Comment high school (Score 1) 113
In 1984 Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC with DOS was pretty awesome. For its time, nothing was better. I was sorry to see the Turbo line loose out to the Visual line.
How is F more arbitrary than C? The goal of F was that 0 is when human blood froze and 100 is the normal body temperature of a healthy adult human. While it easy to say that humans are too variable to be a good measurement baseline, use of a brine rather than human blood for the measurements was sloppy, etc. None of that is bad science, even if it is bad engineering. It certainly isn't more arbitrary that using water at Earth's sea level, which varies by atmospheric conditions so STP ends up being a bit arbitrary.
Plus 1/10000th the distance from the pole to the equator has always seemed pretty arbitrary to me as it is constantly shifting. And is measured as badly as Fahrenheit. But that is distance, not temperature, so technically a different topic.
I would be happier with metric if the standard unit of distance (a meter) cubed to form the standard unit of volume (a liter) and the mass of something inside that would be the standard unit of mass (gram). Make the meter much shorter, and switch from water to air (how ever you want to define that - perhaps pure Nitrogen to be consistent) would have worked better. Or maybe pure Hydrogen as it is the most common element in the universe.
BTW: I used to live in Europe, so I'm comfortable with both systems. They both suck. But Imperial is more human centric, and I prefer to keep us (humans) front and center. But I might be willing to switch the the French Revolutionary Calendar just for the fun of it. 10 day weeks. Awesome.
I agree with most of what you said, but not the bit about Golarion. It is a great setting, certainly one of my favorites, but it isn't top tier. You should look into Glorantha. As much as I admire James Jacobs, Erik Mona, and the rest, they're not in the same class as Greg Stafford.
Comparing it to JRRT's Middle Earth is difficult because the needs of a literary setting are different than a gameable world. The Silmarillion certainly is a tour de force, but it is more inspiration than usable content.
Not true. Lets imagine a kickstarter to create a paper book. I doubt if the margin on of that would be 20%, so if the book is successful, all sales above $750k have a 20% fee (25% for non-kickstarter), so there is now a loss per book. The only thing to do is to jack the price from day one, or cap the sales.
Had it been 20%/25% of profit rather than revenue, then I wouldn't have been bothered by that part of the OGL 1.1. Getting a percentage of costs is abusive. I do agree that few make it to the $750k mark, but it could happen.
BTW: Even without this profit sharing rule, there are other reasons to dislike OGL 1.1.
Memory fault - where am I?