Jeff Öff

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A declassified mission transcript from Apollo 10 (PDF) includes a passage in which the spacemen argue about whose turd is floating weightlessly through the capsule.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

CHICAGO—Despite broiling temperatures that have plagued the residents of the Midwest and much of the Eastern Seaboard throughout the week, local man and lifelong contrarian Martin Rivers told reporters Thursday that the ongoing heat wave does not in...

The NYT's John Schwartz, who is himself from Texas, live-tweeted the dramatic proceedings yesterday in the Texas Senate surrounding one of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country. The law was pushed forward by governor Rick “The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done” Perry.

No surprise: it passed. Read John's coverage today, and weep.

The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and hold abortion clinics to the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers, among other requirements. Its supporters say that the strengthened regulations for the structures and doctors will protect women’s health; opponents argue that the restrictions are actually intended to put financial pressure on the clinics that perform abortions and will force most of them to shut their doors.

Perry thanked lawmakers for passing the bill: “Today the Texas Legislature took its final step in our historic effort to protect life.” A funny thing to say about a law that puts the lives and health of women in unprecedented danger, along with the lives and health of their children. And stranger still, by the governor of the state with the highest death penalty stats in the U.S.

In case you missed it, the final hours in the Texas Senate chambers last night were full of craziness.

Again, from John Schwartz's piece:

The Senate took up the bill Friday afternoon, and people had begun lining up for seats in the third-floor Senate gallery early in the morning. Department of Public Safety officers, their numbers swelled in anticipation of crowds and tumult, searched every bag and confiscated anything that could be thrown — including, for part of the day and until the practice became an object of derision online, tampons. Department officials said the searches had turned up jars “suspected to contain” urine, feces and paint, along with glitter and confetti, but offered no proof.

For shame, America. For shame.

Previously on Boing Boing: "Texas Republicans fail to pass restrictive abortion bill, after long night of filibuster, debates over parliamentary procedure, and 'unruly mobs'"

Before vote, @DavidHDewhurst asks that "we not forget to love each other. As Christ loved the church as we love all of those unborn babies."

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

Leaving the post-vote speech: "take this state back"--@WendyDavisTexas pic.twitter.com/CeIaMlOpkc

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

Outside the Capitol, @kirkpwatson lauds the democratic caucus. pic.twitter.com/PB4zDk70wA

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

#HB2 will force Texas women "to make dangerous, sometimes deadly decisions." @WendyDavisTexas

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

The final speech before the vote, by @WendyDavisTexas pic.twitter.com/F3E0phfnUT

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

Lawmakers pushed to pass the law quickly, says @WendyDavisTexas, "So they won't be delayed in their climb of the political ladder."

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

Closing her speech, @WendyDavisTexas says, “The fight for the future of Texas is just beginning.”

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) July 13, 2013

Microsoft granted the National Security Agency access to private emails and Skype calls through it's Prism spying program as early as 2011, according to documents obtained by The Guardian.

Polygon has reached out to Microsoft for clarification on the report as well as what sort of information the company is sharing from Kinect, Skype and Xbox Live via the Xbox One. Skype powers all chats on the Xbox one.

According to the report, files provided by former CIA employee Edward Snowden show the NSA has been collecting Skype content and emails sent through Outlook.com since February 2011. These files share more information on the Prism program and the depth of its interaction with other major technology companies.

The files state Microsoft...

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Fox has given a "put pilot" commitment for a TV series adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's widely popular graphic novel series "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".

'League' began as a comic series in 1999 and follows a group of Victorian age literary characters, including Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde who team up to fight a common enemy.

Subsequent volumes moved forward into different periods of history. The property was previously, and very loosely. adapted into the 2003 feature film of the same name that starred Sean Connery in his final live-action role.

Michael Green ("Kings," "Heroes," "Smallville") will serve as writer, executive producer and showrunner should the project go to series. Erwin Stoff ("The Matrix," "Kings") will also executive produce, and neither Moore or O'Neill are involved.

Source: The Live Feed

Some memories just won't die — and some can even be transferred to a whole new brain. Researchers at Tufts University have determined that a small, yellow worm known as a planarian, which has long been studied for its regenerative properties, is able to grow back a lot more than just its body parts: after the worm's small, snake-like head and neck are removed, its body will even regrow a brain that's capable of quickly relearning its lost skills.

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Actor Andrew Garfield tells EW that he recently had a philosophical discussion with his "The Amazing Spider-Man" producer Matt Tolmach about Mary Jane (MJ) and came up with an idea that would no doubt stir a lot of talk:

"I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ, and I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’ Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking!… So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?"

He even thought of someone for the role:

"I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since The Wire. He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better — we’d have interracial bisexuality!"

What's interesting is that in a later interview, director Marc Webb barely needed any prompting when asked if Garfield had brought up the idea to him, saying "Michael B. Jordan, I know."

Russia has been hard at work on a floating nuclear power plant for years, but the project is finally getting closer to completion. According to RT.com, one of Russia's biggest shipbuilders revealed that the country's first floating nuclear power plant is expected to be in operation by 2016. While it might seem like a hazardous undertaking, the specifications of the floating reactors are such that they should be able to withstand tsunamis, crashes with other ships, or crashes with structures on land. The vessels are also said to not release any harmful or hazardous substances during operation. The benefit of these plants is their extreme portability — the floating power plants can be towed by other vessels out to remote areas where...

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Guerilla Games' upcoming first-person shooter, Killzone: Shadow Fall, will include options to customize the game's control layout, game director Steven ter Heide said during a fan Q&A.

According to ter Heide, the game's default settings will cover the important gameplay mechanics present in Shadow Fall, but players will be able to make changes that are best for them.

"It always takes experimentation and lots of testing to get this right, and we realize that even then it's probably not the best layout for everyone," ter Heide wrote. "So we will provide options to change the layout. The new controller feels different in a couple of important areas, and we are taking advantage of the new features and feel. But if, for example, you don't...

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Shocker.

Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel
Disney Channel is set to premiere "Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel" on August 16th. The crossover episode marks the first time Marvel characters will be featured in an original animated Disney Channel series.

In the episode, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk are rendered powerless and its up to Phineas and Ferb to restore their powers before it is too late. [Source: The Live Feed]

Orange is the New Black
Netflix has renewed dramedy "Orange is the New Black" for a second season before the first has even bowed on the streaming platform. [Source: Variety]

Happy Endings
It's official, the canceled ABC comedy "Happy Endings" will NOT be heading to another network. This is despite the aggressive efforts of Sony Pictures TV to find the series a new home.

USA had been the most likely network to sign up for a fourth season of the show, but that deal never came to fruition. The cast's options are all set to expire over this weekend. [Source: The Live Feed]

American Gods
HBO and Playtone Productions are reportedly planning a six-season arc for their series adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel "American Gods". Each 10-12 episode season is expected to cost around $40 million.

The story follows a parolee pulled into working for a charismatic salesman and drawn into a conflict between America's gods, old and new. [SourcE: Empire]

It's a game of superlatives.

The studio's biggest game. Its longest development cycle. The first with new publishing partner Activision.

It will also be the first game many at the studio have made that isn't Halo. Imagine having a ten year career in game development and knowing nothing but Halo. Some of these people can say that, or at least they could until now.

They could also say they hadn't designed for anything but a Microsoft console in over ten years. This game will be Bungie's first multi-platform title since Oni, and its first new IP game since regaining its independence in 2007.

For Bungie, this latest game represents the culmination of decades of growth and years of hard work. It is Bungie's best — and possibly...

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Scottish writer Iain Banks, known both for his seminal Culture series and his work in more traditional literary fiction, has died at age 59, the BBC reports. In an open letter, Banks revealed in April that he had advanced gall bladder cancer, saying he did not expect to live more than a year. His death comes less than two weeks before the planned publication of his final book, The Quarry — a date that had been moved up in hopes that he would live to see it. Soon after his announcement, he married partner Adele Hartley, who he said wryly he had asked to have "the honour of becoming my widow."

Over the course of 25 years, Banks published many novels in the Culture series, which explored the complexities of a post-scarcity,...

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I missed this back in March 2012, but it bears re-visiting. Here's a series of Doonesbury strips that some newspapers refused to run in spring 2012. The strips criticize Republican state legislatures' plans to require transvaginal probes for women contemplating abortion, with special emphasis on Texas governor Rick Perry.

Trudeau wrote: "Ninety-nine percent of American women have or will use contraception during their lifetimes. To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of 'limited government' is appalling. "In Texas, the sonograms are the least of it. The legislature has also defunded women's health clinics all over the state, leaving 300,000 women without the contraceptive services that prevent abortions in the first place. Insanity."

Trudeau is dismayed by the newspaper reaction. "I write the strip to be read, not removed. And as a practical matter, many more people will see it in the comics page than on the editorial page," he wrote.

"I don't mean to be disingenuous. Obviously there's some profit to controversy, especially for a satirist. If debate is swirling around a particular strip, and if its absence creates blowback, then I'm contributing to the public conversation in a more powerful way. But I don't get up in the morning and scheme about how to antagonise editors. Some of these folks have supported me for decades."

Oh, Texas... This is why I want to leave you. (via Reddit)

RICHMOND, VA—After applying several spritzes of cologne to his freshly shaven face, 87-year-old World War II veteran Roger Sarlo confidently left his home Thursday to go reel in some top-shelf D-Day anniversary pussy, the grandfather of five confirm...

In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed on Verizon's network, even calls that originated and terminated in the USA (the NSA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans). This kind of dragnet surveillance has long been rumored; Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall published an open letter to US Attorney General Holden saying that "most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted...the Patriot Act." Here, at last, are the details:

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold point out, this kind of surveillance is at the heart of several of its ongoing cases, and the Obama administration has done everything in its power to stop the American people from finding out how it interprets the Constitution:

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but it's predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted surveillance.

But at each step of the way, the government has tried to hide the truth from the American public: in Jewel, behind the state secrets privilege; in the FOIA case, by claiming the information is classified top secret.

Justin Theroux has scored the lead in Damon Lindelof's HBO drama pilot "The Leftovers".

The story is set after the Rapture happens and follows those left behind in a suburban community.

Theroux will play chief of police Kevin Garvey, a father of two who is trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in this world.

Peter Berg helms the pilot which was co-written by Lindelof and Tom Perrotta.

Source: Variety

Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness's report on Prenda Law (previously), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of being sued and forever having your name linked with embarrassing pornography). The witness said that he believed that Prenda -- and its principle, John Steele -- had been responsible for seeding and sharing the files they accused others of pirating.

After hearing about this, the administrators for The Pirate Bay dug through their logs and published a damning selection of log entries showing that many of the files that Steele and his firm accused others of pirating were uploaded by Steele himself, or someone with access to his home PC.

The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files.

The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs.

The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable.

While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far.

The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

You know those inspirational text-wall photos that friends of friends post to Pinterest and Facebook, full of blithe clichés and maudlin motivational monologues? Dude. Fengi, on livejournal, fixed them for you.

A first music video from the long-awaited new album 'Tomorrow's Harvest' by Boards of Canada. New album due Monday June 10 worldwide except for North America, where it will be released one day later on June 11. Pre-order on Amazon here. Video directed by Neil Krug.

"I feel like I have been force fed tranquillisers and cake," says one YouTube commenter. "This is fucking beautiful."

And that about sums it up.

Speaking to Polygon, Ben Kilgore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business and one of the chief architects for the new console, said the console's new hardware and software architecture is the main thing that makes this new Xbox better than the 360.

"It is a combination of hardware and software," he said. "I think the most magical thing that we have done that is going to give us a platform of innovation in the next decade is the architecture. We have multiple operating systems that are able to co-exist to allow game developers ... to get exclusive access to a bunch of resources."

The Xbox One runs on three distinct operating systems. One powers the games, another, the kernel of Windows 8, powers...

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Microsoft will not allow independent developers to self-publish their games on Xbox One without partnering with Microsoft Studios or a third-party partner, a Microsoft exec told Shacknews at the console's reveal event.

The policy mirrors that of the Xbox Live Arcade platform on Xbox 360, which requires developers to partner with an approved publisher to get a game on the platform — the Xbox Live Indie Games service carries no such requirement, but is also a much less successful storefront for indie game sales. The future of the Indie Games platform is also in limbo, as Microsoft has confirmed that it will release no new versions of its XNA game development toolset, which all Xbox Live Indie Games are developed in.

When asked if the...

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This blog hosted “Penny Dreadfuls: Against the Nostalgia Fetish in Fantasy Roleplaying” yesterday, a pleasant-but-perhaps-confused rant against nostalgia in roleplaying game design, and in favor of progress and modernity. Maybe I’m just old enough to see the upside of the conservative worldview, but let me be the first to say “bah, nonsense!” and offer this brief rebuttal in the voice of reason. I fully realize that in doing so, I can expect to insult every active gamer in a slightly different fashion than Mssr. Hebert did.

Yes, roleplaying games in general and Dungeons & Dragons and the Pathfinder RPG in particular do revel in the antique, the ancient, the dusty tomes—as part of the genre, and as a focus for world building. But this is hardly a fetish for nostalgia or a clinging to the outworn and lackluster rules of yesterday. It’s just part of the character of its novels and settings. Fantasy RPG fans also like Renaissance fairs, medieval weapons, and tales that lean toward sagas and hero-quests. Comes with the territory.

Steady Improvement
But RPG fans preferring antique game design? Not at all, and to the contrary. Most gamers are happy to recognize and embrace a core of functional, pleasurable, and workable rules, rather than chasing after every gaming fad and novelty.

Yes, sometimes these are the core rules you learned as a teenager. Some people are still playing OD&D, or AD&D, or Basic. But it’s a small-but-vocal minority of people who master the rules once, and then refuse to tinker, update, or adapt them.

More often than not, though, D&D fans are fairly quick to abandon the old in favor of the new and improved. Every edition of D&D depends on this–and I will bet if there is ever a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder, fans will first scream “heresy!” and then rush to see how things might be tweaked and improved. Certainly, the hobby will never advance quickly enough for some who shout “Faster! Modern! Discard your d20 class-and-level chains!”, but those gamers are perfect-rules-questers. They are always moving from one system to another, and the search for novelty is never satisfied, because by definition, once you have found it, it is no longer new to you.

Now, it’s true that some D&D players and Pathfinder fans are, in fact, delighted with the Old School, and the Old School Renaissance is even more hidebound in its delight in the old stuff. People enjoy games they understand, and once you have mastered a system, it takes a little work to change your rules and your play style. Not much work, though, and many gamers like nothing better than ripping into a new book of crunchy rules or a tome that brings new flavor to a setting we love. That is no crime: It’s comfortable and pleasant to revisit worlds and characters that delight us. The exact same human instinct explains the sequels to books, comics, and movies we love. Superman is 75 years old: The premise still works. D&D is almost 40 years old, and it is still fun to roll a 20 and clobber the orc.

In other words, a new or modern design is not always better. There is no guarantee of “progress” just because a copyright date is recent, and publishers release terrible games with distressing regularity. Treating newness with a little skepticism is the healthy sign of someone who has seen gaming fashions come and go: Remember all those crazy dice pools? Diceless RPGs? The peculiar fascination of the Comeliness stat? Many gaming trends have done okay for a while. But many new ideas wither and die, and the wise designer learns from the history of the field, tracing the evolution of styles and mechanics. The D&D style has been an enduring one. Perhaps that means it does some things absolutely right for its audience.

Experimental, Not Reactionary
I’d argue, further, that gamers are hardly nostalgic as a breed. Sure, everyone loves the adventures that introduced them to the hobby. (And why shouldn’t they? The wonder of the first time!) But rather than hewing closely to nostalgia, most fantasy gamers are tinkerers and homebrewers. They’re always dabbling, trying out a new mix in their campaign, adding supplements, dropping subsystems, and houseruling like crazy. The most popular genres and styles are also the most active laboratories of game design, and they are the crucible of what works, rather than what is new.

And this “what works” style is premised on a foundation of older things that, probably, have worked for decades: simple ability scores, a d20 system or a percentile system, a class-and-level framework or certain types of point-buy radicalism. This isn’t fetishizing old rules. It’s proper respect for things that the hobby as a whole points to and says, “Well, it might look a little odd, but it’s really great fun to do it this way.”

The core archetypes of fantasy—the wizards and warriors—are not subject to a lot of change. The rules we play by may slowly drift and ebb and alter, but the wise gamer does not chase every passing fad. The good ideas in game design will stick around for long enough to find their way into houserules and small-press releases, and—if they are truly great—find their way into the next edition. The junky, flashy progress of untested and unplayable systems fades away. This is, after all, why Kobold Press fights so hard to playtest as much as possible: Real play burns away excessive rules, design indulgences, unwise world-building decisions, poor choices in tactical maps. Only a fool discards the weight of accumulated experience.

What you call “fetish” and “nostalgia,” Dear Mr. Hebert, is what I call “time-tested” and “proven to work.” I’ll be happy to play any wild and progressive design you like, and I would be happy to find new ways to play faster, better, livelier games. But I’ll think carefully before I throw away the games that got me here.

Wolfgang Baur feels officially older than the hills after writing this essay. But dagnabbit, a d20 is a good tool for beginners and advanced players alike.

I am very pleased to report that editorial for the core Hillfolk book has been completed. The last submissions are in, edited, and proofed, and the text and illustrations are now in the hands of graphic design supremo Christian Knutsson. That final straggler of a Series Pitch is now in hand at last. Barring unforeseen calamity, that means that Blood in the Snow should be ready for layout by the time Christian has finished with the core text. He estimates that layout will take three weeks. After we sign off on the layout, we’re looking at an eight week turnaround for printing.

We will fulfill electronic editions as soon as layout is ready, so everyone will have the PDFs in hand even as the presses are rolling on the print copies.

So raise your cups of mead, raiders. The snows of an overlong winter have delayed us, but we have finally equipped our forces. We now ride off into the badlands, to claim our victory.

If you missed the Kickstarter but want to jump on board now, stay tuned for pre-order details.

And here, apropos of nothing in the first paragraph, is John Kovalic’s illustration for his Blood on the Snow Series Pitch, “The Dagon Bar and Grille,” which brings to DramaSystem the vibe of an animated sitcom. Plus tentacles, natch.

Google included some fun user-facing features in its new Hangouts messaging product, such as a massive suite of over 800 emoji characters. While the company advertises the emoji icons as a feature, it has unsurprisingly included some hidden Easter eggs, as well. As detailed by Google employee Moritz Tolxdorff, the six hidden features are enabled with basic commands within chats in Google+ or the Chrome Hangouts extension. You can trigger a stampede of ponies across your chat box, change the background color of the chat window, or even command a particularly shy dinosaur to appear and attempt to hide behind a house. And of course, the ever-present Konami Code is utilized to change your local background. Unfortunately, these hidden...

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Ever since the announcement of “D&D Next”—or, to translate marketing-speak into actual English, Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition—more than a year ago, Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to unite the disparate tribes of fantasy roleplaying enthusiasts under one system of roleplaying has been contentious at best. Fans of disparate—and mutually exclusive, in some cases—styles of roleplaying have been contesting and debating the merits of each edition to assess whether elements of that edition should be included in the Frankenstein’s monster that is Next.

The results have been ugly, retrograde, and entirely predictable. Wizards of the Coast’s promises of modularity and freedom of choice have all been silenced by the advent of the unelected “But that’s not D&D!” committee that lurks on every forum. Its members revel in speaking out against progressive design, clutch tightly to every mechanical cow in the event that someone, somewhere might believe it sacred despite its age or dissociation from the remainder of its herd, and rejoice in purging the unclean from the hobby because of their conviction that there is only one ideologically acceptable way to pretend to be an elf.

Theirs.

People who’ve talked with me know I have never been on board with D&D Next—its design philosophy’s attempt to unite the tribes struck me as remarkably tone deaf, naïve, and harmful to the state of play we have been gifted with since the hobby’s inception in E. Gary Gygax’s basement four decades ago. While some view crowdsourcing as a viable way forward, I predicted that Wizards of the Coast’s tactics to engage fans in the design of the next edition of the game would reignite the most-recent edition warfare that’s infected gaming discussions since the launch of D&D 4E and the release of Pathfinder RPG. Rather than encouraging gamers to have an honest discussion about the role nostalgia should play on mechanical design, the openness of the process has caused numerous players—most frequently those who prefer older editions of the game—to come forward and out themselves as members of the “That’s Not D&D” committee.

I suspect part of the reason I find the views of the “That’s Not D&D” committee so bizarre and unhelpful for the hobby is that I don’t particularly value nostalgia. As I get older, I’ve come to accept that the ways I played roleplaying games in the past—particularly my start in the hobby with AD&D—had little to do with mechanics and more to do with where I was at in my life. I’m from rural Louisiana, and when my friends and I discovered a game where we could pretend to be heroes, we used the rules to make stuff up that we thought would be fun. Our creativity and happiness to play together was part and parcel of being young kids happy to hang out with each other, and we didn’t really let the mechanics of the game get in our way.

I know game designers can’t recapture the esprit de corps of my early forays into gaming, no matter how hard they try; the mechanical design of the games I loved had very little to do with the fun those games facilitated. We didn’t think deeply about concepts like simulation, if it was necessary for D&D to have draconic kobolds or doglike kobolds, or whether warlords could “shout wounds closed.” Our games were laissez faire and au courant. Now that I’m older and have done a bit of game design, the idea that any game designer would try to recreate the games of my youth strikes me as quixotic and impossible—nostalgia is not empirical, and it cannot be mechanically modeled.

May Garl Glittergold go with those who try.

But to the members of the “That’s Not D&D!” committee plaguing RPG forums, the type of fun roleplaying games facilitated should be subordinated to nostalgic purity (in general) and their particular nostalgia (in specific). Did you like 4E? Tough luck. Were warlords the class you were looking for way back when you were playing 2E and wanted to create a fantastic version of Alexander the Great or Zhuge Liang? Sorry, that’s not D&D because the game is and must be Eurocentric. Are you interested in non-Vancian magic options? Too bad. That’s not D&D even if 2E psionics provided just such a system (and even if it were awesome!). Did you play 13th Age and decide that (what they call) narrative mechanics might be interesting in your fantasy game? Leper. Outcast. Unclean. Forge-ite. Swine.

The problem with the “That’s Not D&D!” committee is not the fact that they are attempting to use the Internet to silence and shame those who want D&D to continue moving forward. The issue is these men and women do not understand the extent to which they are fetishizing the past—and in so doing, contributing to the culture that’s making it harder and harder to introduce new players to the hobby. Nostalgia and fantasy roleplaying’s history have their place in this hobby—but to the loudest subset of message board denizens, that place is decidedly not as a reference to where the hobby’s been. History and nostalgia have become Gygax ex cathedra, rigidly constraining our understanding of the hobby’s past and constricting the mechanical designs that will define our hobby’s future.

But what do I know? Nostalgia über alles. After all, that’s not D&D (and it shouldn’t be to you or anybody else)!

Cool, clever, simple music queueing DJ app for iPhone and iPad. One of the best drag-to-reorder UIs I’ve seen. You know you want to check out an app with a “Refuse to Play Nickelback” preference setting. $2, cheap.

Just over a year ago, Paul Miller came to my house for dinner. He already knew he was going to leave the internet for a year, though he hadn't announced it — to the internet — yet. We talked about music, something we've talked about a lot in the five or so years that I've known him. He was worried about, and excited by, the prospect of getting new music while off of the internet, which seemed understandable.

At some point, we started talking about music production, and I mentioned that one of my favorite songs production-wise is "In the Air Tonight," by Phil Collins. I won't go into all the reasons I love "In the Air Tonight," because there are so many we'd be here for a while, and nobody has that kind of time on the internet....

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As we consider Star Trek: The Game (of the Movie based on the Show), as we hold it up to the light to try to find something, anything we can salvage, let us not forget Chris Pine.

Chris Pine is just a regular guy from L.A. who happens to be physically without fault and whose dad was on CHiPs. You probably know 100 guys just like him. He didn't know he'd be contributing to one of the worst games, technically and conceptually, I've played.

He just wanted to be Captain Kirk.

You just want to be Captain Kirk.

It is too late for Chris Pine. It is not too late for you. That's why I am going to devote around 950 words to preventing you from buying — nay, playing — Star Trek: The Game.

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