This is pretty cool…
I found this from a couple different blogs, but here’s the link to the site that generates this stuff.
Which D&D Character are you?
I Am A: True Neutral Half-Elf Bard
True Neutral characters are very rare. They believe that balance is the most important thing, and will not side with any other force. They will do whatever is necessary to preserve that balance, even if it means switching allegiances suddenly.
Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf. They are smaller, like their elven ancestors, but have a much shorter lifespan. They are sometimes looked down upon as half-breeds, but this is rare. They have both the curious drive of humans and the patience of elves.
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.
Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of NeppyMan!
Two additional thoughts to all this:
- Apparently, there’s a big gaming conference going on right now, GenCon 2005. I heard about it on NPR this morning. It’s something like the 30th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.
- When I was a kid– junior high and early high school, actually– I played some Dungeons and Dragons (actually, Advanced D&D), but I think my favorite role playing game was Runequest, which had what we thought was a superior play system to AD&D.
Oh yeah– then I discovered girls….
Adventures at the Food (w)Hole: “I know what that means!”
So, I was at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon to pick up a few things before heading home. While walking down an aisle, I saw someone who I vaguely recognized as also working at EMU. He made eye contact with me as if he were going to say something like “hey, don’t you work at EMU too?” But instead, as I got closer, he pointed at my chest and his face lit up. “I know what that means,” he said with glee, “and no one else here does.”
“That” was the T-shirt I was wearing, which was promoting the University of Okoboji. And I immediately knew what he meant. See, there is no “University of Okoboji;” it’s sort of an inside joke and a weird marketing scheme for the Spirit Lake/Okoboji area in northwest Iowa, the so-called “Iowa Great Lakes.” And really, I think it’s mainly a way for a store called The Three Sons to sell t-shirts and such.
Anyway, we had a nice “Iowa moment,” talking a bit about where we were from and all of that. This guy had never been to Okoboji, but I’ve been out there on a “extended Krause family vacation” we had there a few years ago. It’s pretty nice; I mean, it’s not near as posh or as pretty as the Traverse City area, but it was simple and certainly a lot cheaper that TC, too.
Yet another cat link, sorta
See the comic Cat and Girl. I’ve only looked at a few of them, but they’re pretty funny….
Spam Theater
Ah, we missed it, we MISSED it!
On our way back from South Dakota this summer, we drove right though Austin, MN, which is the home office of Hormel meats, the maker of the infamous luncheon meat SPAM. We just didn’t have time, and really, by that point of the trip, we wanted to be home.
Ever have SPAM? I bet ya haven’t. To be honest, I can’t remember ever having SPAM until we went to Hawaii last year. There, SPAM is a local and traditional favorite, I think because the canned meat was brought by the U.S. military a long time ago. I didn’t try the SPAM sushi, but I did have SPAM as part of a traditional breakfast platter that included SPAM, Portuguese sausage, scrambled eggs, and white rice. And you know what? SPAM is pretty good.
Some day, I too hope to tour the SPAM museum. In the meantime, I’ll just have to live through the photo memories of someone else…..
“I just wanted a video game…”
From a web site titled “The Best Page in the Universe” (a pretty funny site, albeit a bit frat boy-ish, if you ask me) comes this commentary on the controversy surrounding the video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” called “I just wanted a video game, not eternal damnation in hell.” If you missed it, there is a secret way to alter the PC version of the game so that you can see the characters having badly animated video game sex. ABC Nightly News (I suppose the other networks too) ran this story over and OVER again for about a week as if it was somehow as much a national tragedy as, oh, I don’t know, real people actually getting killed.
I like this passage from Maddox’s entry on the game:
The creator of the game, Rockstar Games, has stated that it will offer a downloadable patch to fix the sex issue in the PC versions, and is working on a new version of the game that will prevent this content from being unlocked in the future.
Thank God. I’ll be the first person to download and patch my PC version of “Grand Theft Auto.” I want to shoot people in the face, bang prostitutes, traffic drugs, steal cars, and terrorize police officers without this filthy smut in my game. Frankly, I’m appalled that Rockstar would allow such wholesale corruption of our youth. Years from now when America has become a withered husk of the morality it once stood for, historians will look back at what triggered it all and point to one event: a boolean variable that unlocked a simulated sex scene in a video game.
Oh, and I didn’t realize this either: the original rating for “Grand Theft Auto” (and most of the other games that are rather violent) is “M” for “Mature,” meaning that they recommend that players be 17 or older. “AO”, which stands for “Adults Only” and which is the new rating assigned to the game, means that the game should only be played by folks 18 or older. Ah yes, what difference a year makes….
Why I don’t like cats
I knew there was a reason…
“Cats: Our Cute and Pathogen-Rich Friends,” found via feministe.
Harry Potter in puppets (sorta)
From Annette the Harry Potter fan/scholar comes this, “Potter Puppet Pals,” an odd little sketch about bothering Snape.
A few unofficial notes on our visit to Virginia (and time to start a diet again…)
I’ve posted plenty in recent days on my official blog about my trip to Richmond, Virginia where I appeared on something called “The Writing Show.” You can read all about it there, if you’d like. I thought it was a great experience, I thought the show was a great idea, and, because of bad management and squabbles, it sounds like I was on what is likely to be the last version of the show, at least in this format. But that’s a different story.
The story I was going to talk about here was the unofficial stuff of the trip. There was a lot of fun crammed into a day and a half. We got to meet the “friend John” that our friend Mary talks about once in a while on her blog, we had a chance to check out Harrisonburg, we took a sort of mini-trip down memory lane (Annette and I drove by the apartment where we used to live, we drove by Annette’s parents’ old house, which is where we got married, etc.), we went to an absolutely excellent book store in the Cary Town area called Creatures n’ Crooks, and Annette and I ended up staying in a really nice hotel for not a crazy amount of money, thanks to Priceline.com.
But as we were driving back Friday, both Annette and I remarked about the fine culinary experience we had had the previous day. It started with breakfast in Harrisonburg at The Little Grill Collective, which is a co-op/very hippie-like little place. Located off of the beaten path (this is not the kind of place a tourist could stumble across easily, I don’t think), it was pretty darn scruffy, the mismatched furniture in the dining room not a fashion statement so much as a necessity. The food was equally rustic but darn good. I had biscuits with gravy and a darn tasty potato cake (along with eggs), and Annette had that key Southern breakfast staple, grits (which I find yucky, personally). I hope Mary will send me a bumper-sticker.
We had lunch in Richmond at Joe’s Inn. Ah, Joe’s…. When I first moved to Richmond as a grad student back in 1988, the bars my friends and I hung out at were the ones closer to campus, places like Bogart’s and The Village (couldn’t find decent web sites for either one of these joints). But I went to Joe’s too, especially after I was done with VCU’s MFA program, and super-especially when I lived a block and a half away from the place and when Annette and I got together (for example, Joe’s was the first place I met her parents).
Judging from the web site I link to above, a lot has changed for Joe’s since Annette and I moved out of town 12 years ago. Instead of there being just one in The Fan (which is the very large historic neighborhood right in the city I lived in pretty much the whole time I lived in Richmond), there are Joe’s spin-offs out in the ‘burbs now. I guess that’s okay; more places to enjoy the fare.
Annette and I had the meal we had when we were dating way back when: a shared portion of the Spaghetti a la Greek with the meat sauce. It’s a huge mess of spaghetti that is baked with feta, provolone, romano cheese and garlic and then topped with either their marinara or meat sauce . It’s a great dish, nothing too complicated, but with more than enough cheesy goodness (especially with the feta) to make it interesting, and topped off with their excellent meat sauce (0ur choice), well, it brought me back a few years.
The only thing better at Joe’s, in my opinion, is just about anything they serve for breakfast, but that is both another meal and another story.
We didn’t really have a lot of time for dinner because “The Writing Show” gig was at 6:30, so we checked into our hotel and then wondered around the Schockoe Slip and Schockoe Bottom area. To be honest, I remember it being a lot nicer than it is now– or at least I remember a lot more stuff going on down there. My friend Dennis told me that there was a freak flood last year that caused a lot of damage, and I suppose that’s part of the problem. But when I lived in Richmond 15 to 12 years ago, I recall this area being a lot more vibrant than it seemed now.
We did find one great place, Café Gutenburg. They are in the same place that used to house the Main Street Grill, which was a funky/grungey/hippie sorta vegetarian restaurant that I remember going to a lot when I lived in Richmond. I was sad to hear that the Main Street Grill had closed, but I have to say that this new place is quite an improvement.
Café Gutenburg is a combination book store, coffee shop, and wine bar. Frankly, I cannot believe such a place has yet to open in Ann Arbor. As Annette put it when we sat down, “all of my favorite things– I just wish they had chocolate.” It’s a beautifully refinished space with some good used and new books (I picked up a copy of Snow Crash for fifty cents), little and large tables, very Europeanish finishes, and a nice patio area on the street. We each ordered a flight of wine, which was a sampling of three wines of your choice for the reasonable cost of the most expensive wine on their menu– I had white, Annette had red. Like most other places where I have sampled the flights, they bring you notably more than the equivalent of a single glass of wine, so it tends to be a good deal.
They also served a number of topas-styled dishes (basically, large appetizer portions based on a popular Spanish style of eating), which was perfect for us since we weren’t ready for a full meal after Joe’s but we needed to eat something before “The Writing Show.” We had a couple of filo-dough wrapped sorts of things, both of which were excellent.
And then, just to make matters better, it turns out that Café Gutenburg does have chocolate and in the form of an extremely rich flourless chocolate tort. We shared a piece and I had a cappuccino to wake up a bit (EXCELLENT coffee, by the way), and it was a perfect way to cap off eating in Virginia.
Well, not exactly. Annette and Dennis and I enjoyed some cheese dip over drinks and bitching about things after “The Writing Show,” but the food and beer at this brew pub wasn’t that notable.
I really have nothing to complain about in terms of dining options around Ann Arbor (despite what Bill says, there really are a ton of great restaurants around here), but I missed eating in Richmond, too. And really, I’ve just scraped the very tippy-top of the iceburg of the food options available in this former capitol of the South.
Anyway, we’re back home, and after all this eating and the bad eating on the road home (and all the eating in various trips before this one), we are both ready for a diet, a serious diet. We’re back on the South Beach plan as of tonight. I still think it’s a bit of a gimmick and it is a diet I for one stalled on previously, but it is the only diet I’ve been on in the past that I that was relatively easy for me to stay on and it’s the only one where I lost any significant amount of weight.
We’ll see how it turns out; ideally, I’d like to lose about 10 pounds before the start of school in a month. In the mean-time, I have my travel and eating memories….
Just to prove that I’ve always been a bit of a geek (or at least had friends who are geeks)….
This morning, my friend Chris (who is– and I say this with affection– truly the biggest geek I know) sent me a link to yesterday’s Wikipedia featured page, “The Monty Hall Problem.” This is essentially a math puzzle. Allow me to quote at length from the wikipedia site:
The Monty Hall problem is a puzzle in game theory that is loosely based on the American game show Let’s Make a Deal. The name comes from the show’s host, Monty Hall. In this puzzle a player is shown three closed doors; behind one is a car, and behind each of the other two is a goat. The player is allowed to open one door, and will win whatever is behind the door. However, after the player selects a door but before opening it, the game host opens another door revealing a goat. The host then offers the player an option to switch to the other closed door. Does switching improve the player’s chance of winning the car? With the assumptions explicitly stated below, the answer is yes — switching results in a 2/3 chance of winning the car.
The problem is also called the Monty Hall paradox, in the sense that the solution is counterintuitive, although the problem is not a logical self-contradiction. It has generated heated debate.
“Generated heated debate…” ya got that right. Now me, being an enormous idiot when it comes to math, I didn’t exactly weigh in with my reasoning and opinions. But when I first heard about this puzzle 15 or 18 or so years ago, I do recall there being “heated debate” among my geeky friends. I remember one friend of mine arguing bitterly that this could not possibly be true. The problem is that this particular friend didn’t know a whole lot about math either.
I did have one friend of mine who immediately said that he knew this seemingly illogical solution was correct. This guy is someone I have long lost touch with, but just to give you an idea of his geek credentials: he finished his Ph.D. in genetics at Harvard University, where he was being funded by a Howard Hughes Foundation fellowship. Anyway, his response when I brought this all up with him way back when was something like “it’s math you wouldn’t understand, Steve.”
Anyway, I recall actually testing the Monty Hall problem one drunken night, I think with a friend of mine named Lisette (who is now a professor someplace– lost touch with her, too). I played the role of Monty, controlling the doors and the location (metaphorically, of course) of the goats and new cars, and she played the role of contestant. One hundred times in a row, she picked one door first and then switched. And damned if she didn’t “win” 66 times.
Ah, memories….