I'm no fan of censorship, but Amazon.com is a private company capable of making there own business decisions whether or not I agree with them. It's not as if these books are not available in other places, perhaps a local business that you could feel good about supporting. Calling a company's decision to stop selling a product censorship is at best an over reaction in my view. Amazon must feel that they will sell more books if they stop selling certain others. Otherwise the leadership at Amazon is making these decisions based on personal or religious views and if that is the case then I wouldn't recommend buying any Amazon stock in the near future.

You make some good points. I never tried to speak for everyone with my opinions certainly and I will admit that I play with some people who feel that balance is important to a fun play experience.

All I'm saying is that there is a point at which you stop playing and start rules lawyering and that an overwhelming focus on balance at an ability by ability level leads to generic boring game play (a major complaint with 4e and for that matter many MMORPGs). As long as everyone realizes that it's about having fun how exactly you play is irrelevant though and it sounds like you've had some good times.

Fun is what you make it.

I've been on both sides of this (being useless in combat and being the top damage) and I would rather be in a rag tag party of misfits and having fun any day of the week. As long as it is fun and the story is good who cares about balance, I play pen and paper RPGs to get away from that kind of drama.

This AC is making way more sense then is reasonable to be expected. Fun Fact: the two party system that is now codified into our election system is actually relatively recent and is actually opposed by the founding fathers' writings. Fun Fact Two: The founding fathers where by in large part not Fundamentalist Christians, Infallible god men, or very conservative.

In a sense they aren't new (same angry, middle class, middle+ age and mostly white conservatives that we've always had, my great-uncle fit's this stereotype so well it's funny.) but what is new is the amount of publicity they have been getting, and that lines up with the theory that news is becoming more and more about creating a narrative and less about reporting facts. I'm deeply disturbed by the seeming lack of simple logic and consistency found in modern politics. The idea that everything the opposition does is wrong regardless of whether you supported that stance a week ago is just mind boggling.

But conservative crazy talk wins elections now or at least that's what Fox News is trying to tell everyone. That and that the tea party movement is totally spontaneous.

Surely you mean the laser of two evils. :)

While I believe people should be allowed to make there own decisions regarding the risks of this kinds of treatments. I also believe that it is vital that the risks are well understood by those making the decision. My aunt died of cancer that was suspected to be related to hormone therapy... while it improved her quality of life for a time the cancer (and subsequent treatments) drastically decreased it.

Nostradumbass on the other hand is, surprisingly, available.

Well yes, companies and governments only hire consultants to tell them what they want to hear or what their employees have been telling them basically for free. Any case where consultation does not agree with the stated position needs to be thrown out and redone by a group that understands how consultation works.

Right but without the R18+ label they can defacto ban all games that would fall into this category.

Here in the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere) we had something kinda similar happen recently the movie Kick Ass was released with a very well earned R rating and not really marketed to children but it still received negative press because it was "targeted towards children". Even with an industry self censorship system with a very conservative track record in this country the "conservative moment" (really just fundamentalists) won't rest until they can ban anything simply by objecting to it.

When will the world realize that all religious fundamentalists (of all religions, they all want pretty much the same things) need to be fought?

That's kind of what I always figured.
CSI is guilty of this too... all of their IP addresses start with a first octet in the 400s but I guess that is one of the least of their many tech sins.

I should mod you into oblivion for trying to curse more people with MSPA addictions... good call on posting AC. In all seriousness it's one of the best forms of web entertainment I've seen in a while.

Why would anyone want to be Megan Fox? For the Transformers money?

While you aren't wrong there is one thing that Wall Street did that made this situation worse: When they saw that the emperor had no clothes they quietly made bets against their customers. I would never recommend something that I wouldn't buy myself and that is exactly what they and the rating firms where doing. I won't even get into the fact that all this fiddling and contorting the market turned a relatively small problem into a huge invisible economy crushing one... no one ever asked them to do that.