Excuses, and a Proposal

Okay, so after stepping back my postings (significantly), I'm feeling a little guilty for not giving a better explanation. So, several reasons why I'm probably going to only post once or twice a week:

1) JulNoWriMo! Hey, I know I'm not doing the hardcore-English-major-version of a full 50,000 words, but its still about a thousand words every day, and it actually has to make sense plot-wise. It'd be too much of a chore, in all honesty, to be writing short essays daily on top of that. Of course, my hardcore-English-major friend is doing the full version, but she's not mocking me too horribly for being a literary wimp. In fact, its quite helpful to have someone around to bounce ideas (or more likely, TVtropes pages) off of. When her Trashy Young Adult Fantasy Adventure gets published and makes her millions, I'm sure I'll mentioned in the Forward (or at least the Afterword, I hope...).

2) Posting daily is kind of a drag. Turns out I don't really get a chance each day to think something awesome. It's regrettable, but true. So in the future, I'll try to wait for the metaphorical bucket-that-is-my-mind to fill up before I dump it out onto the page.

3) Lack of back-and-forth. Writing on your own inevitably turns into navel-gazing, which is something I've always tried (with varying degrees of success) to avoid. I'm told that the unexamined life is not worth living, but just as much, I'd say the unexamined world is not worth living in.

On that last, I'll make a proposal. The scientists and mathematicians of yore, and to a degree the philosophers of the same time (read: the Modern period), communicated their ideas to one another through letters. One would write a letter, ("Dear Hume. You're just wrong. Love, Kant.") and the other would reply ("Dear Kant. You don't even exist. Love, Hume."). And this exchange of ideas, while it led to disagreement, also led to growth in ideas.

This could work similarly. One person writes a post on what they believe/feel/logically conclude, and others respond in kind.

So, that said, I'll probably try to write up a response to Lusca's "Purpose," which asks whether there exists such a thing (any sort of thing) that is completely and entirely useless.

Next Time: Uselessness & Possibly Parmenides
___________________________________
Meanwhile, I've been up to my typical nerdy ways. For one, I played that Combat Patrol List I wrote about earlier. I won, and pretty convincingly, but it was a very close match for most of the game. Things I learned:

1) Plasma guns are deadly at 12" or less (i.e. Rapid Fire range). They kill expensive battlesuits like it's what they're made for (and it is, more or less).

2) Immobilized does not equal destroyed. It equals "turret on bunker that can still hit you every turn of the game but is too far away to be worth taking down."

3) Gun Drones make great assault units (well, for Tau, anyway...). Initiative 4 means they're hitting before many standard troops, and a 4+ save gives them decent survivability. 2 Drones took out a half-squad of Guardsmen in three turns of close combat, which was pretty demoralizing for my opponent. Chainswords are no match for frisbees, it seems.

So that was fun.

Also, I playtested my very own homebrewed RPG today! I'm pretty pleased at how it went. It's got WW1-style dogfighting! And zeppelin battleships! And sky-pirates! Okay, I've reached my exclamtion-point limit, but really I thought it went pretty well. Combat was a lot more streamlined than I'd expected, and I just need to make a few checks a little less trivial and it'll be good to go.