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What I find interesting is how, whenever I hear DnD players talk about playing DnD, they seem to have this unspoken assumption that once 4th ed came out, they weren't allowed (somehow) to play 3.5,

Is that normal?

They discontinue old books, and get rid of the free downloads they have for the old system, which makes it near impossible to get new stuff to play, as Requia says.

They didn't just get rid of free downloads, they got rid of a lot of the merely low-cost/discounted downloads as well. it really pisses me off. That's why I now absolutely refuse to buy any new* Wizards Of The Coast products.


*(used and/or fenced WoTC products I'll still buy if the price is right, since WoTC doesn't profit from such sales)

The short of it is simply that as far as they could tell, 'No experimental evidence for microscopic black holes has been found.' The long statement indicates that since the highly precise CMS detector found no spray of sub-atomic particles of normal matter while LHC smashed particles together, the hypothesis by String Theory that micro black holes would be formed and quickly evaporated in this experiment was incorrect.

Now this doesn't necessarily show that microscopic black-holes don't form under those conditions. It sounds plausible to me that a micro black-hole could have formed but not evaporated, falling instead through the accelerator into the center of the Earth, where it will grow and fester until eventually Richard sharpe Shaver is proven correct, at which point we'll all be royally screwed

Has anybody added argumentative smart-ass hairsplitters and nitpickers to the list of people who believe in magic (or at any rate believe in a certain specific and limited sense provided that there's an argument to be had by doing so)? Because i fall into that category.

Many practices which are commonly labeled as "magic" actually DO work, albeit not necessarily by the supernatural means that the sorceror claims them to work by. For example, it is a widely accepted fact that a Voodoo Curse CAN indeed kill you (provided that you sincerely believe that it can kill you). The actual mechanism by which death is caused, however, is not the intervention of vengeful spirits, but rather through psychological manipulation of the victim, resulting a combination of illness induced by the physiological symptoms of extreme stress and potentially self-destructive changes in emotion and behavior.
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_death and http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/full/92/10/1593)

Your definition of magic is too broad.

Science is NOT magic.

No, but according to Clarke's Third Law, sufficiently advanced technology becomes functionally indistinguishable from magic. At least superficially...

Materialism. That's the bottom line of why I hate Xmas so much. It's only about who can buy who the most expensive THING or the most things for their families. It's not about family anymore, I don't think it has been in my life time. Xmas was supposed to be about togetherness, the one time of year when you get to see people you don't see all year around, or a time when your supposed to be merry or jolly or whatever the fuck other word you'd like to use for that. Xmas makes us bitter to no end, the people with so-called holiday cheer are lying to themselves and have probably already maxed out their credit cards for their family members on gifts that are probably never going to be used. I piss on their idea of what xmas is. Its become an excuse to be more materialistic. But hey! your buying SHIT for your family, and that's not selfish is it? I'm spending MONEY on my family and buying them stupid shit. So that redeems everything right?! The days when people used to make gifts are gone. Like making a plate of cookies for your neighbor, knitting a god awful sweater, making ornaments, etc. Those days are gone forever. Now if you end up making a plate of cookies for someone or take the time to do one of the above mentioned for someone they look at you like your a cheap ass. Like they expected you to give them a fucking laptop for xmas! Xmas has always made me bitter. Since I was a child, xmas had always been about money. Mom used to say, quite frequently i might add, "There won't be a christmas this year because we can't afford it!" or "Your not getting anything for xmas because we can't afford it!" but we could never afford it... I didn't want stuff. I wanted the family stability that most people take for granted. I wanted my parents to get along, I wanted the family dinner, I didn't care what we ate, as long as it was as a family.
So, now I refuse to like xmas, I refuse to give in to the materialism that is now xmas. Xmas puts me in one of the worst moods, bringing back all the shitty memories of past xmases that are burned into the back of my mind ever so clearly. I understand why people kill themselves around the holidays, and its not because of the forementioned. All I want is to have my closest friends and family around me. I want to be able to make them a great big dinner, so we can sit around the table talking about anything and everything. Xmas makes me want to punch people and cry at the same time.

You should celebrate Festivus then. If I recall correctly, it waqs explained to have originated out of disillusionment with "The commercial and religious aspects of Christmas"

[*]

^*For those of you unfamiliar with the parable of Greyface and the/his curse, I will reiterate it here.

Translation:  Nobody here has read the PD or RAW, and if you were, you were too stupid to understand it.  Our new guru will explain it to you.  Slowly.  In small words.

This essay was originally written for a larger publication that was posted on a different website which focused more on the SubGenius than the Discordian end of things. Just as on this site all of you have read the Principia Discordia but a couple have not read the Book of the SubGenius (or at least may not be intimately familiar with it), so too I made an allowance for people on the original site who had read the Book of the SubGenius but were not necessarily intimately familiar with the Principia Discordia...

[AM NOT]

•   Tidying the House− This is only a good thing to do if it actually makes things easier to use; If you've memorized and gotten used to your possessions locations where they are strewn about the house, and if the places where things are used are far from the places where they are stored, and if you can still move around the house, then the small aesthetic benefit gained from having a tidy home is probably (and in fact, almost definitely) far more trouble than its worth.

I'm glad you've come up with a philosophical way to justify letting your domicile be sloppy. Now shut the fuck up and stop telling people what's right and what's wrong about the way they live. Some people are simply uncomfortable in messy homes; but of course people with OCD or a predisposition towards neatness aren't really people, what am I thinking?

I didn't say that neatness was wrong, I said that the belief that neatness^* is important is wrong.

As for OCD, I myself actually HAVE obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my experiance with it in fact is in large part what led me to the belief that tidiness and aesthetic concerns are insane. I came to the realization that concerns about appearance, other than as it relates to function (and especially if they are contrary to what is functional) is no different to my need to flick the lights on and off four times before finally turning them on or my need to always have the edges of all stacked objects (escpecially books) be perfectly paralell^*** also, I don't like to erase things (Even when I'm typing online, a lot of the time I'll just use the "strikethru" tag instead of deleting something that I've written); It serves no purpose, it merely fulfills a useless urge that does nothing for us except make us feel mildly uncomfortable if it is left unfulfilled.

Just because more conventional aesthetic concerns are more common it doesn't make them any less insane. The only difference with more popular inclination is that in this case the inmates are running the asylum. And I don't think that its right for one group of inmates to pick on the rest of the inmates...





^* And let me make it clear that I am talking here specifically about "Neatness" and "Tidiness" here, in the sense of "A place for everything and everything in its place" (and of worrying about creating positive aesthetic appeal in one's house), that is the rationale that I am attacking.
I AM NOT however, attacking "cleanliness" in the sense of not having dirt and old rotting food everywhere creating an actual health hazard; I fully understand and acknowledge the purpose of that^**.

^** Provided that you don't go overboard and give yourself worse health problems from inhaling bleach fumes than you would have gotten from whatever you just cleaned up. That isn't something that is likely to happen of course, but when I notice this kind of unlikely exception I never feel right unless I point it out.

^***(both with each other, as well as with whatever table they are on (if any^****) and with the wall of the room (the table usually takes precedence if it, itself, is not aligned with the wall (which is a situation that, itself, will drive me crazy if its on a day when the pharmacy has kept me waiting on a refill of my medication)))

^**** Often I stuff in my bedroom is stacked on the floor

[Trying To Help Control The Human Population by Not Reproducing]

•   Trying To Help Control The Human Population by Not Reproducing−

TRANSLATION:  There aren't enough people in the world.  Everywhere should be like China, with people shoulder to shoulder.

You missed my point on this one entirely.

I agree that there are too many people in the world, HOWEVER I am cognizant of the fact that the idea that people can supposedly solve the problem by choosing (for that specific reason) not to reproduce contains an INHERENT BIOLOGICAL FLAW. Physical traits are not the only type of traits that can be inherited, mental and emotional traits and dispositions can be inherited as well, and if everybody who was concerned about the size of the human population suddenly decided not to reproduce, then any heritable dispositions that could contribute to caring about the size of the human population would be significantly weakened in the human gene pool and, within a couple of generations, people would be even more predisposed to recklessly reproduce, and would quickly more than cancel out the dent put in the population by those who chose not to reproduce.

Personally, I believe that other methods are in order called for to control the world's human population. The same short-term benefits (but much less long-term negative impact) could be achieved without trying to regulate our own reproduction, by instead convincing the world's various governments to DE-REGULATE products and practices that cause infertility, that way the genes removed from the gene pool might actually be ones that deserve to be...

And you were the one bitching about eugenics.  

SMUDGY PEOPLES FROM UNFURNISHED COUNTRIES DESERVE TO BE STERILIZED!

Ok, two problems with this

1.) Who said anything about other countries? I'm talking about everywhere!...In fact, ESPECIALLY the USA! If we replaced all of our power plants with nuclear power plants we could eliminate our dependency on foreign and domestic oil.

2.) What I'm proposing is not eugenics because eugenics is a methodical and non-random, deliberate process (usually intended to warp future generations toward some cockeyed pink ideal of "Perfection"). Radiation and Thimerisol, on the other hand, don't know and don't care who the hell you are, where your family is from, or what your religion is.

Somebody is confusing nature and nurture.

Many traits contain an element of both. The 'either-or' dichotomy of "Nature Vs. Nurture" is largely discredited within the scientific community (or at least that's what all of my college professors and textbooks^* told me).

To give an example, one can have a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism, but unless someone gives then the idea to take that first drink and get hooked that predisposition won't matter. Similarly, a person with no predisposition towards alcoholism

By the way, I am fully cognizant of the fact that the alcoholism is a completely different and much simpler trait than wanting to control the population, but this is proof of concept.

I do not personally know of any studies as to whether or not there is an element of heredity to concern about overpopulation, but if you can point me to one that addresses this issue, is peer reviewed, and has a reasonably large sample size then if it supports your view that there is no element of heredity to it, then I will retract my point. until then, my point stands.



^*Well, at least all the ones that had reason to bring up the matter (that is to say, it didn't come up in Organic Chemistry or Calculus, but in the classes concerning human or higher mammal behavior it was made clear that Nature Versus Nurture was a flawed dichotomy).

[Trying To Help Control The Human Population by Not Reproducing]

•   Trying To Help Control The Human Population by Not Reproducing−

TRANSLATION:  There aren't enough people in the world.  Everywhere should be like China, with people shoulder to shoulder.

You missed my point on this one entirely.

I agree that there are too many people in the world, HOWEVER I am cognizant of the fact that the idea that people can supposedly solve the problem by choosing (for that specific reason) not to reproduce contains an INHERENT BIOLOGICAL FLAW. Physical traits are not the only type of traits that can be inherited, mental and emotional traits and dispositions can be inherited as well, and if everybody who was concerned about the size of the human population suddenly decided not to reproduce, then any heritable dispositions that could contribute to caring about the size of the human population would be significantly weakened in the human gene pool and, within a couple of generations, people would be even more predisposed to recklessly reproduce, and would quickly more than cancel out the dent put in the population by those who chose not to reproduce.

Personally, I believe that other methods are in order called for to control the world's human population. The same short-term benefits (but much less long-term negative impact) could be achieved without trying to regulate our own reproduction, by instead convincing the world's various governments to DE-REGULATE products and practices that cause infertility, that way the genes removed from the gene pool might actually be ones that deserve to be...

[*]

Many of you are so-called Discordians and SubGenii are probably still blundering and toiling under the   Curse of Greyface^* (adherence to or application of unnecessary and/or destructive order and control, see footnote) without even knowing it. Many you may think you have freed yourself from his curse, but most of you are WRONG, you poor deluded fools... He lurks where you least expect it! he bends the knees and crushes the mind yet none behold the hand that smites! Beware of destructive order! Fear Him!


All of the following are of the Curse of Greyface (although some may be unexpected),  
All of them Being either: Order imposed for no reason, or situations where chaos would work just as well (or better), Or else Order of an actually destructive nature:

•   Spaying or Neutering Your Pets− In fact, any attempt to control thepe population. They talk about how many unwanted animals ae euthanized in animal shelters each year, but that is a problem which arises not from animal population, but from attempts to control it. We could make the number of unwanted animals euthanized each year drop instantly to zero if we just shut down the animal shelters and admitted to ourselves that there is no more need to control the population of stray cats and dogs than there is to control the populations or squirrels or songbirds , nor is there any reason other than unmitigated hubris to believe that animals of any sort are or even could be significantly worse off without us in their lives.
•   Yardwork and Lawn Care− You probably spend a great deal of your time inside and most likely so do your neighbors. If you really have business just hanging around on your lawn all the time (or if your neighbors have business staring at it all hours of the day and night) instead of either doing something inside or else going somewhere more interesting than a stupid boring residential lawn (such as a public pool, or a video arcade, or a skate park, or (if you live near the seashore) the beach or the boardwalk, or a bowling alley, or the park) then by all means, keep your yard tidy, but if not, I really do not see what good it will do for you. Plus its bad for the environment, because not only do most lawnmowers have very low fuel−efficiency (and large "Carbon−Footprints" to use a hackneyed and banal popular cliché), and not only are chemical yard treatments bad for local wildlife (especially frogs and salamanders and other cute littkle amphibians), but also, cutting the grass reduces the grass's avaible photosynthetic surfaces, and that means less photosysnthesis and thus less carbon dioxide removed from the air and less oxygen given off
•   Trying To Help Control The Human Population by Not Reproducing− The fact of the matter is, that in the long run, all that this will accomplish is to reduce the overall occurrences of any genetic predisposition towards having a social conscience within the human gene pool. If you care enough about overpopulation to want to do something about it, then you should try to stop other people from reproducing.
•   Abortion− This is a clearly a form of destructive order. Furthermore, it lends itself to the advancement of eugenics−related ideas; Weeding out those who are "disordered" before they can even be born. While this may have some valid upshots it is stlll far, far worse than the alternative; I'd sooner see this species devolve into barely animate wads of slime than let its gene−pool be controlled by what the pinks and the mediocretin normals think is and isn't "Disordered"
•   Tidying the House− This is only a good thing to do if it actually makes things easier to use; If you've memorized and gotten used to your possessions locations where they are strewn about the house, and if the places where things are used are far from the places where they are stored, and if you can still move around the house, then the small aesthetic benefit gained from having a tidy home is probably (and in fact, almost definitely) far more trouble than its worth.






^*For those of you unfamiliar with the parable of Greyface and the/his curse, I will reiterate it here. Greyface, (whether or not he literally exists or not, doesn't matter) is a far more potent figure of negative slack than Satan or even NHGH and Hyper-NHGH, and it is important to know what he is and what you are up against:

   Thousands of years ago, a malcontented hunchbrain by the name of Greyface, got it into his head that the universe was as humorless as he, and he began to teach that play was sinful because it contradicted the ways of Serious Order. ``Look at all the order around you,'' he said. And from that, he deluded honest men to believe that reality was a straightjacket affair and not the happy romance as men had known it.
     It is not presently understood why men were so gullible at that particular time, for absolutely no one thought to observe all the disorder around them and conclude just the opposite. But anyway, Greyface and his followers took the game of playing at life more seriously than they took life itself and were known even to destroy other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own.
     The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes for a bad trip. Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.
     It is called THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.
     To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.
     The Curse of Greyface included the division of life into order/disorder as the essential positive/negative polarity, instead of building a game foundation with creative/destructive as the essential positive/negative. He has thereby caused man to endure the destructive aspects of order and has prevented man from effectively participating in the creative uses of disorder. Civilization reflects this unfortunate division.
     POEE proclaims that the other division is preferable, and we work toward the proposition that creative disorder, like creative order, is possible and desirable; and that destructive order, like destructive disorder, is unnecessary and undesirable.
     Seek the Sacred Chao -- therein you will find the foolishness of all ORDER/DISORDER. They are the same!

Lately I've been reading various selections from the biblical Apocrypha. (btw. Has anybody else noticed the paralells between the events of chapter fourteen of the First Infancy gospel of Jesus Christ and the testimony given by David Berkowitz regarding his motives for committing the "Son of Sam" killings?)

[I]

Personally, I plan to reproduce by donating to a sperm bank, that way I can pass on my DNA without the hassle of dealing with other people, combined with the unique added benefit of actually coming out ahead financially.

Even if they take your sperm (must have a very high count) most donors never get used. FYI.

SPS:

It still probably gives me a better chance than the traditional route...

Prelate Diogenes Shandor cool.

I do have a question re:

2.) Peace and War: If everyone could learn to be so uncooperative that order could no longer be maintained within the ranks of armies than there would be no more wars.
                                      Imagine, if you will, two world powers poised on the brink of nuclear war, as they were back in the dark days of the cold war. Their leaders give the order to fire, but the soldiers refuse; They feel that if they're going to be firing off nuclear missiles all of a sudden then they deserve a raise in pay. Their commanding officer browbeats them for insubordination and while he's doing so, another soldier with a preexisting grudge shoots him; The entire missile silo instantly erupts into a multi-sided firefight between the soldiers. Within minutes nobody is left to fire the missiles. Similar disputes break out in all of the missile silos on both sides of the conflict and because of this a nuclear holocaust is narrowly averted and Peace is thus restored to the world.

Yes, complete uncooperation could technically mean the end of war (and of civilization).  But many people would think of two armies killing each other as being war.  I realize that in your example there isn't exactly a war, but more of an individualized "me kill" scenario.  But once the  bodies are dead, it makes little difference, except to the historians.

But all in all, Bravo.

A recent post in another topic by The Good Reverend Roger just gave me an insight about this. A counterpoint to your counterpoint...

Check out what TGRR's uncle has to say about the Second World War

Hey, Cain, my Uncle is dying, and he's the last WWII vet in our family.  He has told me many stories about when the world went mad and black fascism was allowed to run loose for a while, stomping around in their hobnail boots.

He said it took 55 million nails to hammer Hitler and Tojo into thier coffins.

You'll note that Mussolini isn't mentioned on that list, and you know why? Its because, thanks to internal strife among Italy's ruers, by 1943 it was Mussolini's rivals in the Italian government (epecially King Vittorio Emanuele III and Pietro Badoglio) who were suplying the nails^*.

In fact, this internal discord and strife within the Italian government also directly resulted in Albania and Ethiopia being freed early from fascist rule without needing to first be liberated by the Allies. You see, Victor Emmanuel voluntarily relinquished control of Italy's conquered territories in Albania and Ethopia back to Amhet Zog and Ras Tafari^**, for the express purpose of distancing himself from Mussolini...





^* To continue Roger's uncle's metaphor.

^** (Albania^*** and Ethopia's previous rulers, respectively)

^*** Although there were some in Albania who had considered the cold and impersonalpression of the fascist to be a welcome change from Zog, who had managed to personally offend just about everybody in the coutry (or at least somebody in nearly everybody in the country's extended family)

[I]

Personally, I plan to reproduce by donating to a sperm bank, that way I can pass on my DNA without the hassle of dealing with other people, combined with the unique added benefit of actually coming out ahead financially.

I watched the movie Angels & Demons a few days ago, and I gotta say, apart from that the LHC was never in the business of creating antimatter, and even if they would, it wouldn't be contained in a handheld glowing tube powered by a battery

Also, don't forget the fact that just about any other particle accelertor could be used to create antimatter just as proficiently. Particle aceleators are routinely used to generate antimatter particles, but they only generate a hndful of particles at a time and use prodigious amounts of energy to do it.

(Similarly, particle accelerators could also theoretically be used to transmute lead into gold by bombarding a neutron poor isotope of lead with high energy electrons (some of which could combine with the protons in the lead atom's nucleus to form neutrons, ad thus lower the atom's atomic number), but the energy required and the painfully slow rate of the processwould cancel out any revenue several times over)