I love hearing stories about people nobody has ever heard of but who turn out to be utter legends. I’ll remember Richard Grupe. (His asshole son, not so much.) Thanks for telling us about him.

The counterargument to being called racist and sexist is to repeat calmly *why* the story is bad. If you can make your arguments in a civil tone and with objective proof, no one can call you racist or sexist, and you can shut down those who do.

The B wing is awkward and makes no sense but it’s one of the coolest looking spaceships ever.

So they did have TIE droids. (End of last row.) Why weren’t they all droids? How was it more efficient and more effective to put human beings in these cramped death machines?

The Star Wars universe has antigravity and a lot of other woo-woo physics tricks. I’m sure they have inertial dampeners that compensate for an off-balanced ship structure. If they can play with their ships’ mass by flicking a switch, they can put the engines anywhere.

I always figured (without any knowledge of the ‘official’ blueprints) that the big wings were the ion engines. Ion thrust is proportional to the area of your emitters, but for maneuverability the emitting surfaces would be on the edge of those wings. As engines, those wings would emit a lot of ions in any x or z…

The embarrassing secret about the human race is that the very best among us, our uber-competent heroes and divinely-inspired leaders, are only a teensy bit better than the average joe. And the average joe sucks in every way imaginable.

Ah, but sorcerers rely on charisma, not intelligence, to cast their spells. (At least, in the last edition that I played.)

A rhino-sized house cat would kill you and everyone you care about. Just for fun.

Can we just agree on some uncomfortable truths?

The answer could be ‘everybody’, because it is contributing to global climate change. We may not die out for another hundred years, but little environmental catastrophes like this are the cause. They add up.

This news story fascinates me. How did they think they were going to get away with it? The cheat software depends on the test setup never changing. Eventually this was going to come to light. It’s the most boneheaded, short-sighted decision I think I’ve *ever* seen a corporation make.

In colloquial English, ‘Elected’ means ‘elected by the public’. There is a vast difference between public, democratic elections and private, oligarchic appointment. If you don’t understand this then I have to insist that you are not qualified to discuss politics, at least not in English.

The monologue is to warm up the audience.

A clean install of chrome will have automatically reinstalled flash. Make sure the plugin is disabled.

Chrome recently changed their implementation of Flash. Not sure why, other than that they hate it and want to see it dead. There have been a lot of reports of Chrome crashing on any website with Flash in it. Go into your plugins (with ‘chrome://plugins’), find the flash player and disable it. That should stop your…

I was very young in the early 70s, but the only song I can remember hearing at that time was ‘I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes’ by Jim Brafford. So at least anecdotally the music at the time sucked.

OR: Creation — when Bahamut carved Tiamat up and threw her pieces into the sky.

How did people finish last-minute term papers or graduate from college without having an endless resource of facts in their bedrooms?

What changes have improved quality of life? Is the level curve from 25-35 smoother? Are there any low level dungeons? Have they given us the ability to change weapon hotkeys 1-6?