It looks like Jason Thibeault has succeeded in bringing all of my old posts and your old comments over from Scienceblogs…just in time before it sinks into the abyss. So we now have 24,205 posts and 1,812,731 comments here on Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula, with archives going all the way back to 2006.
So that’s one bit of good news today.
Not a good day. Need to go find a wild party, sit down with some whisky, and be morose for a few hours.
That’s right. It’s a heavy on the bass day to shake things up until my brains bleed.
I played Something Something Soup Something, a simple game which tries to resolve your definition of what is the meaning of “soup”.
It’s mildly interesting, but misses the mark with the wrong question. We could start a war over the definition of “sandwich”, and I would hope the game could be upgraded to address this much more significant issue.
I would never be able to see myself in this mirror! It’s got a built-in camera that only activates the mirror if it detects that you are smiling. I already avoid mirrors, but this one would only deepen my scowl, and here’s how I would react:
Also…Bela Lugosi was a handsome fellow, wasn’t he?
The last time I played Dungeons & Dragons was around 1979, maybe 1980, with two old friends from high school, Steve and Steve. The network of friends was broken up by my need to travel around the country, chasing an education and a career, and I never got back into it. It’s just not the same without those face-to-face friends. I have great memories of those years in that small gaming group in the Pacific Northwest, though, and it was my primary outlet for social networking at that time. I should just get on a plane to Seattle and surprise the two Steves some Saturday night.
Anyway, I guess there’s been a bit of a renaissance in D&D’s popularity lately, which, as usual, I’m missing out on. It’s an old-new way to escape some of the faceless anomie we sometimes experience in our digital universe.
In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987. And the fear that a role-playing game might wound the psychologically fragile seems to have flipped on its head. Therapists use D. & D. to get troubled kids to talk about experiences that might otherwise embarrass them, and children with autism use the game to improve their social skills. Last year, researchers found that a group of a hundred and twenty-seven role players exhibited above-average levels of empathy, and a Brazilian study from 2013 showed that role-playing classes were an extremely effective way to teach cellular biology to medical undergraduates.
Hey, what? Teaching cell biology with role-playing games? That sounds interesting, and I had to look that one up.
In short, an RPG is a game in which a person (in this case, the teacher) tells a story that is enacted by the players who are given roles as the various pieces of background information. Challenges related to the story are then presented and must be addressed by all participants. Each player represents a character in the story and is attributed (quantitatively-defined) skills. These skills are tested during the game to decide if the character succeeds in his or her attempt to perform a task that solves the problem or overcomes the challenge. The skill is usually tested against some kind of quantifiable decision-making system, such as rolling dice. The dice introduce randomness into the game, create suspense and provoke playfulness among the players. This is the main difference between role-play, which refers to the playing of roles in a theatrical play, and RPG, that introduces clear rules according to which the players must decide how to act.
One of the most interesting and significant aspects of the RPG is that the whole team must win together: there are no losers in this kind of cooperative game, ensuring that nobody is excluded or feels excluded.
Unfortunately, all the details of how the game works are in appendices that I can’t find online! I can believe that adding a narrative to the biochemistry of the cell would help with student engagement, I would just wonder if the investment of student time in a game like this is effective enough.
Bill O’Reilly is god’s puppet — he isn’t even responsible for his own actions. He settled a sexual harassment suit for $32 million, and he’s mad at god for making him…do something. It’s not clear what.
You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.
…
If they could literally kill me, they would, we didn’t kill him, so we’ve got to kill him again.
If I die tomorrow and I get an opportunity, I’ll say, ‘Why’d you guys work me over like that? Didn’t [you] know my children were going to be punished? And they’re innocent.’ But then I think about people who have it much, much rougher than me. And you know, I’m a big mouth. I’m a target. They’re not targets.
So they came back with another bunch of garbage. I talked to them this time just to see the devil that I was dealing with. And I truly believe that these people at the New York Times are out to hurt people with whom they disagree. They don’t want me in the marketplace. That’s what this is all about.
So he’s mad at god, and wishes “stuff” didn’t happen. What stuff? That he harassed women? Or that the NY Times exposed that he harassed women? That he harassed Lis Wiehl, or that the case against him was so strong he had to cough up $32 million? Is he acknowledging that he is guilty, when he makes the point that his children are innocent? Is it god who makes his children declare that they don’t want to live with him anymore?
Who are the “you guys” he’s blaming for working him over? Since he’s going to be meeting them after he dies, I assume he means the administration in heaven. Or is he talking about the ghosts of NY Times reporters and editors? Wouldn’t that imply he’s going to meet them in hell?
The only thing we can definitely extract from that mess of a statement is that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t consider himself accountable for his own behavior, and is reduced to blaming god. I suggest that the only possible recourse he has now is to sue his god. He’s got deep pockets, he ought to be able to get a substantial settlement out of it.
Just wait until it gains a primitive sentience and ambulatory appendages. A giant bog has come adrift and is wandering about demolishing docks in a Minnesota lake. It’s so big it has trees growing on it.
We could also wait for The Blob solution: winter will be here soon and will lock it down in a cage of ice. Except that might be the final incentive it needs to break free of its aquatic limitations and rampage across the prairie. We’ll keep you alerted, but in case Pharyngula suddenly goes silent, it may be because I’m imbedded in a slimy matrix of muck and cattail roots and algae.
Just so you know, Jason Thibeault (The Lousy Canuck) is going to do the cunning work of transferring all of my files from the dying Scienceblogs site to the thriving Freethoughtblogs site. At some point in the near future there will a sudden surge of old content, so I thought I’d mention a few stats before they get bumped upward. Pharyngula on Freethoughtblogs has 986,224 comments on 11,009 articles; if all goes well, Jason will be hauling in 831,367 comments (that number is low; Seed Media butchered the comments in their last major update) and 14,387 posts to add to that, so we’ll kind of double in size.
Do you realize that the commenters here have written so much more than I have? And here I thought I’d blocked and censored everyone.
We have this thing called The Minnesota Goodbye — if you lived here, you’d know what I’m talking about. You’re at a potluck where you brought your hot dish or jello salad, and you want to go home, but first you have to find the host and compliment them and have a conversation about the weather and comment on their wallpaper and maybe promise to have lunch sometime which means you’ve got to compare each others’ calendars, and there’s a line of people trying to do the same. It’s agony. My wife, descended from Minnesotans, has this trait. It’s a moral obligation. You cannot leave without chit-chatting first.
Meanwhile, I must have some Irish in me, probably from my father’s side of the family, which means I favor The Irish Exit, so I feel a moral obligation to get out of everyone’s way and stop intruding on my host. If I could, I’d like to snap my fingers and instantly make a twinkling vanishment to reappear at home — not because I dislike the party or the people at it, but just because we’ve all got better things to do than linger.
Now I want to know how native Swedes and Norwegians handle this problem.
In case you want to start your day with a nice story for a change, go read this one. You’ll feel better afterwards.
