My 2011 D & D Character Sheet (According to my Students)

In 2011, I was honored and flattered when some of my @SomervilleOx students made a D & D character sheet for me: https://t.co/JOlvWpRI2b

They were wrong about my alignment and my diety, but that's ok.

Also, I have a +5 Vorpal Red Pen and a Decanter of Infinite Ice Latte. pic.twitter.com/hMd9jzHHWt

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) June 14, 2019

P.S. In case you are interested, here is my 2011 blog entry and the discussion therein.

Trust Me: Google "Thanos" and Click on the Gauntlet

If you haven't tried this yet, google "Thanos" and click on the gauntlet.

You're welcome.

Fake News from Moose & Squirrel

This cartoon from The New Yorker also alludes to the characters Boris and Natasha. They were the adversaries in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

I recently saw this awesome license plate that does so as well.

I really enjoy alluding to the characters Boris and Natasha. I did that recently in my winning entry in a caption content, and I did it in 2006 in an Aprils Fool's Day prank.

History-Book Chapter Title Proposal: "Mr. Trump's Wild Ride"

Inspired by Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I want to advocate "Mr. Trump's Wild Ride" as the chapter title for history books when they discuss our current adventure (assuming there is somebody left around to write history books).

Please place the royalties next to my grave.

Among my lessons this week is that 24 hours is about how long it takes for my snark to get back up to full blast after very bad news. (It came back in fits and bursts well well before then, and my sense of humor is pretty dark anyway.) Actually, I think I knew this before, but I was reminded of it.

Update: And if you don't know The Wind in the Willows, then I strongly suggest you look up the character Mr. Toad. In certain respects, the resemblance is uncanny. ;)

Tales from the ArXiv: Duck Dodgers and Bifurcation Diagrams

I hope that the authors of this paper make references to Duck Dodgers when they bring up this work in seminars.

RIP Leonard Nimoy (1931–2015)

In terms of famous people with whom I feel a connection (to them and/or their portayed characters), today's news really hurts: Leonard Nimoy died today. I am sure many of my fellow nerds/geeks feel the same way. Nimoy is best known, of course, for playing---and often reprising---the character Spock as part of the original "Star Trek" crew. The character of Spock, and several aspects of that iconic character that originated with Nimoy (see the obituaries to which I linked to see the origin of a couple of the things that Nimoy brought to Spock) has had a huge impact on popular culture. But as you can from his Wikipedia entry, he had a very long, successful, and varied career.

The CNN article about his death has some nice pictures and nice tidbits.

In addition to Spock, another more recent way in which I will remember Leonard Nimoy is through his voice acting in Civilization IV when one discovers a technology. (Tip of the cap to Travis Hime for the URL with the clips from Civ IV.)

I would also like to include a very nice quote from Nimoy (which appears in the CNN.com article) in which he describes a visit to Caltech: "I had an embarrassing experience once, many years ago," he told The New York Times in 2009. "I was invited to go to Caltech and was introduced to a number of very brilliant young people who were working on interesting projects. ... And they'd say to me, 'What do you think?' Expecting me to have some very sound advice. And I would nod very quietly and very sagely I would say, 'You're on the right track.' "

(Tip of the cap to a large number of people.)

Kam Torrye: Rogue Demon Hunter (My New Pathfinder Character)

For those of you who are interested, here is my new Pathfinder character. This gives the details of my flame oracle (with the tongues curse) for any of you who want to try to decipher my handwriting (and are interested). He's a rogue demon hunter.

I previously wrote a shorter description when I made some decisions about the character but hadn't yet determined the details.

Update: It turns out that Firestorm has 11th level as a prerequisite, so clearly I need to fix that.

Oracles, Tongues, and Finding Paths

My new Pathfinder character is a Lawful Good 'Oracle' who has the 'Flame' mystery and the 'tongues' curse. I chose 'infernal' for the language of the tongues. I have mega-charisma and a rank in intimidate (class skill), so I plan to roll intimidate checks when I start speaking in tongues.

The GM is requiring all characters to be good, so I figured the LG but divine-touched oracle who others will think is possessed because of his curse will cause lots of trouble --- I mean 'interesting role-playing opportunities' --- for the party.

'C' Doesn't Stand for Fruit, Idiot!

I agree 100% with this demotivational poster!

Fractals in Nature

Here are some nice pictures of fractal-like structures in nature.

(Tip of the cap to Kreso Josić. By the way, in case you were wondering, I make reasonably frequent use of the voluminous html codes for characters for foreign languages available from this web page.)

Retired Muppets

The blog "Mental Floss" lists 9 muppets who were kicked off Sesame Street. Obviously we all know Kermit the Frog, but I actually remember Don Music well. (A few of the other ones who were kicked off are also familiar.)

Hunted by the Yakuza

Or something like that...

We had our second session of Vampire today (I'm in a short tabletop Vampire campaign, for those who haven't heard), and it was really the first full session because we spent the bulk of the time creating characters in the first meeting. The game is set in contemporary Oxford, except with the twist of supernatural things in the air. (Our next session is on Halloween. Spoooooooky....) All of us are humans but have psychic powers (from the book Second Sight) that have just been awakened via a psychological experiment. (We're currently trying to pin down how this happened.) I am playing Billy McLatte, a mild-mannered employee of the Starbucks that is attached to the location of Border's a bit down the road from where I live in real life. Billy has always been interested in the occult, especially the spirit world, and I chose his various skills and specialties (before we picked psychic powers) to give him very good roles in that. His three psychic powers use those good rolls and are actually pretty powerful. He can see and speak to dead people (death sight, ghost calling) and can also do ghost channelling (call either a specific ghost or some random ghost with specific desired abilities --- say, a ghost that's buffer than he is --- into his body). He finds his new powers really cool and always wanted to do the seance thing anyway.

So, why is our party (not just me) now being hunted by the Yakuza (or, more technically, this campaign's version of it). Simple... I called and conversed with the wrong ghost (though I'm pretty sure that conversing with him was an intended part of the plot), who (along with his allies) has basically told us that we should all be killed for breaking the natural balance of things. Hence, because of my character's actions (oops), we are now effectively hunted by the Yakuza. Billy ended up getting chased through the streets of Oxford by a 12-foot tall spectral Hell Hound that started stalking him near St. John's College. Ugh, he can talk to ghosts and do other cool stuff but his physical attributes are craptacular and he can't even come close to defending himself from that. (It's great when the party splits up, huh?)

You know, this isn't the first character I've played that has created party enemies. None of you actually played with Famish, who was my very kenderish sorceror. Sawtooth caused some trouble as well, but his enemies didn't typically leave battles alive and the DM in that game didn't do nasty things like sending assassins to kill us the way my DM at Georgia Tech did. That said, the GT DM was an awesome DM, but the action definitely sometimes came very directly to us. He warned us that people would remember our actions and things like that could happen if we pissed people off. And Famish definitely picked up the 'hunted by the Yakuza' trait --- though I can't remember at the moment what the organization was actually called in that game.