Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Basic Rules Released as a free PDF

Wow, I think Wizards has made a really smart decision here. They've released the basic rules for the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragnos as a free PDF file:

https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/basicrules

It's too bad there's no way to test both doing this and not doing this, because I predict this is going to seriously help the sales of the product.

Personally, I definitely do not need another role playing game, especially not another version of Dungeons and Dragons. But when they put the rules out there for free, I'm unable not to download and read them.

I assume they plan to make their money on glossy rulebooks with art, and on additional rules. By making the basic rules free:

• People can try the game easily, read it and see if it's for them.
• New players have access to the rules before they are hooked enough to buy.
• You have a searchable electronic reference.

I could go on and on, but the advantages seem enormous. Wonder what they plan to do for other companies add-on products? If they're smart, they'll try to make a welcoming environment for those.

You should be able to change/annotate the subject of an email you've received

Let's face it...lots of the emails we receive have misleading or useless subject lines. This annoys me because my work day is full of emails and often I need to store them and be able to retrieve them later, and that's not easy to do when the subject is bad.

Even if a search turns up the right mail, if there's more than a few search hits, you need a reasonable subject line to find the right one.

That means that every now and then I get an email that I need to file and I would love to amend the title, but I'm not aware of any mail system that allows that.

I'm using gmail. I wanted to put this out there on the lazyweb and see if anyone has tried a feature like this.

Great twist on the 'Diamonds and Toads' fairy tale: 'Toad Words'

A new twist on the fairy tale about the two women, one blessed to have diamonds come out every time she speaks, the other cursed to spout toads:

http://www.redwombatstudio.com/blog/2014/06/26/toad-words/

That fairy tale always seemed weird and hard to understand, and this followup on what happens after is therefore more satisfying to me. Here's a reference to the original fairy tale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_and_Toads

Earworms in fiction

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for a musical 'earworm', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm,
I'm surprised by how many short stories there are that use the concept...for example:

In Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man, the protagonist uses a jingle specifically crafted to be a catchy, irritating nuisance as a tool to block mind readers from reading his mind.

And there are so many more:

In Fritz Leiber's Hugo Award-nominated short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (1959), the title describes a rhythmic drumbeat so powerful that it rapidly spreads to all areas of human culture, until a counter-rhythm is developed that acts as an antidote.^[22]

Great stuff.

Fighting the good fight against Morgoth, in Portland

The always excellent Lowering the Bar has a piece about a lady who found herself confronted by a fellow in chainmail, attacking her BMW: Fingolfin Defeated Again

Using wipe-off forms at a doctor's office

I took my daughter to Groovy Molar yesterday to get a tooth checked out, and it was our first visit there, and they used laminated write-on/wipe-off  pages for all the intake paperwork.

After I handed the forms back to them, they entered the data in their computer system, and no trees were harmed in the process. Nice.

I think it's a great idea so I'm passing it along, even though my own left-handed/hook-handed writing style means that it's a challenge for me to use that sort of thing without smudging all the writing.

Could Heinlein win a Hugo today?

Oh, man, John Scalzi's Metafilter response to the sort of 'Heinlen couldn't get a Hugo today, you dang liberals' complaint is priceless:

http://www.metafilter.com/138967/Reclaiming-Heinlein#5537300

...and the reason it is priceless is because it acknowledges that people revere a straw man Heinlein, in rather odd ways:

When people say "Heinlein couldn't win a Hugo today," what they're really saying is "The fetish object that I have constructed using the bits of Heinlein that I agree with could not win a Hugo today." Robert Heinlein -- or a limited version of him that only wrote Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and maybe Farnham's Freehold or Sixth Column -- is to a certain brand of conservative science fiction writer what Ronald Reagan is to a certain brand of conservative in general: A plaster idol whose utility at this point is as a vessel for a certain worldview, regardless of whether or not Heinlein (or Reagan, for that matter) would subscribe to that worldview himself.

At the market very late

You find the best things on Metafilter:

http://www.newsfromme.com/2014/05/08/at-the-market-very-late/

 "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore."

Superpowers that really exist

Nice post on BoingBoing about real superpowers, in the sense of abilities that exist in nature in some animals.  But the best one is a real mutation that has occurred in humans:

 There have been at least two documented cases of a mutation in humans that triggers accelerated muscle growth and extraordinary strength right from birth; it happens when both copies of a myostatin-producing gene are defective, is extremely rare, and no one knows what the long term health consequences are. Having said that…the child in whom the mutation was first identified could, at age four, hold two 6.6 lb weights with his arms extended. That’s the equivalent of 3 litres of water. In each hand.

Full story:
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/30/6-superpowers-that-really-exis.html?utm_campaign=moreatbbmetadata&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=boingboing.net