they find themselves before the throne of Queen Allidia.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 9, Part 4”
What if it was made of adamantium?
Brian Tiemann poses a question about using flywheels to store produced energy, and Steven Den Beste runs the numbers.
A couple of years back SDB moved from writing about politics to writing about anime. This didn’t bother me much, since I love both subjects, and thinking about anime is arguably better for my blood pressure. However, the one thing I missed was these posts about why magical solutions to our power needs were preposterous.
Real engineers like SDB – as opposed to software engineers like myself – have the ability to translate the world into numbers and play with it in a way I can only envy. A real engineer can tell you why you can’t generate power using 600 million tons of turkey guts or billions of tons of corn stalks . He can tell you that to provide power for vehicles in Southern California you would need 231 square kilometers of solar panels that we can’t build. (And even that’s assuming you allow for some 2nd law of thermodynamics violations).
In a lot of ways this stuff is similar to the old, “how much would a million pennies weigh” sort of things we’d read as kids. They are fun problems that tell us more about the average person’s slippery grip on large numbers than they do about actual science.
Take a look at SDB’s answer to the great big flywheel proposal. There are a lot of serious engineering problems with it, and he outlines them in cruel, pipe-dream-killing detail. Looking at the list, most of the challenges would be mitigated by moving to many smaller flywheels. This moves the challenges from the areas of physics (how do you dissipate all that heat / maintain a huge vaccuum / keep it structurally sound / balance it / etc) to logistics (how much will all the flywheels cost, how much space will they need, and where the hell would you put them?).
If I had any grasp of it, I would work out just how many you would need and how much space they would take up. But I can’t. However, if you think about it, you can intuit that the flywheel array would need to be many, many times larger than then dam / wind turbine / solar collector / turkey gut liquifier / etc, and (unless you want to deal with a whole new set of problems) it would have to be part of or next to the existing power source.
I find this stuff to be fun to read and think about. I only wish people who advocate these pie-in-the-sky proposals felt the same way.
Name Game
In our D&D campaign, I borrow heavily from other sources of fiction. I’m sure many DM’s do. For the curious, here is where I’ve lifted from:
The concept of the Mage’s Guild is stolen from Morrowind, as is the name of the Bitter Coast region in western Dunlock.
Endo is named after one of the more obscure henchmen in the movie Lethal Weapon. He is NOT named after Cannabis. (I had no idea Endo ment that until AFTER I’d introduced him.)
Noreeno gets his name from”Mike Toreno, the government spy from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Citadel may be named after the Citadel in Half-Life2 (which I’ve spent a lot of time with this year). It could also get its name from Citadel Station in System Shock, which I havn’t played in years, but which affected me so strongly I wrote an entire novel based on it.
“The Lich King”, the title given to Mordan, was first used in Warcraft III.
The “Dravis” part of Dravis Lorman comes from the villian of the same name in Descent II.
The way Mordan seeks to recapture the orb is very similar to the way Sauron seeks to recover the One Ring in Lord of the Rings. The fact that this contest happens in the shadow of a great mountain only underlines the fact that LotR has left an indelable impression on my mind. Also, the name “Dunlock” seems very Tolkien-esque. I would not be surprised to find that name came from the novels as well, although I can’t recall anything by that name off the top of my head.
Dawn’s Bride (a ship the players have ridden on many times during their adventures) probably got its name from Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis.
In my first campaign (which is not available online) I had a family of nobles named Loric, who were deliberatly named after King Leoric in the original Diablo game.
The name Enoch is taken from the character of Enoch Root in the book Cryptonomicon.
But I’m not the only one to pilfer names from more talented sources. Dan pulled the name of his Wizard, Skeeve, from the book Another fine Myth (the first of a series of eight) by Robert Asprin. Eric used the Dune books as the source for both the name of his character (Thu’fir) and his sword (Fai). Pat took the name Eomer from Lord of the Rings.
At least we steal from the best. :)
Quotable Me
I occasionally do vanity searches. That’s where you type your own name into google and see what you get. I do this from time to time because my name is really unique, so most of the results I get are related to me. During a recent search I found a page of quotes. Here is one:
I (heart) technology. Last Thursday, I was eating a hard pretzel when I broke off the front of one of my back teeth and was left with a giant bleeding hole in my tooth. This was terrible. However, four hours later, I walked out of the dentist’s office with a totally rebuilt tooth. A few hours after that, the novocaine wore off and I enjoyed a meal as if nothing had ever gone wrong. In the thousands of years of human history, only in the last few decades has this sort of thing been possible. In centuries past, I would either have had to have it pulled (if I had access to a dentist) or wait for the tooth to become infected, die, and fall out on its own. Either way, that one mishap would have meant weeks of pain and discomfort. Technology is cool.
That’s an actual quote of mine, from my first blog. This was probably written sometime in early 2001. I no longer have the site, but it is cool to see someone found one of my quotes worth saving. The tooth is still going strong, almost five years later. In fact, another tooth has failed and been replaced since then.
Tale of Pants
Beware of engineers and their practical jokes.
My question: How much did these two idiots spend on this over the years? They claimed they were keeping it cheap, but you don’t encase objects in gigantic blocks of cement and have said mass of cement delivered for Chrismas without putting out some money.
From The Archives:
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)