SEEvil Thoughts

The Simpsons has a quote for everything:

2009-10-10T07:20:07Z

"Convicted of a crime I didn't even commit. Hah! Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?" -- Sideshow Bob

Accounting Class

2009-04-30T20:25:07Z

If I get just one answer right on either the last section test or the final, I get a B for the class.

If I get a perfect score on the last section test (and I got perfects on the first two and one wrong on the third), I get an A without taking the final.

This is a quite relaxing position to be in.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-04-09T02:11:00

2009-04-09T08:11:55Z

Okay, Dell is replacing my system. Make enough noise and they can be reasonable.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-04-07T15:44:00

2009-04-07T21:43:32Z

Well, the lying bastards at Dell are claiming a liquid spill took out my Mini 9, and thus its failure isn't covered by warranty.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-04-05T19:19:00

2009-04-06T01:18:48Z

At the time of this post, the book holding the #25 spot on the list of Amazon Bestsellers in Books was published over fifty years ago.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-03-18T16:11:00

2009-03-18T22:11:02Z

Better today.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-03-17T17:00:00

2009-03-17T23:00:23Z

Ill. Tired. Not happy.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-03-10T14:56:00

2009-03-10T20:56:24Z

Observation indicates that the amount of gout pain I have can be calculated by the following formula:

Pain = 1/(Total Calories Eaten Previous Day)

I can eat "bad for gout" foods all day and the next day I'll be fine. I skimp on meals, and I'll be in pain. The more I skimp, the greater the pain.

This does not bode well for losing weight.

Watchmen

2009-03-09T07:35:30Z

Sticking with Robert Redford would have worked better than swapping to Ronald Reagan.

I realize you've all probably seen it already . . .

2009-03-07T11:52:55Z

But, well, it's still awesome.

Saturday Morning Watchmen

An eye for both eyes . . .

2009-03-05T21:35:05Z

A man blinds a woman with acid. The court rules that the woman is entitled to blind him with acid in return . . . but only in one eye, because men are more valuable than women.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-02-03T12:21:00

2009-02-03T19:21:48Z

Clearly, a male Wiccan is a slau pijeaux.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-01-26T13:11:00

2009-01-26T20:11:15Z

Nurse practitioner seems to think the pain in my foot is gout.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-01-15T18:58:00

2009-01-16T01:58:36Z

I get frustrated with people who say things like: It's time to legalize, or at least decriminalize, drugs.

Look, I am perfectly willing to consider legalizing drugs. Assuming the end-of-Prohibition model holds out, we'd see an uptick in use, but it would remove the entire business from the hands of criminal enterprises and mark an increase in the product safety of the drugs.

However, decriminalization? Decriminalization leaves the manufacture and distribution to the black market, which means you still have adulterated drugs sold by warring criminal gangs at inflated prices. At the same time, eliminating legal pressure on the demand side means an increase in use. You get the worst of both worlds.

stevenehrbar @ 2009-01-08T22:26:00

2009-01-09T05:26:29Z

Arrrrrrgh.

I keep having dreams in which I'm arguing with my family. Mom, Dad, brother, sister, and, for no apparent reason, my aunts.

This is neither restful nor relaxing, and leaves me tense and disagreeable for the rest of the day.

ed is the standard text editor

2008-11-26T23:39:59Z

No, really. It's so important that it is the kiss of death if your OS doesn't support it.

You have ed on a standard install of Mac OS X. You have ed in any standard Linux distro. You have ed's cousin, edlin, under any standard install of Windows Vista or XP.

You do not have ed in a standard install of BeOS 5. You do not have ed on Mac OS 9. You only have a DOS version of edlin on OS/2. You do not have edlin in Windows 98. All these operating systems are dead, beaten or replaced by operating systems that by default have ed(lin).

Indeed, ed is the standard text editor.

Codex

2008-11-18T09:06:39Z

Hmm. Looks like Mongoose's Classic Play: Book of the Planes is getting put on the Grand OGL Wiki. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that book . . . and perhaps most usefully for the Codex project, a Deep Ethereal with elemental Border Ethereals. Hope it makes it into the wiki.

(The existing Open Content declaration on the Book of the Planes is a lot more limited, at least at first glance, than what's apparently getting put into the OGL Wiki. That's why I avoided the Book of the Planes material as a source. Since the Grand OGL Wiki was created at Mongoose's initiative, though, I trust anything of theirs that gets on the wiki is fair game.)

Codex notes

2008-11-17T07:50:53Z

1) The Material Plane

The Material Plane has three "echo planes" — the Ethereal, Shadow, and Faerie.

Shadow works as in SRD
Ethereal works as in SRD, plus travel along the fourth spatial dimension will drop you in the Ylem (q.v.).
Faerie is a reflection of the Material Plane that is inhabited by fey creatures, and has the flowing time trait.

2) The Ylem

Stole the word from modern physics, which apparently dragged it out of an old dictionary in the 1940s. Refers to "primordial substance from which all matter is formed". That is, this is the primordial 'chaos' from which the multiverse was fashioned. It touches the Ethereal and Empyrean (q.v.), and is generally considered to "contain" the Inner Planes. Magic is not required to move from the Ethereal or Empyrean to the Ylem or from the Ylem to the Inner Planes; the same types of magic used on the Material to enter the Ethereal allow passage the other direction. Contains a number of demiplanes . . . some under the control of beings that want to return the whole multiverse to ylem.

3) The Inner Planes

Positive Energy, Negative Energy, and Elemental Air, Earth, Fire, and Water from the SRD. Para-elemental planes of Fog, Smoke, Wood (Earth-Air), Lava, Mud, and Steam (Fire-Water). Quasi-Elemental Planes of Lightning, Vacuum, Metal, Sand, Light, Cold, Acid, and Salt.

Inner Planes are mostly vast stretches of their given element. Some areas, however, seem to echo the Material Plane. Here you find, say, gravity, a ground of solid fire, with lakes of liquid fire, and an atmosphere of gaseous fire, inhabited by what look like four-eyed six-legged badgers made of solid, liquid, and gaseous fire. Since the planes are infinite, these echo regions can be really, really big. As big as the GM wishes them to be. Big enough that people can mistakenly believe the entire plane is like that, because they traveled for years in such a zone without reaching the edges. Infinity has lots of room for entire galaxies.

4) The Empyrean

Also known as the Firmament, the Outer Planes are "within" the Empyrean. Godlings who can't stand to have a realm on one of the seventeen infinite Outer Planes create their own demiplanes here. The Empyrean has "natural" portals to and from Outer Planes, and to the Ylem.

5) The Outer Planes

LE Nine Hells, LE/NE Gehenna, NE Hades, NE/CE Tarterus, CE Abyss, CE/CN Cocytus, CN Limbo, CN/CG Mag Mell, CG Olympus, CG/NG Shangri-La. NG Elysium, NG/LG Paradise, LG Heaven, LG/LN Aaru, LN Nibiru, LN/LE Acheron, and N Sheol.

Bit about the Outer Planes being infinite in at least three spatial dimensions. Which means anything you read elsewhere about the geography of a plane being entirely clockwork wheels might be absolutely true . . . for a volume of space five hundred trillion parsecs in diameter. That doesn't mean that different geography doesn't exist on the plane. It's infinite. Certainly, some constants exist which define the plane; Inner Planes tend to be uniform in their substance; Outer Planes tend to be uniform in their alignment. But if the greater god Mastrack, the Invincible and Implacable Overlord, wants a galaxy-sized region of rolling hills bathed in an eternal sunrise? Hey, that's what his part of the Nine Hells looks like. I'm not going to tell him he's wrong.

Suggestion on the afterlife: When an intelligent being other than an outsider or an elemental dies, its soul generally goes to the plane which matched its alignment. There, it will usually dwell a while before reincarnating (though other fates can occur). Especially dedicated followers of a specific god instead go directly to that god's realm in the Outer Planes regardless of alignment, where they are then disposed of as that deity sees fit. Souls on the Material Plane reach the Outer Planes visa the Ethereal-Ylem-Empyrean. If their attachment to the Material is strong enough, they manage to halt this travel process on either the Material (becoming a corporeal undead) or Ethereal (ghosts being the prime example of the latter).

(Why the terms Inner and Outer? Because, from the Material, it's easy to get to the Ethereal, which then gets you to the Ylem, which then gets you to the Empyrean. So, the Inner Planes seem to a being on the Material plane to be closer, and the Outer father away. Map of a Material-centric cosmos shown with the Ylem as a ring around the Material and the Empyrean as a ring around the Ylem.)

6) The Astral

As per the SRD, the Astral touches all other planes in the multiverse. Discovery of the Astral upended the whole Inner/Outer logic, but the nomenclature is too useful to ditch.

7) Other planes

The "Elemental" Plane of Time, the "Manifest" Plane of Psionics, and the Plane of Dreams are poorly-attested; among the few things known about them is that they are deadly.

(On the Plane of Dreams, the city of Celephaïs is known to be safe from the ravages of dreamstuff; elsewhere, reality is completely fluid and completely outside the visitor's control. Best to visit in your sleep; visiting physically is a good way to get killed by an army of tarrasques in your underwear.)

Alternate Material planes can exist alongside the campaign material, or they might be off in their own parallel multiverses, which may or may not be accessible by magic/via the Plane of Shadow. Because it ins't enough to have a multiverse of at least 57 infinite universes and some impossible number of demiplanes; there might be an infinite number of multiverses.

But, of course, I couldn't get a license

2008-11-11T12:00:49Z

I've been reading various "old-school" D&D blogs and fora and whatnot, and I've come to a conclusion — I would like to do AD&D 3rd Edition.

The basis for my AD&D 3rd would be the "core text" of the first edition -- DMG, PHB, MM, FF, and MMII. It would, of course, be significantly reorganized into an easier-to-reference whole. There would be minor borrowings from the 2nd Edition core (defined as the PHB, DMG, and Monstrous Manual), with care. (Note the total lack of mention of UA, DSG, and WSG. Some of the spells and magic items in UA will make it via borrowings from 2nd Edition, and that's about it.)

Assassins, monks, and druids would be freed from absolute level limits and challenge-to-advance (and the XP tables would change accordingly); bards would resemble the OD&D/2nd Edition ones instead of the appendix one.

Racial level limits would be modified. Instead of the thief being the universal U class (yes, we see you back there, half-orcs with your assassin), each nonhuman race would have a single U/15 class — indicating a level limit of 15 if multiclassed, and unlimited if single-classed. Other classes would be limited to 8th level, 4th level, or barred to the race. This allows a humanocentric world, while still giving players reasonably broad choice. Only humanity is capable of putting together a full name-level-or-better party on its own. Other races can have exceptional fighters (dwarves), wizards (elves), illusionists (gnomes), thieves (halflings), rangers (half-elves), assassins (half-orcs) or the like, but must make cross-racial alliances to deal with truly great threats.

(And note the lack of raise dead-capable nonhuman clerics.)

Druids would come in three alignments — true neutral, chaotic neutral, and neutral evil. Neutral druids accept intelligent creatures and civilization as part of nature. Chaotic druids consider intelligent creatures organisms like any other, but find civilization, domestication, and agriculture as anathema. Evil druids seek the destruction of intelligent life, seeing it as a cancer upon nature to be excised.

Assassins would not specifically be hired killers; they would still be experts at cold-blooded killing by stealth and surprise. Accordingly, they would not be liked in polite company . . . but even a lawful good assassin, specializing in the elimination of dangerous evil beings, would be possible, if rare. (Granted, such an assassin would still get into arguments with a paladin, as the latter is bound by a code of chivalry and honor. Sneaking into the chaotic evil archmage's tower and stabbing him in the kidney with a poisoned dagger might very well be justified, since the mage deserved death, a warrant was issued by competent authority, and it was an effective way to end the threat of his army of undead at little risk to civilians . . . "but it still lacks honor!")

And so on. Definitely would use 1e attack tables instead of THAC0. Monsters would have 3e-style breakdowns of their AC, and be assigned an armor-type-equivalent for the weapons-against-armor table.

Codex

2008-11-05T23:16:53Z

It's going to be interesting to see what Obama does on trade. It will be very tempting to take protectionist measures to help U.S. manufacturing . . . and thus punch the Asian economies hard in the export sector.

stevenehrbar @ 2008-11-01T14:19:00

2008-11-01T20:19:20Z

One of the major-party presidential candidates opposes gay marriage on religious grounds, but also opposes a U.S. Constitutional amendment banning states from adopting it.

The other major-party presidential candidate opposes gay marriage on cultural grounds, but also opposes a U.S. Constitutional amendment banning states from adopting it.

Hope for the 2008 College Football Season

2008-10-26T13:48:34Z

Utah, Boise State, Tulsa, and Ball State to all go undefeated, every other team in ~~Division 1A~~ FBS to have two or more losses.

stevenehrbar @ 2008-10-12T00:22:00

2008-10-12T06:21:56Z

Okay. Codex of the Infinite Planes is now back on my to-do list.

stevenehrbar @ 2008-10-09T01:49:00

2008-10-09T07:49:51Z

This is set after Foundation's Edge, contemporaneously with Foundation and Earth. It won't make sense unless you're rather familiar with the former.

"The problem," First Speaker Stor Gendibal said, "is that Preem Palver fatally miscalculated."

Delarmi, across the table, manifested the slightest hint of impatience; a hint that, to the minds around the table, clearly said, "Obviously, or else the First Foundation would not have developed these devices. Get on with it an explain."

Gendibal smiled. "In fact, the reason for miscalculation is precisely because of the whole orientation of the Second Foundation to mentalics instead of physics. Since we think of mentalics as separate and superior, we are not prepared to notice where physics impinges on it, except where it makes itself blatantly clear. And as a result, we have used this set of equation matricies to represent the Mule." Gendibal lit up a section of the Prime Radiant.

"What do you mean?" Delarmi asked. "The Mule's power was mentalic, not physical, and his entire rise was proof that the mentalic was superior to the physical. If there were a physical component to his power, the equations would not fit into the observed pattern."

"Of course. What we failed to note properly, however, was that the Mule's mentalic powers were not fully innate, but partly derived from the Visi-Sonor. If we substitute the following set of equations that account for that fact in place of the mentalic constants used, like so—" he twisted his wrist "—then look at the results."

After a few minutes of silent contemplation by the whole table, Leonis Cheng was the first at the table to speak. "Of course. That explains it. The First Foundation, with its physical orientation, would remember a physical device was critical to the Mule, and was directly involved in emotional control. Knowing that, they would fear that others could develop such devices and use them for mentalic control, even without the Mule's gifts. The menace was not extinguished with what they believed to be the end of the Second Foundation, but was ongoing, since anyone might develop such a device."

"Leading them to continue their researches and develop the improved mentalic devices the First Speaker just discovered on his trip. An interesting discovery," concluded Delarmi.

Gendibal bristled. "Merely interesting? It will require swift and careful work to stop them. If their capacities in menatlic technology develop at the rate their other technology does, they will destroy the Seldon Plan more througlhly than the Mule could have unchecked!"

Delarmi nodded. "A grave threat, if there was any Seldon Plan left to save."

Around the table, Speakers gasped. Gendibal looked severely at Delarmi and said, "Explain yourself."

Delmari inclined her head in acknowledgement. "I shall. You just brought up the rate of advancement in their other technologies. That is the source of the threat." She held up her hand. "Hear me out. First Speaker Gendibal, you yourself brought the necessary fact to our attention. The Foundation now possesses ships capable of traveling at least ten thousand parsecs an hour. The result is that the effective physical size of the Galaxy, measured in time, has collapsed by a factor of ten in any direction; a factor of a thousand, then, in terms of social density. If we include this increased speed into the Seldon Equations, like so—"

Delarmi pressed a few buttons in sequence. The Prime Radiant, on display in the center of the table, immediately exploded in Deviation Blue.

"There is no way to recall gravitic technology. The basics are too widely-published. We would need to suppress its application to spacecraft not just in the Foundation Federation, but throughout the galaxy (so it could not be used to fight the Federation), for the next five hundred years. That would require literally tens of thousands of Speaker-class mentalists, which we do not have and have no possibility of recruiting without such an effort itself disrupting the Seldon Plan just as badly. The Seldon Plan is flexible, but it is not infinitely so, and it cannot adapt to a thousand-fold increase in effective social density. It is shattered beyond recovery."

The room stared.

Gendibal was the first to speak. "Perhaps. That does not, however, mean we cannot create a new plan, combining psychohistory and mentalics, to achieve much the same ends as the Seldon Plan. It merely means we will take longer to do so, perhaps thousands of years more. But if the First Foundation retains knowledge of mentalic technology, it undermines the very axioms of psychohistory and makes mentalics useless. It will be difficult to act appropriately without an effective Plan to guide us, but we still must act, to gain the opportunity to develop a new plan."

stevenehrbar @ 2008-10-02T15:13:00

2008-10-02T21:13:00Z

"What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?"

"The psychologist, of course."