Gormongous

The first twenty minutes were Trump's strongest, although they weren't that strong at all, and by the end he was going off on a number of weird tangents, even congratulating himself for not slandering Clinton more than he has. Surprisingly, considering its status as Murdoch rag, the New York Post has a good summary of the gaffes that'll probably end up sticking with him for the next month or so. I also enjoyed Slate's dissection of Trump's meta-argument about business sense: EDIT: I changed my mind, this is the best summation.

This election never stops being surreal.

I might be slightly late, because this weekend suddenly became the one where everything's happening yesterday, but that time should still work well for me.

No pressure, though!

As is usually the case with "accuracy" complaints, I think that the expectation of historical weaponry is a stand-in for the expectation that Battlefield 1's new setting would inform the gameplay in some way beyond goofy period touches like saber charges on horseback and shooting down zepplins with small arms fire. As far as I can tell, it hasn't even informed it to the degree that Battlefield 1942's setting did, wherein the majority of the classes had single-shot weapons and a robust automatic weapon was the special province of the Assault class, so it's fair to be disappointed for Battlefield 1 being basically Battlefield 2142, a fantasy skin on modern warfare. I don't fault them for that, not really, but I do think it's weird that they cling to this fig leaf of historical plausibility (all guns were technically in service during the Great War, for example) when they're clearly designing a near-steampunk wartime romp and would probably be better off embracing it, since the people who care about historical accuracy aren't being fooled by technicalities.

If I didn't have a serious cashflow problem in my life right now, I'd be buying The Sprawl. It's a simple system with an easy pitch and the book itself looks cool enough to sell people on the game, which is plenty in my book.

Oh, are we shooting to start in the evening instead of the afternoon? I'll see if I can do that.

The more I read about the production of Voyager, the more I think that show was doomed from the start to be weirdly mediocre. Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor, who ran the show together after Piller's stint during the first two seasons running Deep Space 9, were used to the experienced writers' room of The Next Generation, which they'd also ran together, and didn't see the need to impose a top-down vision on their staff. Rick Berman was distracted by the end of DS9 and had never really been more than just a steady hand on the till anyway. No one was really making sure that there was only one version of Janeway or the rest of the Voyager crew out there, so one writer would submit a script where the captain's latent authoritarian tendencies were pushed to the brink, another would submit a script where the captain was mother to us all, and both would be shot without much effort to reconcile them. By the end of the first season, the show's bible was in tatters because every defining features of the show and its characters had either been contradicted, sometimes multiple times, or flanderized to meaninglessness. Brannon Braga was brought in to fix the mess and, to his credit, the fifth and sixth season are the show's best, although the "dark and sexy" approach that he pioneered there didn't work nearly so well when applied de novo to Enterprise. I wonder how much a franchise history will praise or damn Rick Berman. Dude held the course after Roddenberry's death and presided over the best moments of the best shows, but he seems to have had a custodial mindset that proved disastrous for the franchise once the cache of the big-name shows was spent and the most talented members of the staff were off doing their own things...

That's the case with the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, so I think you're correct, yes.

Or, if you have a tolerance for some jank, The Last Federation.

Fair enough. I just read them and was like, "There is no circumstance where I'd want to swap out my cheat sheet for another cheat sheet, just so the GM and I can have our own little cyberspace adventure." I'm sure there are people who are not like me out there. I immediately thought of the Shop Cat (does it have an official name) from Invisible, Inc.

Fixer... cat?

The world intro says that the system's designed to be broadly compatible with cyberpunk visions of the eighties (megacorps, magnetic tape, and wires everywhere), nineties (miniaturized tech, rampant piracy, and holograms), and naughties (mandatory social media, wireless everything, and the one percent). They recommend the group discuss what tech is and isn't there, although smartphones seem like a given in a lot of the book's examples of play. I'll be honest: I'm really leery of the Matrix rules. They seem to take the strength of the Powered by the Apocalypse system (a small set of player and GM verbs that have narrative hooks built in) and throw it out the window by introducing a subset of verbs that only serve to increase overhead and split the party. I'm not saying I don't want anyone to play a Hacker, I'm just saying it's not going to be me. I'm planning to be a Soldier myself. Ex-military, ex-corp, trying to make good as an independent contractor now. The governments and corporations of the West, their indifference seems like evil, but that's because they lack the right people on the ground, giving perspective and taking action. With my heart and their hardware, there's a chance to make a difference.

Well, his days were numbered anyway, running a grassroots campaign that was insufficiently presidential (and deferential) for party standards.

I mean, to be fair, the Once-Cat is really just an alternate template that overlays an existing playbook, so the rules overhead is mostly during character creation. I think it's kinda silly (the end of the PDF has the creator acknowledging it as a joke/prank for a friend) but if Twig's got his heart set on it, I'm sure we'll find a way for it to fit into the tone of the setting you described. I'm excited by the implications that wireless connectivity and social media exist in this cyberpunk world, too often the "wires everywhere" aesthetic of Lain and Ghost in the Shell dominates things.

The amazing/ridiculous thing is that you base your advancement scheme off of any playbook, so you can have a Pusher Once-Cat (preaching the apocalypse), a Fixer Once-Cat (who knows people who know people), or a Reporter Once-Cat (getting the scoop they don't want you to know).

Other questions: is it rude to ask for the broad tone of this one-shot, either in terms of adjectives or media touchstones, so that I can come up with a character in advance? Also, would you prefer for players to have an idea of what character they want when they first come to the table, or do you want character creation to be a communal process?

Mercifully, most universities are resistant to forming formal or informal consortia because they tend to see their fellow universities, whether sharing their economic background or their geographical proximity, as "peers" only in the sense of competition. The fact that most universities strongly prefer internal hires (or, at least, external hires of people making lateral career moves from other universities) is much of what's enforcing a lot of cross-institutional conformity in policy. They're all drinking from the same well, as it were. Otherwise, attacks on tenure and related attempts to tear down the protection of free speech in an academic space come from an effort to remain competitive in what's dimly apprehended by various administrations to be the "marketplace" of higher education. It's definitely happening, though, and not as an unintended consequence of institutional policy. You have big universities and small ones integrating more and more corporate features to make themselves more attractive to donors, all of whom only know what success looks like through the lens of a business that's out to make money. The adjuncts in my city unionized last spring, after a near-libelous campaign by every college and university in the region to the tune that a union would either take a chunk of your already-small adjuncting fee or prevent you from working entirely, and the retaliations are already happening: an excessive surcharge of fifty dollars has been tacked onto every grad student's attendance fees, which raises approximately half a million dollars for my institution alone to pay for a 3% raise for adjuncts with over five years' experience (yay, $3090 a class instead of $3000, half a decade of experience is sure paying off) and a union office staffed by five volunteers, and meanwhile the new five-year seniority preference is being spun by my university as an ironclad rule that freezes new adjuncts out of classes and builds resentment for the older ones that fought for the union. Divide and conquer, the old union-busting tactic, being used on a five-month-old union, yep! Meanwhile, at my undergrad institution, the vaunted tenet of "self-governance" has been gradually dismantled since before I graduated, with the final nail being the abandonment of a "safety first" alcohol policy for a more punitive one structured around mandatory reporting. Who cares if Grinnell has record lows of hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning, because there's no fear of punishment for getting your friend help; people won't donate if they think students are drinking too much! In an object lesson on the humorless strictures of university administration, a student attempted to hold an event titled "The Funeral for Self-Gov" last spring and the dean of student life blocked it until he added a question mark to the end. All this, because Grinnell thinks making itself more "businesslike" will attract East Coast money and boost it from being the peer of Oberlin and Carleton to the peer of Haverford and Amherst, which would attract more money and justify pushing tuition past its current $59,000-a-year absurdity. So yeah, the fact that most professors are contract employees living precariously from review to review is not something the average university cares about, because it's already working for them. Right now, there's virtually an endless supply of adjuncts in every major metropolitan era, courtesy of the bottom falling out of academia with the Boomers, and the high turnover tends to increase student satisfaction, because bad reviews really do have the power to get people fired... all of which also only matters to universities insofar as a small percentage of those students will someday become wealthy donors themselves. The institutional pressure for universities, as far as I can tell it, is that each one of them is dying to move up in the US News and World Report rankings, increasing the available prestige that can be monetized, and so they each have their eye on their would-be peers higher up on the list, trying to beat them out at being more professional and profitable. It's a gross race to the bottom.

That picture is the natural result of a strategic AI that prioritizes its conquests based on economic productivity and military weakness, rather than cultural or geographical proximity. There's probably an AI that could prioritize those things, given all the computer-generated solutions to gerrymandered districts in the US, but then Paradox fans would whine up and down the forums about the AI not fighting "optimally." That is to say, the same Paradox fans who regularly post with puzzlement about why the Nordic kingdoms didn't fully integrate the Sami people until the nineteenth century or why the Byzantine Empire didn't try harder to annex Armenia or the Rus, because such moves would have been totally "optimal." You know, morons.

I can do it, too. Are we going to do text, voice, video...?

The tendency in Paradox games for random inheritances and odd AI prioritization to produce countries with long snakey borders and arbitrary enclaves in the middle of nowhere. Think les Trois-Évêchés only worse.

Yeah, I think that The Conclave is at its best when you're a vassal duke or king, getting the benefits of the council without having to deal with the consequences constantly. The AI, generally, does not spend much effort or resources trying to disempower the council, so you've always got that dynamic going. When you're an independent king with dukes of your own, however, the council blocks virtually every useful law change and revolts like clockwork if you take away their power, so it's hard not to wish they were gone. "Enforce realm peace" is good, but not that good, and the trade for two demesne slots and no more bullshit is very tempting.

When you do get The Reaper's Due, I'm recommending that everyone bump "minor epidemics" down to low, because I'm in a Sweden game where waaay too many young and healthy people are dying of slow fever and typhus. For about a fifty-year period, diplomacy was impossible because no one was living long enough to have kids and alliances were constantly breaking down, which was cool in theory but annoying in practice. My grievance with The Conclave is now mostly that it requires so much micro to be "fun." If you want to increase vassal levies, be prepared to pay out for favors, and a vassal who isn't on the council because they're an imbecile is guaranteed to revolt... but when you disempower the council, three or four of your most powerful vassals are always in the "empower the council" faction, which poses a minimal threat to your rule even if you lose (change a law that you can change back in five years' time, plus lose a hundred prestige) and keeps them from actually challenging your rule or your more important laws. I don't think I've had a single "So-and-so for King" revolt in two hundred years of gameplay and, during the Black Death (which, annoyingly, hit in 1125), I went through four kings in seven years. I should be getting succession law and claimant revolts, but I'm not, because the AI is obsessed with the council treadmill. I've also noticed that elective succession is now pickier with younger or unlanded heirs, which is good, though. I think it's two things: first, it's harder to breed diplo supermen with the new education system, and second, the AI seems to appreciate the difference between innate prestige (from being part of a major dynasty) and earned prestige (from title-holding) and will generally only vote for a young or unlanded heir if the current ruler has high enough prestige to make up for the heir's shortfall. It's great on paper, but look at that border gore! I don't know if I can handle it.

Last post on the crisis in higher ed for a while, I promise, but this article from The Baffler does a great job of tying together the University of Chicago letter, the corporatization of the American university, and the transition of the university professorship into a low-paying contract position. I especially like that it corrects the perspective of the infamous Vox article "I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me." The titular professor isn't terrified of his students, he's terrified of his students getting him fired by the university. Somehow, that's the students' fault, because PC culture run amok.

Any week besides next weekend!