Game Designer and Father of Lovecraftian gaming. CEO of Petersen Games. Also Doom, Age of Empires, etc. Subscribe for cool stuff 3x weekly! Sorry, no DMs.
Utah
Joined October 2012
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Some bleeding heart is going to say, “But what about the poor fired innocents?” To that I will only emit a hollow laugh, because every time I got kicked out of a company it was after a mega-success (Quake, Halo Wars, etc.) so if you’re being fired for actual financial reasons I am unsympathetic.
The longest war in history was the Third Punic War. It started in 149 BC and ended in 1985 AD, when the mayors of Rome and Carthage finally signed a formal peace treaty.
Technically it lasted 2131 years. Is it time for a Fourth Punic War?
Bioware closure.
I’ve said before. It’s okay for a game company to go away. It’s happened to me several times. Companies mean nothing. It’s the people who matter, and a company closing doesn’t kill them. If they were awesome they will have a great resume and find a new, better job. If they sucked they can still find a good job - with luck not in the game industry.
We’ll always have Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate anyway. And the people who built them will make something new and wonderful.
“Go for the eyes, Boo!”
When someone calls you a Chud, just remember that CHUD stands for Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal. A useful and productive job.
There was another interpretation but who cares?
Also there were two CHUD movies. Watch the first. It's great. Only watch the second if you have buddies to laugh at it along with you. It features Bud the Chud and a high school overrun by monsters. And get this ... it's not good.
My son was telling my grandson a bedtime story.
The heroes went deep into a cave. Suddenly, my grandson interjected, "And they saw the MOUTH of the world. And it was EATING."
In twelve words he created imagery scarier than 99% of my horror stuff.
I was so mad.
I was mocking the awful British sausage to her face when my English friend said she’d prove me wrong. Next morning she cooked a Full English for us (me, her husband, and daughter). The sausage was great.
She said it was Cumberland.
Still not okay with their baked beans.
The British sausage is called a banger because in the First World War it was so full of water that it exploded in the pan, and the one that never did was the one from Cumberland.
Before the war a butcher's sausage was pork, fat, salt, pepper and a little rusk to hold it, and it fried. During the war, with meat rationed, the makers filled the skins with water, scraps and whatever cereal they could get, and the water turned to steam in the hot fat and burst the casing. Soldiers named it, and the name stuck to the whole family for a hundred years.
The Cumberland sausage stood apart. Up in the Lake District it was made by the yard, coiled flat into a wheel rather than twisted into links, from coarsely chopped pork rather than minced slurry, heavily peppered, with no colouring and almost no filler. A proper one is more than 90% meat. The spice came in through Whitehaven, which was trading with the Indies, and the pork came from the pigs every Cumbrian farmhouse kept. You bought it by length, not by number.
If you grew up in the north it was the Sunday breakfast, a whole coil in the pan, cut into quarters at the table, with the fat spitting round it. Fried in lard, because that is what was in the pan.
In 2011 the name was protected by law. It has to be made in Cumbria, in the coil, with at least 80% meat, and the cheap imitations with a quarter of the pig and three quarters of the water had to drop the name.
The sausage in a supermarket pack is what the war taught the trade: fill the skin with water and sell the skin. The one in the coil is what a sausage was before anyone had to.
They told you sausages were bad for you. They meant the water.
Why don't we get a blockbuster film about Lepanto? It's a story about a king's bastard half-brother with zero naval experience. He has to put together a ramshackle alliance, and then a rag-tag fleet to defeat the biggest, most experienced, and most powerful navy of the day.
Lepanto is one of the longest Hail Marys in history. It's almost impossible to simulate in a wargame, because the Turks always win unless you instigate specific rules for the Christians to cheat their way to victory.
In a film version, you also get to have the character of Cervantes and a heartwarming bit when thousands of Christian slaves are freed at the end. It's amazing. I suppose it would be super-expensive with all the ships, but I'd assume decent and appropriate use of CGI. Until then I guess we'll only have G. K. Chesterton's poem Lepanto, which I recommend highly.
I know that having a movie in which Turks are the bad guys couldn’t have been made 6 years ago. Maybe we’ve matured.
Anyway Chesterton’s poem is really good. Here’s a sequence that gives me goosebumps.
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
The creature terrorizing Ron Weasley in his Dark Arts class was not a spider.
It is an amblypygid, sometimes called a whip scorpion. Confusingly it's sometimes called a "whipless whip scorpion" which makes no sense. They really get as big as the one in the movie, and they are completely harmless.
They don't have any kind of poison. They do have grasping claws, but they can't pierce human flesh, and I've talked to a LOT of arachnologists and handled small ones myself.
I also have provided a picture of a tiny cute one. They are rare in Europe and North America but I imagine folks in Brazil and Africa know about them.
You can keep them as pets, but they're kind of boring most of the time, since their goal is to hide under a piece of cardboard all day unless there's a cricket to terrorize. Or, I suppose, a Weasley.
When I was raised, I was told, as was every kid in America, that in the Spanish Civil War the Republicans were the good guys, and the Nationalists were practically Nazis.
I believed this up till about 2 decades ago when I actually started reading up on the Spanish Civil War as an event in and of itself instead of just as part of the "prelude" to WW2. My beliefs have modified.
Yes, clearly the Nationalists were guilty of terrible crimes, and I neither respect nor like the Caudillo. But the Republicans ... let's just say that if they'd won, their idiocies might have destroyed Spain as a viable state.
In 1807, Napoleon went on a rabbit hunt.
His chief of staff rounded up a couple thousand tame rabbits and kept them near the hunting area. When the cage doors opened to release the rabbits, it went wrong. You see, these were TAME rabbits, and they assumed le Empereur & his guests were arriving with food. So they swarmed the "hunters".
A gigantic force of adorable fluffy bunnies jumped on Napoleon, chewed up his coat, and overwhelmed him and his armed allies, until they got into their carriages and fled away.
He won almost 63 out of his 70 battles. This was his lamest defeat.
