One of the things I loved to do in our campaigns was give out magical items which were interesting but mostly useless. We’ve been trained by movies that if you find some seemingly unimportant bauble, then the story will later create a situation where it will be the key to solving a problem in an unexpected way.
My favorite was a rope I gave them that untied itself the moment you let go of the knot. It was pointless, but enough of a novelty that they hung onto it. Another was a chalice that would purify any water you put into it. It was sort of a magical water filter which could turn a glass of swamp sludge into mineral water in about five minutes. Another was a magic staff which had only one property: It could be placed tip-down on the floor and it would keep itself balanced.
Once in a while they would haul out one of these magical booby prizes and actually put the thing to some unexpected use. I always loved when they did that.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I’m still plowing through the comments from the weekend, plus email, plus cleaning the lint out of the spam filter and checking out the new incoming links. So, if I don’t respond to something you’ve said, that’s why.
I actually have some notes and stub posts from last week that I need to hammer into some sort of shape before the original ideas leave me altogether. So, a couple of my posts may be a bit stale in the next few days. (As in: Linking to stuff everyone is done talking about.) I actually have quite a lot of stuff like this. On Tuesday and Wednesday I was on some sort of writing bender, and it all got stuck in the queue when things went sideways on Wednesday.
I feel good today. You know that depressing slump you feel right after vacation or something really, really happy? That sadness that hits a couple of days later? I’ve noticed emotions are always like this. The week after summer camp was always a slide into depression for us as kids. The post-camp world seemed empty, dull, and lonely. This was because we were coming off a five-day manic spree and the pendulum was swinging back. I knew this was the cause (I knew there wasn’t really any reason to be depressed) but that never made me feel any better.
But today I’m experiencing the opposite: I feel energetic and happy for no other reason than I’m no longer stressed. I’ve even got a new DM of the Rings for later today.
216 geek points to the person who can identify the source of the needlessly obscure title to this post.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I’m back. Just got home from the hospital, with my daughter. She’s on the mend. Feels like a week since the last time I was home.
On Wednesday night I held my limp daughter in my arms while her open, unblinking eyes looked past me. I couldn’t feel her breathing, and for a good minute or so I wasn’t even sure if she was still with us. If you’re a parent then you can probably imagine what this feels like. If not, you’ll have to extrapolate. Anyway, after those moments of primal emotions and the subsequent three days of uncertainty, writing about how “scary” the Silent Hill movie is seems childish and shallow. Something like this is great for putting things into perspective, although a healthy sense of perspective is really bad for enjoying the fantasy worlds of movies, videogames, and roleplaying.
So, I need to step back from this thing for a couple more days and, as the hippies say, “Get my head together, man.”
Thanks for the well-wishes from everyone. Really, it was nice to come home to that. She’s doing fine. She’s tired of needles and drugs and bizzare tests she doesn’t understand, and we have every reason to believe she will recover fully.
I’m really hoping the next five months or so will be exceedingly dull. That would be just super, thanks.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
In case any of you are wondering where my husband has gone, he is at the hospital right now, staying over the second night to be with our daughter. She was rushed to the local hospital Wednesday night and then taken to the Children’s Hopital. I stayed the first night and he stayed last night and tonight.
If you are interested here is what is going on so far.
She was taken to the hospital due to a possible seizure. They are currently trying to solve two separate problems.
Earlier today:
1. She has a headache, a sore throat, a high fever and is vomiting. They are trying many things to find out what is causing it. She is sleeping or groggy most of the time. She is not eating or drinking. She is on IVs for fluids as well as most medicine. They have done a spinal tap, a viral culture, a CT, and many blood tests. So far everything is coming up negative. There are several tests we are waiting on.
2. The seizure. After discussing her past behaviors we have realized that she has had small staring (not grande mal) seizures in the past meaning that she has a mild tendency towards seizures and that the fever lowers her threshold causing larger ones. The neurologist is considering her dyslexia/dysgraphia, Migraines, and known sleep disorder to be related to the seizures. This morning she had an EEG to see if they can detect the seizure. After she is healthy she will be going to the sleep clinic to get some tests in regard to the sleep disorder. They are hoping by dealing with that that the migraines and seizures will diminish. They are considering putting her on something that will prevent both the migraines and the seizures. They are watching her to see if she has another seizure while she is at the hospital.
Now: The fever had diminished though it still might spike. She was up and about and not groggy. When I left the hopital she was doing much better but they were still doing tests trying to find the root. Shamus is enjoying having some much needed time with his eldest daughter. He will be back as soon as she gets home or I take a turn at the hospital (though I think right now she prefers him.)
Welcome to this special edition of DM of the Rings with special behind-the-scenes director’s commentary…
An alternate joke I wanted to use here was that the other players were not afraid of the monster per se, but afraid of getting involved in a battle which would require knowledge of the grapple system as well as the byzantine system of attacks of opportunity, and they were terrified of trying to wrap their heads around all of this while fighting a many-tentacled creature.
The gist was that they were fearful of spending the next four hours leafing through the rulebook trying to figure out how to wrestle with this thing. There is some truth (and thus humor) in this idea, but I couldn’t figure out how to deliver the comedic payload.
So instead you got this.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
YouTube hosts videos and lets people watch them for free. They incur massive storage and bandwidth fees, and they get nothing in return. Unless they find a way to convert movies of people falling over and getting hit in the head into currency, (which is not currently possible outside of Japan) it will continue to lose money. If the site becomes more popular, they will lose more money.
This is just a taste of what Google got for its $1,500,000,000.00.
How much do they lose? How many programmers and sysadmins does it take to keep the show running? How many lawyers are needed to deal with the low level legal sniping that is always going on against high-profile companies that tangle with intellectual property? How many accountants are required to compile the annual summary of how much money has been thrown down the rat hole? Do they hire a graphic artist to print out an 8×10 laminated bar graph of their profits as it plunges deeper into the red with each passing month? What is the bill at the and of all of this? Five million? Twenty-five million?
I don’t have the numbers on hand and I lack the motivation to see if it is available online. So, in order to figure out the net annual losses of YouTube I’ll simply have to turn to the science of statistics. By calculating the average between my two random guesses, we can see that YouTube loses fifteen million dollars a year.
My site here has much the same problem. It operates at a net loss, paying out about $11 in hosting fees each month and bringing in no income. If we count in annual domain renewal, then it becomes clear that our monthly losses may be as high as $12, or $144 annually. This means Twenty Sided makes $14,999,856 more than YouTube each year.
Dear Google,
I would like to make it known that the site Twenty Sided is available for acquisition. Please realize that $14,999,856 is a lot of money, and if YouTube is worth 1.5 Billion then you should expect to need some real money if you want to get your hands on something as profitable as Twenty Sided. I’m including all of the archives in the sale, and if it helps to close the deal I’m even willing to stay on board in some sort of figurehead or advisory position while you hire the team that will work on the re-branding and creating future content.
You don’t want to wait for this to turn into a bidding war, so please get in touch with me soon.
Thank You,
Shamus Young
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Ok, I concede that things in the 70’s were not universally awful. There were little bits – a few key movies and some good songs – that many people really cherish. Fine.
But I think we can all agree that when things were bad in the 70’s, they were really, really bad. Soul-crushing, mind-destroying, nightmarishly horrible.
I do not at all suggest you watch the following clip, which Will maliciously provided. Just don’t do it. However, if you want to see the depths of the 70’s, then this might provide some sort of morbid entertainment, akin to watching an autopsy. I’d go to a Hanson concert and scream like a teenage girl before I got anywhere near these guys when they were making “music”.
You think boy bands suck? You think legwarmers looked stupid? You think the mullet was ridiculous? You think tribal tattoos are cheap and shallow? Friend, you have not begun to understand the meaning of awful:
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
T w e n t y S i d e d
