The fourth wall of Dungeons and Dragons

The latest in breaking the barriers of reality: Inception, and this.

Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents' imagination:

"Carlton Mellick, III, the king of Bizarro fiction, has a new one out... The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is "an absurd comedy about a group of adventurers (elf, halfling, bard, dwarf, assassin, thief) going through an existential crisis after having discovered that they are really just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic AD&D role playing game. While exploring the ruins of Tardis Keep, these 6 characters must deal with their inept Dungeon Master's retarded imagination and resist their horny teenaged players' commands to have sex with everything in sight. '"

Via Boingboing

NOTE: you get a great deal on this with Amazon if you also buy Apeshit and the Cannibals of Candyland

D&D Character Sheets

We'd talked about doing this a while back; so I found a nice simple D&D character sheet for each of us to fill out. I mean, anyone who feels like it. We can link it to personal profiles in the sidebar, or something. I don't know.

I started one, and one thing I found difficult was the allocation of ability points. I have no idea how strong I am, but I know I have more dexterity than strength, so maybe if we all decide on a set number of points to allocate (54, say--average) and distribute them among our different abilities, that will be an easier thing to do. It always kind of weirded me out that so much of the game of D&D was decided in those initial rolls, in the same way that Ayn Rand freaks me out.

This is an interesting exercise, and I think it may be best to see this as a résumé, avoiding any modesty, and cataloging our skills. Or maybe it will just be enough to gaze upon the gold standard of D&D CVs, and leave it at that.

Fig. 4 Character Alignment Graph

!!!

These were found here.

The true point behind "Earth Day"

Here is a well written piece to keep "environmentalism" and the whole Earth Day thing in perspective.

The idea in a nutshell: Over the past 4.5 billion years the Earth has dealt with catastrophes of over 90% extinction rates and recovered––even if we tried, nothing modern civilization could do to the environment could compare. If we screw up now, in a few million years there will be thousands of new species around to fill the niches of anything we regretfully take with us on our way out, and there will still be about 5 billion years left for worse things to happen and recover from before sun goes nova and swallows the planet in a big ball of fire.

The one thing that won't recover when we screw up, is us. So the point of environmentalism isn't about saving the Earth at all. The Earth will do just fine; the climate will recover, whales will be replaced by these guys. The point of environmentalism is self preservation. Modern human civilization needs the environment and it's resources to be stable in order to survive. We ruin it, we die. That's a pretty epic fail. Seems simple enough, but we sometimes lose sight of this or think environmentalism is more about keeping the Earth looking pretty and feeling good about ourselves as we save whales. That's clearly the wrong attitude, because khargras will be more fun, anyway. But we must do what we can to survive long enough to enjoy them.

And here's another post he did about how D&D got him his job!