10 Things Parents Should Know Before Seeing The New Star Trek
My favorite bits:
8. Do I need to sit through the credits for some sort of bonus movie at the end?
This should’ve been question number 1, not 8. The answer was “no”.
It’s a space action flick, so it’s fairly loud throughout. The space battles are loud [...]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Jeff Bezos wrote:
A strange thing happened on the way to the paperless society. We humans created more paper than ever before. Computer printers (and their evil companion, the ink-toner cartridge) have proliferated, and most of us routinely print out and lug around loads of personal and professional documents. Why? It’s not that buying printers or changing ink-toner cartridges is fun. It’s because reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays. Printing has been worth the hassle.
(It’s currently on the Amazon home page, but I didn’t see a permanent link.)
Reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays? There was a time when that was certainly true, but it hasn’t been true in a long time.
Why do I print things out? There are a lot of factors, of course, but here are currently the primary ones.
Area: I can spread four sheets of paper out on my desk. Buying a display or multiple displays that can show as much at one time is expensive.
Flipping through papers is often easier than managing windows.
I do have a portable screen, but it has less area and flipping between documents on it can be more overhead than managing windows.
These are all trade-offs. The point is not that paper has a clear advantage for any of them. The point is that paper still has enough of an advantage enough of the time to make printing worth the hassle.
The Kindle DX does add another variable to the mix: A portable display with a larger area and different characteristics. It doesn’t, however, fundamentally change the equation.
Having said that, I’ve been wanting something the size of the Kindle DX for a long time. There’s a reason you can buy—e.g.—paper notebooks in pocket, digest, and letter sizes. I think there are roles for devices in similar sizes.
Adam Savage (a.k.a. @donttrythis) wrote:
I met a girl (my first kiss) playing D&D while in the employ of Warner Library, in Tarrytown. I was the Dungeonmaster.
So, I’m listening to Grimm Studios Podcast episode 1 and the subject comes up about whether a hero is an extraordinary person or an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.
(I think both. I think it’s also interesting to note, however, that when the hero is extraordinary, the challenges faced are often so much more extraordinary that the hero’s extraordinariness† is immaterial.)
It occurs to me that this might be why I’m not crazy about things like The Watchmen. In some ways they are about extraordinary persons in ordinary circumstances. I can appreciate that sort of thing but only so much.
Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy The Watchmen‡. I did. It’s just never going to be on my list of favorites.
†Wow. This derivative of extraordinary—as awkward as it is—is actually explicitly listed in the Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary.
‡Not the movie. The comic. Although I haven’t actually so much read the comic as watched the “motion comic”.
I’m really bad at keeping up with music. I’ve been making an effort to regularly buy albums, but it hasn’t really helped since I seem to mostly be buying digital version of my old cassette tape collection.
One such is Joe “Satch” Satriani’s 1987 Surfing with the Alien. Of course, I didn’t know when I bought the CD at Half Price Books last June that in 2007 he’d released an expanded 20th anniversary edition.
As I recall, Joe came to fame as a former guitar teacher of Steve Vai’s after Steve had come to fame playing with David Lee Roth when Diamond Dave left Van Halen. Of course, “fame” here means that if you’re a guitar player you have probably heard of them.
Here’s my two degrees of separation: One of my guitar teachers, Danny Blitz, once jammed with Joe. During that time when Joe was known only as “Steve Vai’s guitar teacher”.
Joe has built an impressive career on electric guitar instrumentals. He’s only recently joined a “regular band”, Chickenfoot.
Anyway, back to 1987: Alien, Joe’s second album, reached 29 on The Billboard 200 at a time when rock instrumentals hadn’t charted in years or were heard on the radio much.
There’s no doubt that Joe has mad guitar skillz, but the things I love about this album aren’t so much the flashy tricks. “Always with me, always with you” is a melodic ballad in which the few bursts of shredding or whammy bar squeals or right-hand tapping are used only in service to the song. That’s probably my favorite track. “Midnight” explores two-handed tapping but not for flash. Overall, besides the flashy, rocking title track and “Satch Boogie” hits, there’s just a really nice mix of pieces here that cover a lot of territory.
There may be as many opinions on the various roles and contributions of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons as there are people who recognize those names. By all accounts, though, they were both interesting, imperfect, and genuinely nice characters. And also very different.
The hobby they created has given me fun, but it also gave me an impetus to study history and probability. It introduced me to literature I might never have read otherwise. And it helped me find and have an excuse to hang out with some of the best friends I’ve ever had.
Though I never met either of them, Gary’s passing last year and Dave’s now have both felt a bit like losing a mentor.
In honor of Dave and Gary, I’ve pulled out Oearth Journal #6 to read “Robilar Remembers: Journey to the City of the Gods”. It is Rob Kuntz’s account of a session in which his character Robilar and Gary’s Mordenkainen explore Blackmoor’s famed “City of the Gods”. It includes some Dungeon Masters Comments from Dave as well.
On the business of role-playing games...
Ryan Dancey made a comment on a post at RPGpundit’s blog. I found it interesting enough that I’m quoting the whole thing below.
One of the reasons I find Ryan’s opinion interesting is because he’s a former Wizards of the Coast Vice President.
(I saw this due to Randall posting about it on the RetroRoleplaying blog.)
This is a classic example of Death Spiral. As things go bad, the regressive forces inside the organization (lawyers, commissioned sales people, creative folk who feel stifled by history, precariously tenured executives) are increasingly able to exert their agenda. It always makes a bad situation worse, but there’s no magic bullet that would likely make the bad situation better so you get a rapid unbalance in the Corporate Force towards the Dark Side.
- OGL?
- Risky (someone might make us look bad, steal our ideas before we print them, or create a competitive brand that siphons off sales), and lack of faith in network marketing devalues ROI assumptions. Kill it.
- PDF?
- Causes endless problems with hardcopy partners creating pressure on sales team they could really do without, and revenues are so small as to be non-strategic. Cut it.
- Online?
- Every time you talk about it someone produces a $10 million minimum cost estimate to “do it right”. After spending 3–5× this amount in a series of failed initiatives (lead by utterly unqualified people), executives assume Online is plutonium. No qualified lead or team will touch it.
- Evergreen?
- Sales of each unit are going down and few products have any staying power. The only (seemingly viable) solution is to put more books in production—make up for the revenue hole caused by lack of evergreen sales by getting more money out of each customer. The Treadmill.
The next things that will take hits are the RPGA (costs a lot to operate—slash its budget), then quality (put fewer words and less art on fewer pages and raise the price), then consistency (rules varients generated by inexperienced designers and/or overworked developers start to spawn and cohesion in rulings breaks down leading to ad hoc interpretations as the de facto way to play).
Meanwhile sales just keep going down, the gap in the budget keeps getting bigger, and no matter how many heads roll, there isn’t any light at the end of the tunnel.
Wizards is about to be forced into the D&D end-game which is something that many publishers have gone through but none ever with a game the scale and impact of D&D (TSR walked right up to this cliff but WotC saved them from going over the edge). There are 3 outcomes:
- A total collapse, and the game ceases meaningful publication and distribution at least for one gamer generation and maybe forever.
- Downsizing until overhead matches income; could involve some kind of out-license or spin off of the business—think BattleTech in its current incarnation.
- Traumatic rebirth, meaning that someone, somewhere finds some way to cut out the cancers that are eating the tabletop game and restarts the mass market business for D&D.
Note that 2 and 3 can be mileposts on the road to 1.
