perfidy

How do I know this? Because Dr. Jack Hyles tells me so.

Make a Snowflake.

Just thought I'd let you all know that at this moment, ten hours and 30 minutes after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, the following has occurred:

• Rain of fire seen over Scituate.
• Boston harbor has turned to blood.
• The dread Pazuzeu has perched atop the Boston statehouse and is belching fire and gall at passersby. Mayor Menino has been hospitalized.
• The Provincetown ferry has been dragged 'neath the waves by a many-tentacled horror from the deep.
• Northampton is sliding into a smoking crevice; crevice wasn't there yesterday.
• The population of the North Shore, from Lynn to Newburyport, have transformed into swine and are running amok.
• Bands of harpies have descended upon Harvard Square and are scalping all and sundry. Students, faculty, and homeless have taken refuge in tunnels.
• The legions of the dead walk the earth again.
• The armies of the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy, festooned in rainbow flags, march on Lexington intent on buggery, buggery, buggery.
• Civilization as we know it is gasping its dying breath.

In addition

• The sun is shining.
• The flowers are pretty.
• All of the above has thus far failed to happen.

[wik] John Scalzi has some words of advice for newlyweds, gay and otherwise, and says something I'd like to echo:

"I cannot speak for all married people, but I can speak for myself. Marriage has been so good to me that I cannot imagine not sharing it with anyone who wants it. I celebrate your weddings, and I offer the greatest gift I have: That you receive in your married life the joy I have had in mine, and that you share that joy, every day, with an open and loving heart. You're about to be married. There is nothing better.

To those about to be married: Welcome, friends. It's good to have you here.

Have you seen every episode of "Oz"? Do you watch the "Shawshank Redemption" each of the 37 times it's on TV in a month? Wonder how you'd hold up in the race wars raging in America's penitentiaries?

Maybe you'd care to have a peek at your future.

Best,

Chinpainter

Marginal Revolution links to a nifty site that maps the webs of interdependence between the boards of large companies and institutions. Y'know, like who sits on what board, and what other boards they sit on, and who sits on those boards, and how they all interrelate, as if it's a total of fifteen people sitting on all those boards.

Yeah, I know how paranoid and pedantic it sounds. Go check it out!

The site in question is called "They Rule," which might open the author up to charges of Liberal Scaremongering. Except the thing is, people like that do rule. There's a ruling oligarchy in the United States, only organic and casual rather than enshrined in law. People who know people do things; people who don't, pump gas.

Just look at our current Presidential candidates for an easy and relevant example: both are scions of monied families, both are Yale graduates; both are members of that silly-ass Skull 'N' Bone Thugz 'N' Harmony thing; and thanks to all this, both are blessed with the social and family connections to make som'n out of not much at all. The only way they could be more closely tied would be genetic, but that went out of fashion back in 1795.

I'm not drawing any pat moral or ideological conclusions from this, because that's stupid. But I will say this: class does matter in the United States, more than anyone will acknowledge.

An international team of archaeologists have discovered the location of the University of Alexandria, one of the seats of all Western learning. Notable alumni include: Archimedes, Ptolemy, Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Testicles.

The team has found 13 individual lecture halls, or auditoria, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archaeologist Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The classrooms are on the eastern edge of a large public square in the the Late Antique section of modern Alexandria and are adjacent to a previously discovered theatre that is now believed to be part of the university complex, Hawass said.

All 13 of the auditoria have similar dimensions and internal arrangements, he added. They feature rows of stepped benches running along the walls on three sides of the rooms, sometimes forming a joined “U” at one end.

The most conspicuous feature of the rooms, he added, is an elevated seat placed in the middle of the “U,” most likely designed for the lecturer.

“It is the first time ever that such a complex of lecture halls has been uncovered on any Greco-Roman site in the whole Mediterranean area,” Hawass said. This is “perhaps the oldest university in the world.”

Sometimes I think archaeologists have the coolest job in the world.

Fellow Virginian and Ohio expatriot Phil has enslickened his website. Check the new design and the story of a exceedingly clueless Chicago Alderman.

Go here to make your own Mr. Picassohead!
 

As if our usual stuff weren't moronic enough, please take a moment out of your day to pay homage to pure trash genius: The Exorcist as re-enacted by bunnies. Go see! The power of Christ compels you!

Thanks to GeekLethal for the notion.

Shane MacGowan was in a barfight.

The Buckethead clan is heading west, to attend a wedding. So, no more muddleheaded and aimless bloviating 'til Monday. You'll have to limp along with the pithy and wise commentary of my comrades. Wait, that was suppossed to be the other way around...

Seeing as Perfidy is letting its inner (or not so inner) geek hang out, lets just wallow in it, shall we?

No one, to my knowledge, has come up with a really good role-playing game system. The problem seems to center on the difficulty of modeling skills and the learning process. Other problems (such as combat, physics, various magical or super-technological systems) have been solved with varying degrees of success, usually with an attempt to balance ease of use with verisimilitude. The fact that these systems are used constantly in the game system puts a premium on the ease of use side of the equation, as overly complex games have a limited market, even among nerds and geeks.

However, the problem of character development remains. The game might have a slick way of resolving how successfully you apply your skill at safecracking, orcslaying, or starship piloting. But how does your character gain and improve that skill? The results have always been unsatisfying.

Existing game systems can be plotted on a spectrum ranging from D&D on one end, and original rules Traveler on the other.
D&D had by far the most simplistic advancement scheme. Characters had a class, which gave them a package of skills or attributes. (Well, really it mostly gave them a different table for resolving combat.) As the campaign progressed, gold expropriated from dragons, orcs and Enron translated directly into experience points. At certain thresholds, you would move up a level and all of your skills would simultaneously increase. This is not in any way realistic, though certainly satisfying to the thirteen year old who loves to say he has a 25th level Assassin.* The focus is almost completely on advancement in the game.

On the other end of the scale was the Traveler system. Characters were created using a system that closely resembles what actually happens in real life. You start out at 18, with nothing more than remedial skills. Then, depending on the career track you select, you enlist in the navy, army, marines, interstellar scouts, or go to college. Your pre-game life is divided into four year terms, during which you have an opportunity to gain skills related to your profession. You can keep this up as long as you want balancing your greed for more skills with the realization that you don't want to be having an adventure with a 90-year old alter ego. Once this process ends, you begin the game. Once the game has started, it is exceedingly difficult to gain new skills or even improve old ones. You are stuck with what you have. Again, this is much like real life. The focus here is almost completely on character creation. (GURPS used a different approach, but was similar in that the focus is on character creation.)

Most games fall somewhere in between these two extremes. How do you create a game that allows your character to start with some skills, yet allows skills to be developed in game? How do you create a system that allows character creation in some detail, without predetermining the character’s future existence? How do you design a reward system that isn't based on the easily quantified cash, but isn't based solely on the subjective judgment of the DM? Moreover, how do you find a system that simultaneously isn't completely subjective and doesn't require hours of anal-retentive bookkeeping?

The last campaign I ran before I gave up on gaming completely eliminated most of the game system. The only concession I made to traditional role-playing was to keep a combat system, which I appropriated from White Wolf's Vampire games. And I only did that because the players insisted. Most of the time they were rolling dice just to amuse themselves, though I allowed them to think that the results affected the game.

I dodged the whole question of character development by having the players play themselves in the campaign. If they could do it, their character could do it. This was satisfactory in most respects, but sadly puts a great deal of limitations on the types of game you can play. (Worked great for a present day Cthulhu game, though.) Rewards were largely moot, since the campaign lasted only a few weeks in game time.

I've tried to see through to a way to combine the pristine simplicity of that last game with the requirements of other types of campaigns, but so far without success. The thing is, if you have a group of decent players, the game system is just a framework. The campaign is more important. The problem with adopting the no-system system is that it becomes hard to balance character creation with the needs of the campaign. You can't have the characters that are too powerful. Further, in a long campaign, you have to have some mechanism for rewarding players with improvements to their characters. Gold and wisdom is not enough. This, really, is the only thing that needs to be systematized. Everything else can be done on the fly, given enough background information and some quick thinking. But I haven’t figured it out yet.

GeekLethal's last post prompted a user comment from the Three Armed Man. TAM suggested that the criteria outlined by GL really point to Dork, rather than Nerd. This raises the perennial semantic dilemna, how do we define these terms? Saturday Night Live once had a sketch called, “Geek, Dweeb or Spaz?” Where contestants had to determine which category the panelists fell into. This is the question we need to answer.

The jargon file defines geek thusly:

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves — and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard ‘hacker’ as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.

One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates “gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to.”

Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a ‘geek’ was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living — an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now ‘geek pride’ festivals (the implied reference to ‘gay pride’ is not accidental).

Nerd is defined in this way:

nerd: n.

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.

2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950).

Sadly, the file does not have entries for spaz, dweeb or dork. But I think the time has come for a definitive taxonomy of the various subspecies. We can move toward this goal by outlining the salient characteristics of each type:

Nerd: the nerd is base type, from which all the others are derived. Nerds are bright, and lacking in social skills. They have odd interests. They are dilettantes, and usually end up consumed by counterproductive pursuits like the SCA, Star Wars collectables, and Star Trek conventions. Some nerds can achieve purpose in life translating the arcane thoughts of the geeks to the mundane normal people. Nerds are hapless, though they often have a goofy charm.

Geek: the geek is the most competent of the subspecies. Geeks transcend the limitations of the nerd through focus. Geeks have real, and often marketable skills – usually in the tech/computer fields, but in theory these skills could be in almost field. Geeks have social skills, but they are not the natural, inborn manners possessed by most people. Geeks learn to deal with others the same way they attain mastery of any other skill; by observing the humans around them, and deducing rules and patterns, and through experimentation. This sometimes leads to embarrassment when a rule is over generalized, or applied incorrectly. Geeks are often odd, but have an edgy competence about them.

Dork: the dork is the nerd’s dimmer younger brother. Dorks can’t fit in. Unlike nerds, they can’t even get laid at SCA events. Dorks are strange, but without the redeeming semi-charming goofiness of the nerd, or the skills of the geek. The dork’s attempts at humor or charm always come off as vaguely (or, let’s be honest, often extremely) creepy. Dorks are annoying.

Dweeb: the dweeb is the nerd-lite. Not so odd, not so bright, in many respects the dweeb is both a substandard nerd and a substandard normal person. Dweebs don’t fit into the everyday world, but neither are they completely at home in the clannish, ritualized worlds of the nerd. Where a nerd knows that he won’t get picked for kickball, the dweeb will keep trying. Dweebs are misfits.

Spaz: the spaz is the nerd on crack. Your everyday nerd is quiet, sedentary, and overweight. The spaz takes the basic nerd template and cranks it up to 11. The spaz is hyper, annoying and restless. The spaz is the only type more likely than the dweeb to be chosen as the spare.

Hopefully, this tentative classification scheme will be of use.

OK, this topic has been kicking around my head for a bit now. NDR and I talked about it a couple weeks ago, and considering recent blog-age at the Ministry today seems the time to post.

Unable to balance an original or imaginative format against my desire to get this up before lunch, I'll just steal...ummmmm...pay homage... to that redneck joke guy. Thus:

You know you're a nerd if:

-You see real animals and wonder about their hit dice
-You know that d100 and percentile dice are the same thing
-You are unsure of your own alignment
-You are absolutely certain of your own alignment
-You know where in your home there is a multi-sided die
-You keep that die out of nostalgia, with your old character sheets and sketches
-You wish you were half-orc
-You read your old Monster Manuals for a little light reading before bed
-TSR, GDW, and WoTC are not random letters but a way of life
-CNN and the military call it "night vision", but you know it's really infravision
-You own a sword
-Any of the above apply to you but you think you're actually pretty cool

Here is a PhotoJournal of Chernobyl. It's rather striking, and the timing of finding it is odd -- I heard an interview on NPR a few days ago with an author who had written a history of Three Mile Island. He described the state of the containment core when the reactor was finally cracked apart, and how the investigators were shocked to discover that the interior had melted. That meant that the reactor was dramatically more dangerous than most had thought, and was close to being a disaster.

Nuclear is dangerous business. It can be managed, but the consequences of screwing it up are pretty terrifying.

Maybe this is only funny to me, but if you have any idea what the following words or phrases mean-- Thac0, Mind Flayer, Vorpal Blade, Mordenkainen, Rust Monster-- I order you to check out SomethingAwful.com's loving tribute to your lost teenage years.

Bring on the funny!

I left the coffee shop this morning; my coffee didn't have a lid. Raindrops wanted to be coffee drops; they made little splashes as they bullied plain old water molecules out of the cup.

This morning I have questions.

What percentage of music industry revenues actually ends up with artists, overall?

How much money is the US military spending on private security contracts in Iraq, right now?

Does joking about "perception is reality" make it so?

Is the strength of a democracy proportional to the freedom its citizens enjoy, their active participation/monitoring of their government, neither, or both?

3am is no time to fall asleep.

Phil has an excellent and nearly Clueless-length post on Gay Marriage up over at Catch Me If You Can. While I fondly remember Gay Marriage Day here at Perfidy, I don't particularly want to revisit it. So go over there and bother Phil.

...Democrats love bumpersticker slogans. It's their major contribution to modern political discourse, after all. A little while ago he Bush-Cheney campaign had a automagic poster creator. It allowed you to enter your own text and create a customized Bush campaign poster. Naturally, many people (apparently starting with Wonkette and The Politburo Diktat but also including all these people - that last one has the biggest list) started having a little fun at the administration's expense. 

Here's my favorite:

Sadly, the Bush-Cheney campaign decided to end all the fun, and now the campaign posterator only can create boring signs with state and coalition group names. It's so boring, I won't even link it. I wrote a letter to the campaign, complaining of their lame attitude. Do they think that conservatives are incapable of keeping up with the vitriolic moonbats of the left? Are we incapable of pithy remarks? I find their lack of faith disturbing.

More of my favs below the fold.

And lastly, my second favorite:

Dodgeblogium has one of the best linkfests I've seen in a while. Rather than poach his stuff, I'll just send you over there. Klingons for Christ! Best of Me!Islamic Country Songs! Damned!

Also from Andrew, but not in that post, is a link to the answer of whether guns cause violence, and the International Jewish Conspiracy's magical demormonizer.

He's on fire, he is.