Prep time is useful but not necessary. In fact, so is a GM. I've been in fun adventures where we had neither a GM nor a fixed plot. Not quite as great as a proper campaign but fun nonetheless and very quick to set up. Now, there are games where you need a GM who plans things out in advance - Shadowrun, for instance; at least if you play it the usual way with legwork and so on. But if you don't do anything that requires meticulous advance planning you can really just pick characters, have someone come up with an initial situation and make the rest up as you go, passing GM duty from player to player as people come up with an interesting direction to move the story to.

Now, I can't say I've done that with D&D; being German I prefer The Dark Eye*. But we did do it with a few systems including TDE, Shadowrun and a weird TDE/Shadowrun/Star Wars/Exalted/homebrew crossover game where we constantly had to translate back and forth between systems. Good times.

tl;dr: Roleplaying can take a lot of prep time but if you're willing to have a more chaotic experience you can do without it - and even without a GM.


* D&D doesn't even have crucial skills like Pottery, Housekeeping or Crystal Growing. It's a wonder anyone can get any adventuring done with that system.

I'm really not invested in this as I'm not really a dedicated comic book reader but to me it doesn't look like a big deal. Somewhat bewildering but not a big deal.

In-universe the case is clear: It's not the same character, just like whoever came after Bruce Wayne wasn't the same Batman. They slapped the name onto someone else and that's it. Of course it's kinda weird how they retained the name as I thought that "Thor" was the original Thor's given name but then again my knowledge of Marvel's Thor comes from that one movie and a Hostess Cupcakes ad. Might've been a title all along.

On the meta level it's a transparent attempt to rejuventate a series Marvel apparently felt was no longer generating enough interest. It's not really different from breaking Batman's spine or disbanding/reforming the X-Men. In essence it's a soft reboot without having to toss away the continuity, which is something best reserved for a crossover. Blatant pandering in this case, yes, but nothing particularly unusual.

As for screwing with Norse mythology: Didn't they do that all along? I mean, old Thor was already a space alien if I remember correctly.


Seriously, to me this seems like business as usual. Thor was replaced by a woman. In other news, Wolverine has teamed up with someone.

You can always try KeePassX (for Linux and OS X; use the latest 2.0 Alpha release) and MacPass (for OS X), both of which are compatible with the KeePass 2.x database format. They might not have all the features but they work rather well and you don't have to deal with the monstrosity that is KeePass on a non-Windows system.

Microsoft's hardware isn't all bad - just think of their human interface devices, which are highly esteemed. Their reputation with mobile devices is much spottier, though, with the Zune probably being one of the better ones. Their smartwatch might be good (especially since they bought Nokia's mobile devices division who know how mobile devices work) but on the other hand Microsoft does have a history of shooting themselves in the foot with anything that fits in your hand but isn't a peripheral. That makes it easy to crack a few jokes about the device.

If Microsoft indeed does as you say (I don't know, I'm not in the market for a smartwatch) then I think the brainpower behind the watch comes more from Nokia than from Microsoft proper. Not that that's a bad thing. If Microsoft defers to its ex-Nokia engineers when it comes to mobile devices that's probably better for Microsoft Mobile, Microsoft prime and the quality of their mobile products. I, for one, would welcome more competent mobile competition from Microsoft. Competition is good.

And, for the record, I don't hate Microsoft's mobile products. I find them amusing because historically they have been the mobile market's comic relief character but I don't hate them.

PHP is the boring, reliable choice. It's popular enough that it's probably still going to be mainstream in twenty years. The ease of entry means a steady stream of neophytes who end up checking out PHP at their first web language.

It's not a pretty language but you can be reasonably certain that for the forseeable future it's going to stay. It's nowhere near as nice as Ruby on Rails or Python/Django but it does have a huge market share so there's both relatively many people who speak it and a lot of ready-to-use code, from snippets to frameworks.

The huge amount of available code is a bit of a mixed bag, though - PHP attracts a lot of entry-level coders and in many cases it shows. On the one hand you have things like Twig (a clone of Django's template engine) that are a delight to work with; on the other hand you have things like most WordPress plugins, which consist of barely-working code written by someone who thinks that "model-view-controller" involves Kate Moss staring at a gamepad. The fact that PHP makes it easy to write code that is wrong but still runs doesn't help here.

PHP has flaws. A lot of them. It's a pretty annoying language to work with. But it's not going to fade away anytime soon and that is its strength. If that makes it desirable to you then PHP is a reasonable choice. If it doesn't you might want to stay with Perl or take a look at trendier languages like Ruby, Python or JavaScript.

It'd probably have a 5" display, quadrophonic sound and an octacore CPU and run an unmodified Windows RT. Due to weight concerns most of the battery had to be sacrificed, limiting its life to an etimated fifteen minutes - but no other smartwatch has both Office and HDMI and you can always use the USB port to hook it up to an external power source if you want to use it on the go. You see, Microsoft gets mobile devices.

Or they decide they actually want to make money and release a generic Android-based smartwatch. Their Nokia arm doesn't seem too hung up about reinforcing the Windows hegemony if it gets in the way of business.

Sennheiser has a lot of stuff on the market. You can get a pair of Sennheisers for twenty bucks. They won't be terribly good but they're actually a decent stepping stone if you want to get people off five $CURRENCY supermarket specials without scaring them off with a huge price tag.

Now, there are great budget earphones. If you like in-ear monitors you might want to try some from Visang/Brainwavz or VSonic. Both companies tend to punch above their weight in terms of sound quality while having reasonable prices.

Not my "meme." I rarely, if ever, refer to it.

But, it's true. Capitalism relies on private control and a free, competitive market. Crony capitalism is government control and a resulting non-free market by explicitly decreasing competition.

I mean, sure, you can call it whatever you want to, but when I say "capitalism works" and someone says "crony capitalism is proof it doesn't," that's just stupid, because crony capitalism flatly violates some of the primary tenets of capitalism.

So you admit you lied.

False, but telling that you think such a stupid thing. To you, there's no difference between freedom, and not-freedom. It's just two different options, neither better than the other.

a. I never saw you ask that. It might've been in the comment I replied to, and I didn't see it, because after your massive whopper about what you want people to think crony capitalism is, I stopped reading.

b. Why would I produce an example of something I never asserted? Once again: holy shit, you're retarded.

I haven't seen the case strongly made. If you have a link, I'd be obliged. Stories I saw all handwaved at it.

But they are Republicans. Voter suppression is expected. It's OK.

Only because I see YOU STANDING BEHIND ME. What the fuck, man?!?

Sorry, no. I have these things called pride and integrity.

You fucking asshole.

Nice, except you said "altruism," which is an illusion. True, Cochran is not altruistic, but no one ever is.

This is the first I've heard of this. I want to know specifics. For example, does state law say you cannot participate in GOP runoff if you participated in Dem primary? And is that what happened? If so, then yes, Cochran should lose, but really, MS screwed up, because they should have disallowed those Dem primary voters from participating.

Fuck everyone who wants to use government to push "fairness." "Fairness" isn't a real thing: nothing is inherently fair or unfair, except for someone violating your rights (unfair) or you exercising your rights (fair). There is no other objective concept of fairness. So when someone is pushing "fairness" through the government -- except in those limited senses of protecting individual rights -- they are really pushing their own private moral judgments on everyone else, taking away our freedoms even more.

Except, it is.

Wow. You really think that damn_registrars, of all people in the world, claiming A means B, is actual evidence that A means B?

Seriously?

Yes, within a certain context, where government is not siding with the thiefs. You attacked that notion within the context where government is siding with the thiefs (or, at least, you were ignoring whether government was siding with the thiefs).

As I noted in another comment, crony capitalism is not capitalism. Your claim "The existence of crony capitalism is counterexample to the notion that capitalism will protect us" is idiotic, because either it is saying that crony capitalism is capitalism, or it is saying that smitty claimed capitalism will solve all our problems regardless of what government does. Obviously, neither of those is true.

False. You do not know what "wealth" is. Try harder.

It's the only reasonable means to the end. In what other system would I be free to use my natural faculties to create wealth to further my own interests? Every other system we have works to prevent me from using my natural faculties, or at least significant restricts it, or else it takes my wealth after I've created it, or else it restricts what I can do with my wealth. Capitalism is the only means we've yet seen in humanity for doing this, except for, perhaps, anarchy, which is destructive in other ways.

You offer this quote as though it disagrees with me in some way. Why?

But, as I said, it was not merely a non sequitur, it was also meaningless. It said nothing. It made no point, and had no meaning.

Yes, by dishonestly and meaninglessly claiming that virtue is only for churches, and not all other aspects of our lives.