Create-a-Critter #1: Curse-y Thing

So, here I am, creating another non-skepticism-related series. Anyway, here's the rundown of how this'll go: I start with an undeveloped germ of a seed of a concept for a monster, and those of you oriented towards gaming (usually specifically for tabletop RPGs, may extend to other genres) help me flesh it out some. So, today's candidate:

I'm working on a campaign setting that's got a lot of spirits that kind of resemble a cross between some fey and various Japanese spirits/demons/whatever. They usually hang out in these dimensional pockets that form in the center of large areas of one biome type. Mortals can create different kinds of wards against them, usually designed to prevent them from entering an area, or from affecting people in the protected area.

Anyway, now that I've gotten that little bit of background down, I'm trying to think of some kind of critter with some kind of signature curse. The thing that keeps it from just spreading it around easily for its own benefit or amusement is that it only affects the target if it performs a specific action, which varies from cursing critter to cursing critter. If players go up against one of them wandering a city, part of the fun will be figuring out what triggers the curse.

So, here's some questions I'd like your help in brainstorming:

1. What does the curse do? (Maybe even a case of cursed with awesome)

2. What sort of interesting triggers could there be for the curse?

3. The players have figured it all out and track down the bugger. How does it defend itself?

Dear Strong Bad...

A while back, I decided to drop an email to Strong Bad whenever I thought of one. Haven't had any luck, of course, but one of these days I might make it.

So, anyone want to share some emails they've sent to Strong Bad? Here are some of mine:

Dear Strong Bad,

I've sent you a shrink ray via snail mail. Every cartoon needs an Incredible Shrinking Whatever episode, so here's your chance!

-Bronze Dog

Dear Strong Bad,

If you ever want to see your dear little brother ever again, you'll come to the back of Bubs's Concession Stand with a case of Cold Ones.

Dear Strong Bad,

If you ever want to see your dear little The Cheat ever again, you'll come to the back of Bubs's Concession Stand with a case of Cold Ones.

Dear Strong Bad,

If you ever want to see your dear little case of Cold Ones ever again... Well, nevermind. I got what I want.

Dear Strong Bad,

makehomestarrunnerandstrongbadswitchbodies.exe!

-Bronze Dog

So anyway, on with yours.

Promises, Promises

Hi. Just a short, possibly moving into foamy rant ahead.

I'm guessing all my skeptical friends have noticed it at some point or another: Woos make all sorts of promises about how their favorite woo will cause a world-changing, possibly world-saving revolution. They never seem to deliver.

We've had nuts studying psychic powers for a long, long time, and yet have yet to do anything that would pass a test worthy of any attention. And somehow, a lot of them expect to develop practical applications for stuff like remote viewing and telekinesis. Still others claim that the ancients had practical applications, like pyramid building. As if it were impossible with standard human ingenuity (Our primitive ancestors were just as smart as we are. They just didn't have the enormous knowledge base we have today) and a lot of elbow grease.

We've had all sorts of people claiming to have perpetual motion machines, free energy devices, and so on. They can't ever seem to keep them running, or can't ever seem to complete them, but often promise that they'll get the bugs worked out if they get just a little more money.

Another thing that annoys me are these basement inventors who never get their magical machines out and working under controlled conditions. They're an insult to the real basement inventors like all the computer geeks we now have to thank for your ability to read my blog.

Thought its sloppiness and unwillingness to engage people, woo is probably one of the biggest forces for maintaining the status quo. Imagine if all the PR funding for woo was instead spent on genuine research.

If I Get Tazered...

...please don't just sit there.


Aside from a little schauchenfraud (however you spell that) for a conspiracy nut mixed in with a lot of outrage over the response (Seems he did a lot more than shown), this thread is devoted to discussing useful anti-The Man measures.

Quote of the Time Being #14 or Blake Stacey Wins the Internet

It would be nice, to say the least, if the anti-Uppity Atheists advanced a positive position, rather than ceaselessly declaiming their unhappiness with the Uppity Atheists. Otherwise, how can they hope to succeed? You can't have a world-view which is entirely negative, after all.

-Blake Stacey on Pharyngula

Doggerel #123: "You Argue as Loudly as a Fundamentalist!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless. This particular entry is currently interrupting the original schedule, brought on by a troll elsewhere.

The point should be obvious to my regulars, but it seems to escape so many woos, fundies, and squishy pseudomoderates: Arguing with passion is not equivalent to advocating or performing violence. It is possible to be very opinionated without wanting to use violence to force anyone to agree with you.

Just because an author slashes at the pages with his pen doesn't mean he's bringing a sword anywhere. Just because I press my keyboard a little harder or start using more bold tags doesn't mean I'm advocating violence, much less performing violence. It is entirely possible for someone to be passionate, loud, and persistent without entertaining any thoughts of violence.

Unlike a lot of fundies, my friends and I know very well the difference between a metaphorical debate table and a literal gladiator arena. My chosen weapons are text sent over the internet, my votes, the occasional cartoon or video, and, hopefully soon, letters sent to my region's elected officials. About the only violence I can really do with those weapons is give a senator a paper cut.

This is the inverse of the fallacy of 'argument by volume' a lot of trolls are fond of employing: Just because they're loud doesn't mean that they're right. Just because I'm loud doesn't mean I'm wrong. Judge my arguments' merits by their merits, not their implied volume. If I'm not advocating something, don't use my apparent decibel level to imply that I am.

Slimer! and the Real Pointless Fun

Well, it's been a while since I've done a straight one of these.

The big item in this is a website Nodwick introduced me to a while back: The Independent Gaming Source. It covers a lot of games made by individuals and small companies. The really great thing is that a lot of them are free. The favorite thing I've seen there: A big list of 50 indie games.

I like Cave Story, Warning Forever, and Samorost. Be sure and tell me if you find a favorite or two on the list.

Anyway, here's some YouTube stuff: The guy who does "I'm a Marvel, and I'm a DC"

And since it's Speak Like a Pirate day, I should post something about that, since pirates are having a hard time making it in our modern office world:


In other news, I'm hankering for something steam punk:

This Time, You Ask the Questions

Was idly talking about logic puzzles and recalled a variation on the familiar Knights and Knaves. So anyway:

(Updated with more possible deities)

You live on an island ruled by three deities who will answer yes/no questions for the inhabitants. They're overly obsessed with never appearing in the same form twice, so you never know which one is which when you show up at the temple. Truth always tells the truth. Liar always lies. Random Whimsy will switch between telling the truth and lying whenever he darn well pleases, and will favor whichever aids him personally. All three deities travel together and answer all questions, so you can't direct a question to a specific deity.

Since you're tired of chronically playing games of Knights and Knaves every time you've got a trivia question you want answered, you decide to thin down the numbers: The ancient scrolls or some such say that if a deity is unable to produce a yes/no answer due to a paradox, his head will explode.

So, what questions can you ask to identify each deity (fairly easy, no points), kill a specific deity which will not harm the other two (2 points), or a question that'll kill two deities without harming another (5 points). Minus infinity points for a question that'll kill all three, since that'll arouse the attention of the Hounds of Tindalos, who'll rip you to shreds, or whatever they're supposed to do. All I know is that I like their plush.

Alternate deities to replace Random/Whimsy, to possibly expand the challenge:

Chaos: Switches randomly between honesty and lying.
Alternator: Switches between telling the truth and lying with each question. First answer is random.
Yes-Man: If Truth and Liar give the same answer, he will give the same answer as well. If Truth and Liar give different answers, he will lie.
Ragnarok: If Truth's and Liar's heads explode, he will answer to cause his head to explode. If that option isn't available, he tells the truth.

On the Road

Just thought I'd let you know I'm only intermittently connected to the nourishment of the umbilical cord of the internet. I'm in pretty much the middle of nowhere where dad grew up, inspecting some land with him. Got wi-fi from a relative, but just barely.

Got to try out a cane sugar Dr. Pepper that, unlike the previous one, didn't spend too much time in the sun. Wasn't all that different, aside from an aftertaste.

Pointless Question #9

You've saved the world from mad scientists, meteors, alien invaders, demons from a lower plane of existence, and inexplicably giant gorillas hundreds of times over, and all while making very good excuses for your alter-ego.

How did the world stay in one piece before you and your caped friends came along?

Doggerel #122: "You'll Be Sorry!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

When I think of it, just about everything is an appeal to consequences. If you get into a car accident while not wearing your seatbelt, you're more likely to get injured. Therefore, you should wear your seatbelt. Unfortunately, woos like to use fallacious appeals to consequences.

Exaggerated example: If you don't wear a tinfoil hat, the government will read your mind. Therefore, you should wear a tinfoil hat. Where the fallacies come in, of course, is the first part of that statement: What evidence do they have that the government can read your mind, and furthermore, what evidence do they have that tinfoil can prevent it?

Alties are particularly fond of this, since they can try to use it to discourage people from seeking real medicine, generate fear about what'll happen if people choose not to use their product, just doing a normal, health-neutral action, and so forth. Such efforts involve a lot of other doggerel and mistaken "common knowledge."

Conspiracy theorists love this one because they can portray critical thinking and honest questioning of their crankery as complacency in the face of the MIB black helicopter invasion that's due at 4 o' clock tomorrow.

I could go on (and I will, in the next Doggerel entry, "Better Safe Than Sorry!"). They key problem is that they have to show good evidence of that, not just chant the mantra. If we question the premise, they have to defend the premise.

So, What's the Point of All This, Again?

Well, my brother unceremoniously announced he's quitting blogging. He's been pretty frustrated lately about what he was trying to do, and didn't want to be someone who just recycled what he saw online.

So, I think I should pretty much review my intentions over here:

1) Support First Amendment rights: I make a stand for separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and all that good stuff. The two are vital for the advancement of science, and our ability to improve ourselves. That was one of my reasons for going to the rally: To oppose some of the nasty laws passed in Texas, intended to tear down the wall, while masquerading as protection. Of course, that 'protection' is born of double-standards and such. Open-mindedness (the real stuff, not the fake woo kind) demands that we be able to speak about anything without government coercion intended to enforce conformity in children.

2) Atheist/Skeptic Representation: A lot of people out there lie about atheists and skeptics all the time. Expressing our actual opinions all over the internet is supposed to make it harder for them to get away with it. We've already got pithy responses for everything they say we don't. Additionally, I can do my part to show atheism and critical thinking in a positive light, and show evil in an appropriately bad light.

3) Vent: Sometimes, I just have to blow up at woos in comments. It's a luxury I can't afford here in meatspace most of the time. There are problems in the world, and it irritates the generic fiendish plane(s) out of me that there are people who so devote their lives to obstructionism, apathy, intellectual isolationism, and cynicism.

4) Have fun: Sometimes it's very easy, and other times it's very hard. Where there's gross absurdities in life, there's humor to be had if you can get in the right mindset.

Stuff I should probably do: Write to relevant politicians, take the fight to woo places more often, etcetera.

69th Skeptics' Circle

It's up at Screwing the Inscrutable. And it's got a plain Jane version for you people who don't want to deal with hosts being cute and/or comedic.

Open thread, but black-hatted people are FORBIDDEN from commenting.

Want to See Me in Meatspace?: Part 2

Well, I'm back from the rally. It was small, but respectable, and I'll save the details for a later post.

Anyway, my brother and I are planning on going to Opal Divine's for dinner. On the off chance one of you is in the area, you'll see me wearing a black T-shirt declaring who my master is. And no, it's not PZ or Dawkins, or any of the others trolls like to bring up. You'll figure it out.

The Directory Directory

Just got an annoyance. Surfing some links, looking for some tips on fantasy world building to work a little on a D&D campaign I'll be keeping for a rainy DMing day. I ended up going through some directory sites... except they only link to other directories allegedly about world building. There weren't any that contained actual articles or tips for world building.

Anyway, I'm trying to flesh out an archipelago culture (Not entirely for player benefit. Sometimes I just like the world building process), and I'm trying to find some information on island ecology, economics in isolation, and that sort of thing. Would like the place to be potentially valuable once the players kick out the baddies. So, know any links I could use, rather than directories?

This is the IDiocy That Never Ends...

PZ ended up with an email from Michael Korn that induces another round of groan-inducing stupidity I've touched on in a rant before. I think it's pretty revealing of the typical Creationist mentality, as you'll see below.

Anyway, here's the quote I'm going to be talking about briefly... unless I go off on another rant:

survival of the fittest

i wonder if, since you are a proponent of darwinism and its creed of "survival of the fittest", you would accept my challenge to a fight, at a place of your choosing, using just our God-given or, in your case, randomly evolved, hands and feet (i.e., no weapons of any kind, as in a duel).

it would be interesting to see finally who really is fitter: an Evolutionist believer in Darwin or a Creationist believer in God.

our exhibition could render a real service to the community and help resolve this vexing issue.

for your information, i am 5' 6", 120 lbs, and have no military experience or training in martial arts or any other form of self-defense or combat.

it will be a very fair battle i think.

please respond soon.

Rhetorical question I feel I must ask: Since when is combat ability a determiner of fitness?

PZ's fitness and success as an organism isn't determined by his ability to beat up some crazy little Creationist on demand. Life is not a Mortal Kombat tourney. In terms of evolution, a pacifist who raises a small family in the suburbs is more successful than some virgin who defines his life in terms of how much combat he can handle. Humans are adapted for life as social creatures. Senseless violence tends to decrease a human's fitness when other humans band together to lock violent people up in a concrete building where their gametes will never meet up with those of the opposite sex.

Biological fitness is not measured by combat. I suppose fitness could be described as problem-solving ability. "Kill it!" might be the favored solution for the typical D&D dungeon crawl, but that hardly applies to the real world. There are plenty of other methods for competion (including cooperation). The typical Creationist's ignorance of this suggests that they honestly believe violence is the best solution to any given problem.

On top of that enormous level of stupidity is another, of course: Since when is the truth of evolution dependent on the fitness or combat ability of its louder proponents? It's positively medieval: Trial by combat. Are Michael Korn and his ilk going to insist on bringing back that barbaric tradition? It's the logic of bullies. Might makes right.

Science is done by performing experiments and seeing the results: The experiment is analogous to a question we ask of nature, and the measurement of the end result is nature's answer. What a novel idea!: Asking reality what reality is! Much more intelligent to test reality about evolution than asking irrelevant questions like "Can PZ beat up some 5'6", 120 lb. guy?"

Of course, though, my baser instincts think that irrelevancy would make for an amusing, if not informative, experiment.

So, Should I Move?

Got to thinking about moving my blog again, mostly because I've so radically changed the place since Ryan's original incarnation. It'd probably be easier for people to find "thebronzeblog.com" or something.

The trick is that I'm not sure how to do it easily. I'd like to duplicate the posts at whatever new place without going through the sheer number of individual posts, keep this place up, at least for a while, and maybe even find some way to get people redirected from the posts here to the new counterpart, to give people time to update bookmarks, links, etcetera.

So, any general recommendations from those more experienced at the matter?

Quote of the Time Being #13

From the Uncredible Hallq:

Can you imagine an actual government writing laws to guarantee that everyone will wind up guilty, and then making pardons conditional on loyalty to the leaders? Such a government sounds horrific, yet that is exactly the program that has been a major strand of Christian theology since Paul.

Anyone Else Get This Particular Cultish Vibe?

I've read pretty much all of The Brick Testament to date. It's kind of creepy to see some bits of the Bible, especially the bloodshed that tends to get just briefly mentioned.

Anyway, sometimes it gets creepy with Jesus, and reminds me of stuff I've seen about cults:

Here's a collection of passages talking about the family conflicts he came to cause, including a bit about requiring his followers to hate pretty much everyone associated with them as well as themselves. I'm not an expert on cult recruitment tactics, but one familiar theme that comes with cults is that new members are given reason to separate from their family and friends, the people who'd be most interested in talking them out of it. As for self-hate, it pretty much goes along with one of the typical cult lines of "let go of yourself/your ego/etcetera."

Extending the internal house conflicts to their natural extension, Jesus wants the world to burn. Lot of obligatory doom talk.

The self-mutilation bit is a bit creepy even if you take it "metaphorically." Glad I haven't met anyone who takes it literally, yet. Suspect they'd have a hard time typing, though.

Everyone knows cult leaders like to have the followers share all their money. Hence the later bit about "Accept Communism or Die."

There's the whole "Hell" thing, generally used as a threat against those who would dare to question the faith.

There's a fair bit of love mentioned there, like other cults, but actions don't seem to match up to words.

There's also something else I noticed: It seems like the whole thing was set up as a resistance movement against then-mainstream Judaism, depicting themselves as persecuted throughout history or something. Always need to generate the impression of being persecuted in order to attract contrary thinkers, it seems.

Of course, I realize that there's not much separating "cult" from "religion" except popularity. But anyway, anyone else get the impression I do: That Jesus was just a leader of a typical doom cult that got popular?

Doggerel #121: "Eureka!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Contrary to what you see in movies and outside Archimedes's favorite bathhouse, science doesn't really come from startling revelations made by a single person. At least not very often, anymore.

Science is usually a team sport that requires a lot of hard work. In the early days, before we had a large understanding of the human-scale world, bright individuals could discover quite a lot. A lot of the knowledge we now take for granted wasn't around back then. The problems science deals with these days are growing more subtle and more expansive.

In medicine, you can't just give a pill to a guy and expect his results to be typical. You have to give it to an experimental group and compare them to a control group and pay attention to how it affects different people in different demographics. That's a lot of work. You may suddenly have an inspiration that leads you to think Chemical X would have beneficial effects, but don't presume that your intuition about the complexities of the human body is as straightforward as Archimedes's realization about displacement volume.

In physics, scientists have to deal with tiny particles, velocities, and so forth that don't follow our everyday Newtonian expectations. A physicist may have some potentially ground-breaking idea to untangle some knots in a superstring, but he still has to show how the math and/or experiments work to support it.

In biology, critters can come up with all sorts of unexpected defenses against our efforts to control them or whatever. With the vast time scales involved in evolution, you might get blindsided by some of the shorter-term thinking of your squishy brain. That's why you have to refer to the large body of evidence that's been collected.

I'm sure more examples could be dropped in the comments. The point is that science doesn't end with sudden realization, thought experiments: You have to test your ideas in the real world. Many of the woos out there just don't get that. "It's just an idea! Why do you have to criticize it?" is one of their common complaints. They don't realize that new ideas demand to be explored.