Seeing things as a difference of brain power is freeing.  I had never really considered that option for most of my life. Instead, I had just assumed that "human intelligence" put everyone at roughly the same place.  It made differences of opinion very difficult for me to grapple with.  I would go over something with a friend, they wouldn't get it, and I'd keep at it again & again under the assumption that eventually, they would catch on.  Ugh.

Sometimes people are just broken from their own personal history, or they're indoctrinated into a way of thinking and cannot see it.  It is very useful to recognize such issues and route around the damage.

The first time I realized that I could write off the opinion of a someone who had consistently voted in ways that had terrible, terrible results, it was incredibly liberating.  Why am I taking advice from someone so reliably wrong?  Why are they lecturing me?  I broadened it out to politics in general.  Why am I listening to the group that screwed things up?  Don't I have any discernment?  Can't I evaluate someone's position and decide it's foolish?  And if they advocate such foolish positions regularly, can't I write off the person as a fool?

I’m still surprised how many states are heavily in favor of the Republican party’s candidate.  To me, it’s like the party is saying, “Hey, we exhibited terrible leadership over the last 8 years, so elect us for better leadership.”  That just doesn’t make sense to me at all.

That's all I have to say on that topic for now.

Just a quick note.  If you use digg.com and you have my "Digg Done That" or "Digg Filter" scripts installed, they have been updated.  You can find the new versions here (newly updated scripts on top):

userscripts.org/users/34026/scripts

I want to have John and Hank Green's babies.  What's that you say?  I'm a heterosexual male who is already happily married with kids?  Well, yes.  But John and Hank read books, and talk about politics while making Ze Frank peanut butter faces.  Seriously, why have I not had their babies yet?

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Personal responsibility, community support.  Reduce taxes by trimming the budget and reducing bureaucracy.  Restore our standing in the world.  Barack Obama.

For a long time, I've been impressed with the tattoos on Platter's Planescape site.  After years of wondering if I really want that tattoo, I've decided that waiting almost a decade to decide is probably long enough.  I do want it.  I've found a beautiful version of the artwork, here:

The nature of a man by ~isilien on deviantART

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This is my third homebrew rule revision to Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which I'm calling the 3.t edition. Today's rule revision has little to do with speeding up gameplay, but has a lot to do with lengthening the game day.  In particular, we're addressing Vancian magic.  That's the form of magic that 3.x and earlier versions use -- basically, spellcasters can use a limited array of spells per day, and then they're wiped out and need to rest.  That's a very different model from Diablo, for example, where your character can shoot fireballs all day, so long as he has mana.

The problem with the Vancian system is that it engenders the "15 minute work day" -- that is to say that clerics, wizards, and the like seem to blow through their spells after just a few combats, causing the group to go rest after less than a hour in the game world.  Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition has a solution for this, which is pretty close to just abandoning the Vancian magic system.  I personally wanted to do something much simpler with the 3.5 rules.  I was thinking, could I address the issue by changing just one single table in the Player's Handbook?

Let me show you the revised table, and then I'll explain why it's awesome.

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Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch recently gave a presentation titled, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."  What makes the presentation amazing (aside from how entertaining it is) is that this is a man who was staring down cancer.  He knew it when he gave the presentation.  Yet it is amazingly hopeful.

He was a geek, like me.  He loved video games and learning through fun.  He loved his family.  He has a thousand stories about the people he's met.  And he passed away today, July 25th, 2008.  You should watch the video.

"I mean, the metaphor I've used is... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them.  And that breaks my heart.  But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall.  So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets."

Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008)

As in my previous entry about the 3.t system, I'm trying to make D&D 3.5 play faster.  Today's rule revision has to do with critical hits.  Right now in 3.5, each weapon has a "threat range" such as 19-20, which means that if you roll a 19 or 20 on a 20-sided die, you are maybe going to do critical damage.  To determine if you actually do get critical damage, you roll again.  That's a bit convoluted.

The problem?  To fix this, we cannot just drop the confirmation roll and say "all critical threats are automatically confirmed."  If we do that, then crits will happen much more often and low-level characters will die more often.  But if we reduce the damage of the weapons, then we can keep all those crits.  That should speed up gameplay without changing the numbers (much), because there is no more rolling to confirm crits.  They just happen.  It should be more enjoyable for the players, too -- their weapons might do a tiny bit less damage each hit, but they will do critical hits often.  So what we're about to do will keep damage roughly the same, but remove an extra dice roll.  Ready?

Critical hits

1. Drop every weapon's damage to the next smaller die.  1d12 becomes 1d10, 1d10 becomes 1d8, 1d8 becomes 1d6, 1d6 becomes 1d4, 1d4 becomes 1d3, and 1d3 becomes 1d2.  Now, there is a tricky part here, for weapons that do two dice worth of damage per hit: 2d6 becomes 1d10, and 2d4 becomes 1d6.
2. All critical threats are automatically confirmed.  Done.

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For a while now, I've been mulling over what I would do to make D&D 3.5 play faster, like 4th edition promised.  Of course, the joke is that 4th edition can be even slower than 3.5, due to all the new movement rules.  But I don't have to worry about that.  I just want to take the best elements, and graft them onto the 3.5 rules with a minimum of fuss.

I'm calling my revisions 3.t, as in 3.tony, because I'm the one to blame if the revisions suck or work well.  The criteria for "sucks" would be if a rule change requires large rewrites, or breaks lots of other rules.  The criteria for "works well" would be if a rule change speeds up gameplay but has little effect otherwise.  So if a typical combat takes 90 minutes to resolve normally, with my rules I hope that you can resolve combat in an hour or less.

Turning

First up for revision is the cleric system for turning undead.  We merely drop the turn check roll, and replace it with cleric level + charisma bonus + knowledge religion synergy (if the character has it).  The turn damage roll would remain.  So the steps are as follows:

1. Roll the turn damage as usual (2d6 + cleric level + charisma).
2. Cap the highest hit die undead that can be turned at: cleric level + charisma modifier + knowledge religion synergy (if any).

Let's consider the example of a 2nd level cleric with 14 charisma and no points in the knowledge religion skill.  If the cleric rolled a 4, he'd have an 8 for step 1 (4 + 2 for level, +2 for charisma).  Then for step 2 the cap would be set at 2 + 2 + 0 (no synergy bonus), or 4 total.  Therefore, the cleric could turn two 4 HD undead (8 total, capped at 4 HD).  But he/she could not turn one 8 HD undead, due to the per-monster cap.

This is almost exactly the same as turn undead following RAW, but removes one roll and replaces it with a reasonably fair, typically unchanging number.  Should be easier for players to follow and execute quickly.

I'll group all my articles about rules revision under the 3.t tag, should you wish to see what else I have for it.

There's a discussion happening over at the RPG Codex about the Nintendo Wii and the terrible, terrible showing that Reggie Fils-Aimé (Nintendo's president) gave at this year's E3 gaming conference.  Reggie has gone from revolutionary to nanny in just four years.

I've owned a Wii since day one.  I've put probably a thousand dollars into the console, games, and controllers.  But I'm thinking hard about things, and so I want to share with you what I posted over at the RPG Codex.

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I just finished watching Pan's Labyrinth, by director Guillermo del Toro.  I understand now why he received a 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

I decided to watch the movie because I had heard that Guillermo del Toro will be directing the new Lord of the Rings movies (The Hobbit, and an in-between movie to bridge the 50 year gap between The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Ring).  The only other movie I had seen from this director was the movie Hellboy, which I hated.  So to be honest, I've been nervous that my favorite movie trilogy was about to be ruined with cheesy add-ons.

Having seen Pan's Labyrinth, I'm no longer worried.  I may do a full review of the movie later, or I may not.  But I know this is a man who can tell a story, and do a spellbinding job of it.  I wish him all the luck in the world.

Below is a quote from a post at Slashdot.  The discussion had veered into a debate about terrorism and the responsibility of Congress & the President versus the voting public.  What do you think?  Is he right?  Is he wrong?  Have we come to the point in our politics where placing blame on voters, even if difficult, is necessary?

Anyone who would vote for Bush Jr. twice is wilfully ignorant.

Anyone who supports perpetual budget defecits we're going to leave to our grandkids to pay back is wilfully ignorant.

Anyone who supports tax cuts and rebate cheques while we're 500 billion overdrawn every year is wilfully ignorant.

Anyone who supports war against relatively innocent nations, first on the basis of dishonest 9/11 rhetoric, then on dishonest WMD rhetoric, then on dishonest "He's a very bad man. Aren't you glad he's dead?" rhetoric, is wilfully ignorant.

Anyone who supports demolishing our freedoms in order to attack terrorists who supposedly hate us for our freedom is wilfully ignorant.

These wilfully ignorant people, they are supporting policies which are having a massive negative impact on the entire world and her people. Tens of thousands, maybe millions of people are dead because of the actions brought about by their wilful ignorance. More Americans are dead because of these ignorant policies than were killed on 9/11.

These people are my enemies.

I was excited about the new Diablo 3, and I found myself playing a round of Diablo 2 for nostalgia's sake.  I played a druid, got him up to level 9 and finished the "find Cain" quest.  Importantly, I never allocated any skill points.  Would you like to load him up and allocate the skill points as you wish?  Feel free.  His name is Mogrin, and he's available for download on my Diablo 2 saved games page.

So while I was working on getting back into phpBB development and updating all my mods to phpBB 3, I got a few doors shut in my face.  I was always a phpBB outsider, never submitting my mods to the official database.  However, I never felt closed out, until now.

So I've posted a story on Slashdot that hasn't hit the front page yet, and I could use your help getting it there.  The story should open up discussion of the best Open Source alternatives to phpBB.  Is it Phorum?  Is it FluxBB?  Is it something else?

Please, log into Slashdot and then view my story.  There is a +/- graphic embedded in the title, and if you hit that "+" icon you'll give my story a boost.  I'd really appreciate opening a dialogue with all of Slashdot.  It may give me insight into products I don't even know about yet.  Thanks!

I can't believe I did this.  I have revised The Blog Mod for phpBB 2.  It includes multiple bugfixes, new icons, and more.  I gave it a big version number increase, up to 1.0.0.  That's mostly due to the transfer of ownership, not because of some big overhaul of the code (although lots of bugfixes is nothing to sneeze at).  So, it only took six years to get to version 1!

I don't know why I revised it, as it is not for the new phpBB 3.  But I don't care.  It was fun.  If you still use the phpBB 2 system, now is your chance to get a nice stable blogging system in place for your members.  Check it out.

Thanks Matt, for helping to chip away at the cynicism I feel toward the world.

I'll offer a translation of the song's lyrics below the video.

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About a year ago, we started giving the kids chores.  They were constantly complaining that they didn't have any money, and we were constantly unhappy with the state of our house, so we gave 'em lists of housework to do.  My daughter took to it okay.  She balked at some jobs which she felt were pretty gruesome and deserved more pay.  But overall, she liked earning money and did most jobs.  For my son, if it was family cleanup day he'd pitch in.  But if mom & dad were busy and he was left with a choice to play a video game or earn money cleaning the house, he'd play a video game.  Money didn't motivate him at all.

For the most part, we let that stand.  If he didn't want to earn money, he could miss out and that was fine.  However, there were some things on the list that were not optional, such as keeping their rooms clean.  When the rooms didn't get clean, I attached what I thought was a pretty serious consequence -- any toy not in its proper place gets thrown out.  Again, for my daughter, this was fairly effective.  Her room got mostly clean, and usually stayed that way.  But for my son, this was a wonderful negotiation.  "If I don't clean up, you throw these things away?"

I nodded somberly, "Yep."

"Okay," he replied.  And then he left his room a complete mess and went outside to play with the neighborhood kids instead.  Of course, I called his bluff.  I put a ton of his toys in a garbage bag.  Only it turns out he wasn't bluffing.  He saw the bag and shrugged it off.  It was almost as if this was a cost vs. benefit calculation for him -- the cost of a free afternoon was giving up some toys?  Yeah, worth it.  Done.  As a bonus, he got me to clean his room for him.

I did not see that one coming.

This is – I think – my first cup of awesomesauce, ever.  This code is beautiful.  I've had a lot of Open Source projects, yes.  But they were all done fast – in a weekend, when I could cram it in.  But this baby?  She's all curves.  Try clicking these table headers:

Yeah. Want a cup? It's yours, for free.

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I was given an iMac recently, and decided to burn a little cash on upgrading it.  However, I had a problem.  I knew I had a Bondi iMac, but I couldn't tell if it was revision A or B.  They're both teal, they have the same form factor, and there are no visible markings to differentiate them.

It does make a difference when upgrading.  For example, the revision A iMac can only use up to 384 megs of RAM, while the revision B iMac can take 512 megs of RAM.

It has been nine years since the original iMac arrived on the scene, so my assumption was that this is a solved problem.  I'd hop online, search for a hint, and discover an easy way to tell the difference between them.  But no, it's not solved.  However, it turns out that it can be solved, pretty easily.

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Over at Enworld, I posted a quick review of the 4th edition D&D Player's Handbook.  I wanted to put that here, as my "stake in the ground" about my feeling regarding 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons.  Here's my review.

The Player's Handbook is much better organized than the 3.5 edition book.  Everything makes sense.  Gameplay is better (as in, I can see how you could hustle it along with fewer pauses to consult the rules).  Having said that, wizards, warlocks, and even clerics are booooooorrrring. Fewer spells, and at least for clerics, their role as healer is much less interesting considering that everyone has healing surges (and yes, I did read that a cleric can trigger healing surges even after the other players hit their cap – I'm not suggesting that clerics are useless, merely that they no longer feel as special or interesting as before).

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This blog entry really isn't for most of the world.  But I have some family members that have started uploading digital photos to a MemoryFrame, and so I'd like to outline some tips.

1. The MemoryFrame skews yellow and bright

The MemoryFrame doesn't have color fidelity on par with a typical computer monitor.  I've had two copies of the MF-8000, and both tend to add a touch of yellow.  Check it out:

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What is MTAgain?  Why do we need it?

MTAgain provides looping to Movable Type.  For example, say you want to list not only the previous blog entry, but the one before that and the one before that.  MTAgain lets you do that.  Essentially, what it can do is put a tag like MTEntryPrevious inside itself, and it can do that thousands of times if you're crazy enough to try it.

The MTAgain plugin for Movable Type is not my own creation.  Someone named Lummox JR wrote it years ago, and then disappeared.  In fact, I couldn't find his original plugin anywhere – even the Web Archive didn't have copies of his long-gone Web site!

What I did find was an article that mentioned the plugin and, when readers complained that the plugin didn't exist anymore, offered the code.  However, they never offered an instruction manual.  With the author's site gone and the manual missing, I had to do some sleuthing.  In particular, I couldn't really guess what the "any" feature did.  But I found an old forum post, learned the code, revised and expanded it, and now I offer it to you with a useful new feature.

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I recently saw a few blogs that had photos by the author of each comment.  I thought, "Wow, those blogs must be very popular if people are willing to upload photos!"  But then I saw the same dude with the same photo on a couple different blogs, and the blogs were smaller than mine.  So I started looking into it, and I learned about gravatar.com.  That Web site allows you to associate a photo or icon with your email address, so that no matter where you post, your photo goes with you.

Of course, you wouldn't sign up if you want privacy.  But lots of people are signing up, and I want to show the icons they're using.  So I found an old Movable Type plugin from 2003 that does the job.  But it does it badly – it has a feature that no longer works (the border option), and it doesn't use any of the newer plugin features.  So I've revised it to use the newer Gravatar URL format as well as use the MT plugin interface.  However, I haven't revised it to work with MT 4.  No.  Instead, I've revised it for MT 3.

Why revise for MT 3?  Well, there are a lot of us still using it.  I won't be onto MT 4 for another 6 months or so.  But I want Gravatars now.  So here we go.

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I hope that when my time comes, I can be half the man you were.

I created a script that is hosted over at userscripts.org.  It's called Slashdot nuzak CSS.  It modifies the appearance of slashdot.org so that it doesn't look as clunky.  It thins out the big fat box drawn around each comment, it makes the "reply" buttons look a little more stylish, and so on.  It's not a big overhaul, but it's a nice little cleanup project.

Thanks to Slashdot member nuzak for coming up with most of the CSS that is used.

-Tony

Just a quick note to say that I released a new Greasemonkey script.  It adds a warning box of text to any php.net manual page that features a function that is dangerous to multi-byte strings.  I'm sorry, you want that in English?  OK.  Have you ever posted something to a Web site and found that characters were missing or truncated or there were lots of question marks or boxes where letters should have been?  Usually that's because the person running the site doesn't understand how letters work at a programming-language level.  They think everyone on Earth is using an English keyboard with the letters A-Z.  When they get data that isn't A-Z, their Web site programs don't know what to do with the data, and they mangle it.

It turns out most people don't use just the A-Z characters, even people who write in English.  Lots of people want to use the Euro symbol, for example.  That isn't a "normal" letter, and so lots of Web sites just mangle it.  Part of the problem is the programming language used on these Web sites.  In particular, the PHP language has two main "modes" for handling characters.  The first, and the default, is basically to treat everything like ASCII.  ASCII is the A-Z standard.  Unfortunately, that severely damages the text that people type nowadays.  So PHP has a second major mode of operation, and that is to set itself to UTF-8.  UTF-8 includes lots and lots of characters, and it's backwards compatible with ASCII.  So pretty much every Web geek should use it. 

The problem?  The online PHP manual doesn't offer much of a warning any time you look up one of the old, bad ASCII functions.  I personally replaced some old, bad code with... you guessed it... more old bad code.  Why?  Because I looked up replacement functions and found what I thought would work, only to realize that the replacement functions were also bad and came with NO disclaimer!  And that leads us to my Greasemonkey script.  This script will add disclaimers to php.net, on any page containing a bad old function.  If possible it will also tell you a better way to do what you want to do.  It's basically code help for PHP developers.

You can get the script on userscripts.org.  Please install it and then view some of these pages to see the disclaimers it adds:

http://www.php.net/ucwords
http://www.php.net/strstr

In the blog comments for my other Greasemonkey script, Alex requested that I create a script that would allow him to mark Digg stores as "read."  Doing this would make the story disappear, so that the only stories showing on the page would be the ones still unread.  It took months for me to find some free time, but I finally made the script.  Here's a screenshot of what it adds to digg.com stories:

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I don't remember where I found this – maybe on Digg? In any case, it's a very interesting image that shows how much debt was incurred by the USA, every year. The image is a link that leads to a larger, more readable version.

That certainly puts things in a different light for me.

Since the people who maintain The Blog Mod dropped off the face of the Earth, I've found all the stuff I could from my backups, and I've put it online for whoever needs it.  This includes:

• The Blog Mod itself (my .24b version, which was the latest)
• The patches
• The templates

Interested?  Link in the sidebar, under the software section.  Or just jump there directly.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Check out more of these uh... (cough cough) very cool guys!

Imagine my surprise a while ago when I was reading a discussion about the Lord of the Rings books, and suddenly the topic veered into the nature of love and marital fidelity (give it a minute to load before you start scrolling around that page, because it should jump to about halfway down automatically).  I think it's quite awesome to read that post and the two replies underneath it, because in my opinion it illuminates the stark contrast in thinking between people who will succeed at marriage, and those who will fail.

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I like this photo a lot.  I hope the kid didn't get into too much trouble.

The photo links to the site where I originally found the image.  The site has some other good photos, plus this photo at a larger size.

I was doing some ego surfing just now and I stumbled across this old forum thread about poetry by yours truly.  The real discussion continues for about 3 pages after my inital post (as linked).  It's a very old thread, so don't register on that site & post replies or anything.  But I am proud of the nuanced conversation we had about what poetry is, what kind of standards it needs to maintain, and how subjective the whole process should be.

Planescape: Torment is probably the best role-playing game ever made.  Don't let the word "torment" throw you off – at its core, this a bittersweet game about regret and forgiveness.

Platter was a guy who hacked Planescape: Torment (in a good way).  He fixed bugs, stabilized the gameplay, and so on.  Unfortunately, he dropped off the Internet in 2007, and his Web site was lost.  As I was going through an old backup, I found a copy of his entire Web site, which I recently put back online.  Now that I've gone through it, I want to share with you the 5 coolest things I've found.

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For roughly two months, I have kept a tab open in my Firefox Web browser.  It contains one of the saddest Web pages I have ever seen.  I do not mean that the code or design or CSS is wonky.  I mean that it displays a heartbreaking image from a photo journalism contest.  The photo breaks me down into tears every time I glance at it.  I haven't been able to close the tab.  I shut down Firefox, but when it starts back up the next day, it reloads the tabs.  Every time, this image of this boy is there.  This broken, six year-old boy who looks so much like my own six year-old boy.  And every time I see it, I cannot stop thinking of the cruelty of this life, the fact that we have been robbed of life that never had a chance to flourish.

I need to make peace with the photograph.  I need to find some way to resolve my feelings about it.  The only thing I can think to do is to link to the photograph, to make this the funeral for everything wrong with the image that I cannot get out of my head.  And after I make this post, I will close the tab, and then I will go and kiss my son as he sleeps, and I will thank God that he is still with me.

It's a photo of the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge.

I lost nothing this week!  My photos look better, though.

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So, over at RPG Watch forums, there is this interesting discussion titled, "Why is one belief better than the other?" What's interesting (aside from the fact that it's taking place on a gaming forum) is that it hasn't sunk down into a religious war. There are cool conversations happening. And I made a post that I wanted to reprint here in its entirety. The discussion centered around a woman who believes that God is responsible for everything in life – her grades, her jobs, her success, her failure. She could control none of it. I likened that to Calvinism (predestination).

And then I told an interesting story. Maybe. You can judge for yourself, but first let me give you one piece of info.  There is an allusion to a game that you need to know about in order for some of this to make sense.  The game involves a character called Vhalior.  He is a suit of armor with nothing inside except pure will to do justice.  And at a certain point in the game, the main character (called "The Nameless One" or TNO for short) has the ability to cause Vhalior to disappear in a puff of logic, the armor clanking to the floor.  How this happens isn't the point here.  The point is merely this: what happens when we follow our own logic about existence and discover that we don't need to exist?

Here is the post, in full:

This is odd.  I lost weight this week, but in my photos I look fatter.  What's up with that?

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From the comments over at Cliff Schecter's site:

My large (90+) extended family are mostly poor white East Texas evangelicals. And they love, love love Bush. They would make him president for life if they could. At a recent family holiday get together, one uncle actually suggested this and there were knowing nods all around and even and amen or two. Crazy thing is that my family is mostly rural poor and they have really suffered economic hardships under this administration. A number are having trouble putting food on the table and a few have lost their homes. Yet they just don't make the connection. One aunt who lost her job in Nov when the company shut down blames Bill Clinton for her current situation!

I've tried to point out that SEVEN years ago with Bill was prez, no one in the family was on food stamps. But they just can't make that connection.

Wow.  I just don't understand my own country.  I know it's wrong to make judgments – and I know that when you do, you invoke the wrath of those who dislike your opinion.  Having said that, I think it is important for intelligent, thinking people to have some discernment.  And in this case, I think you can safely navigate toward the exit door and then flee from the crazy people in the room.

I finally managed to put together a succinct explanation of why I disliked the Alias TV show so much.  Beware, spoilers ahead.

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Holy holiday luck!  I lost weight, but by everything that is good and righteous, I should have gained weight.  I ate terribly and failed to work out.  I have to admit that the only thing that kept my weight down is that I have been relentlessly sick for the past two days (apologies to all my family members who read this and realize that I had a holiday dinner with them while I was probably contagious).  Well, let's get to the photos.

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