Look up Bureau 13 Stalking the Night Fantastic. It’s from the early 90’s. It’s got a lot of X-files vibes, but doesn’t take itself particularly seriously, and it predates x-files. It’s built on the all conspiracies are true trope, so it’s quite gonzo. There’s all sorts of gadgets the agents have access to that are prosaic today, so you probably want to run it in the era it was written in.

The Open D6 system remains my favorite system. I’ve run my homebrew fantasy games as well as Star Wars games in the system, and have plans for others when the opportunity arises.

Without a purity test how can I tell which members of the tribe are loyal and which might betray me?

For me this changes all the time as I invest in developing something, and inevitably something catches my attention. I’m pretty invested in the Open D6 system, so I’m always riffing on this system.

Lately I’ve been penciling out a game where a party is rewarded with the Charter to the king’s casino. I started with the idea of inverting Ocean’s 11, since every party ever wants to rob a casino as soon as they learn there is a casino. So, the idea is the party has control of a casino and now they have to deal with organized crime, card counters and sharps, rivals, labor disputes, royal demands, and the occasional party that thinks they’ve got a surefire plan for an epic heist.

The reason is apparent in history. Party leadership lived through Nixon and Reagan’s punishing wins over a liberal leaning Democratic party. Labor support went lukewarm, and their funding stream dwindled. The left absolutely utterly to fill the gap. Clinton ran and won as a centrist, and just as important his cohort had a plan to fund the party. The ranks of party leadership were filled with this cohort, and the left hasn’t done the work to take back party control.

I quite like Sanders, but his vision of a groundswell of public support fails to account for the importance of campaign spending in election outcomes. It’s not enough for a few charismatic candidates to win, a party needs to win to effect change, particularly in a federal system. That reality, in my opinion, is why the left is still shut out of party control.

All this too say, the party should stand as an anti-oligarchy party, but the party needs a cohesive vision of what what that means.

I’m reminded of the story of Garg and Moonslicer, and I wish more publishers would lean in to this approach to good and evil. A purely lore approach would be enough to frame the conflict around, some races are naturally social creatures, and some races are naturally antisocial. Both have hierarches, but not all races have the same natural concepts of fairness and justice. Any individual can embrace either world view or a mix, but one comes more naturally to each race. Even if humanity is naturally a good race (debatable, but whatever), members can obviously deviate significantly.

Ultimately it doesn’t mater what race the slavers are, I’m not going to worry about the ethics of self-defensing a party of slavers to death as PC or GM.

Gilbert himself didn’t seem sure he had a complete definition, just a critical piece of it. As a psychologist he would have understood sociopathy well, among other psychological maladies. He seems to be making a distinction here, but that is my reading of him. If he could have provided a diagnosis that underpinned becoming a Nazi it would have been a bombshell, but they all seemed rather normal under a battery of tests. Instead of a specific diagnosis, the Banality of Evil became the commonly cited mechanism behind the Nazi’s abhorrent acts. Weak men following vile leaders.

After thinking about Gilbert’s quote I have come to conclude a lack of empathy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for evil. There may be more to it, but this piece is already enough to oppose evil, and challenging on its own.

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Captain G.M. Gilbert

The army psychologist assigned to interview the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.

A list of options has been previously catalogued.

I’ll grant you it’s easier to daydream about violence.

Latvia is very excited about Flow’s success. It’s all over Latvians social media. Even the military official accounts are posting their congratulations.

The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.

I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.

Keeping music and art education in schools is often justified with broad improvement in test scores for students who had these humanities classes. Similarly, recent studies show learning cursive has broader benefits.

If this was the worst thing the Republican WI legislature brings about we’d be lucky.

The word exceptional didn’t always mean better. It used to just mean different, as in an exception to the rule.

Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.

WEG Star Wars 2nd edition Revised and Expanded.

My roommate and I split the cost, and when we moved I kept it. It’s still one of my prized possessions.

It’s interesting to me that in the medieval period the term outlaw applied to persons who broke the law and were no longer protected by it. They were entirely outside its auspices.

I guess around the enlightenment philosophy changed, and a class of rights were considered unalienable. Society protects itself from law breakers, but even the worst offenders have some protection under law, even if the case law considers their life forfeit.

When Popper posed the paradox of tolerance one imagines he supposed a tolerant society extending tolerance as an unalienable right. I quite agree the social contact resolution to the paradox of tolerance neatly solves the paradox, but I think it introduces interesting questions about what behavior is beyond the pale, and how we as a society resolve what we find acceptable. The extremes are easy, but edge cases are introduced. I hope we assess those cases with our eyes open.

In both cases, maybe I’d more frequently be able to resist the temptation to talk about both subjects if I had the option to use them at work.

Elon: Roll the dice to see if I’m getting drunk!

In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…