Obstacle Courses

Two different amazing obstacle courses, one for ninjas and one for squirrels.

The squirrel one.

The ninja one. (This is obviously from Japanese game show/sports competition. There are four segments; unlike the others, the third one is not against a timer, which means it has a very different feel. The stunts are right at the edge of the compass of my mental picture of human ability; I haven't yet seen a superhero film as convincing.)

Both links courtesy of esmeraldus_neo.

And another video link

'cuz it's easier than writing....

German country-western (actually, I'd say bluegrass) band The Boss Hoss does a remake of Outkast's "Hey Ya", behind the cut. Definitely the best transmogrification-into-bluegrass of a hit song I've heard since Luther Wright and the Wrongs' album length Pink Floyd tribute, Rebuild the Wall. Courtesy of spuffyduds.

( What a wonderful world. )

A comment about rewards within RPGs

My friend rickj made this observation in a recent post.

My request for [the forthcoming 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons] -- cut down on the shopping trips. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I played D&D 1st and 2nd Ed, we didn't seem to spend nearly as much time going to town to buy new magic stuff. The current version's economics seem to expect regular trips to the magic shops, and characters who don't have magic rings on each hand, amulets, headbands, gloves, boots and belts are gimped compared to those who did load themselves down. I don't mind getting magic loot, and I don't mind going to town to upgrade equipment every once and a while. But I am looking forward to seeing what they mean by the leaked statements about characters being cool because of who they are instead of what they're wearing.

Here's a comment I left for him, reposted here.

My late brother made the observation decades ago that in original D&D, pretty much the only way to actually reward a player within the game mechanics* was to give the character a magic item. Magic items make the character both more effective--which allows the player to perform more interesting actions within the game--and more individual--because stripped of magic items, every fifth level fighter or thief or monk is pretty interchangable with every other fighter or thief or monk (this is slightly less true of spellcasters, though they tended to converge on the same sets of spells).

This is one of the major reasons he preferred the "second generation" RPGs like Runequest, where there were more hooks in the game mechanisms for making the characters more individual. (I think this feature is closely related to what robin_d_laws now calls "crunchy hooks".) While there will be common features among all Humakt Rune Lords, you can tell them apart even if you strip away every piece of equipment they own.

My impression of 3rd Edition D&D was that with all of the Feats and side classes and so forth, it was less dependent upon magic items to make characters memorable within the game system. So it's interesting that both you and, if you're interpreting the hints correctly, the 4th Ed team, think that there's still a lot of work to be done.

*It is, of course, possible to reward the player of an RPG with things that are not directly driven by the game mechanics--interesting storylines and opportunities, meaningful in-narrative advancements, glory--but that's not what the game system itself does for the player. The early D&D material was downright crappy at promoting that type of thinking within a campaign; it was so, so loot-driven--in large part because it's much easier to come up with a table of magic items than it is to explain to people how to write a good interactive story that plays out over the course of months or years.

(This last is especially true of Gary Gygax, whose magpie love of genre and pre-genre fantasy allowed him to assemble vast lists of interesting creatures, spells, and magical knick-knacks; but despite Gygax's evident and well-attested skill as a GM, he wasn't able to communicate much about how to actually run a good campaign.)

An observation about spam

kent_allard_jr had a recent post about spam actively putting pictures of naked people in front of audiences who had mostly not chosen to see it. agrumer pointed out in response that most of the spam he gets is "penis enlargement and stock trading ads". I responded,

Because of some odd choices I made in my e-mail configuration, embedded pictures in my spam go into their own folder. I have to periodically remember to clean that folder out.

The vast overwhelming majority of the pictures are gifs of text explaining, as you say, where to get stocks and medicines for a low low price that it still infinitely more than they are worth. Of the 600 or so span-related pictures currently in that folder, I see one which actually shows any significant portion of a naked woman--the backside of a woman hugging her man in an erectile-dysfunction ad. At a guess, more than 500 of the rest are just text in .gif form to evade spam filters.

I quote this all here because I noticed something in this latest batch of pictures that I hadn't noticed before: the ads are getting harder to read. Deliberately. By way of illustration, here is an image I got in spam in July:



And here's one I got in spam last week:



It's obvious that the latter image is heavily obliqued; it's also obvious that this is done to help the image slip past Optical Character Recognition software which would be scanning images in spam looking for key words. This is, of course, the opposite of the CAPTCHA idea, where difficult-to-OCR images are used to keep spammers out.

Spammers are evil. I don't favor death for them, but they need to be hunted down and neutralized before they reduce all forms of communications to unusability.