Pinned Post: Looking at My Stats and Revisiting My #RPG #Copyright Posts

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The quarantine has me doing a bit of blogging lately, which means I’m also looking at my stats. With respect to my posts regarding copyright and RPGs:

The posts are broken into two separate issues. Part 1 and part 2 are about the copyrightability of RPG stat blocks, and part 3 (not relevant here) is about the OGL. As to the first issue, to date, part 1 represents ~30% of text by page count and has 17,037 hits (edit 10/20/2020: 17,667 hits), whereas part 2 (70%) has only 704 hits (edit 10/20/2020: 802 hits). Moreover, part 1 spends much of its text on going over basic copyright principles that don’t represent the actual argument. It’s clear by the stats and the basis of the criticism itself (often peppered with personal insults) that the vast majority of (non-lawyer) criticism I’ve received is from people that have read only 30% (at most) of that argument. I know it’s long, convoluted, and at times poorly written (mostly because it targets two very different audiences); and you’re under no obligation to read it (or even care about it). However, it’s all connected, and if you’re going to criticize it, you should probably understand it first.

Or not. Free speech and all that.

Endnotes:

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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)

Merry Christmas, Foolish Mortals #holiday #Christmas #LotR #movie

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Everyone likes to claim Die Hard is a Christmas movie despite it being released July 22 (1988) right in the middle of the USA’s summer. I’ve always had trouble with this because I remember the theater being sweltering.

Here are two other potential Christmas movies for your consideration.

This is no different that Die Hard being a Christmas movie. First Blood takes place during Christmas, and because it was released in October (1982), it at least wasn’t hot out when the movie was released.

Now, now. I know this seems to be a stretch, but there’s more.

Okay. Maybe not the Lord of the Rings.

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The Night Before Deadwinter, A Christmas-Themed Adventure #DnD #RPG #TTRPG #4e #holiday #Christmas

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A few weeks ago, I had a memory pop into my head. It was a stupid song parody my middle school friends and I used to sing around Christmastime.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
not a creature was stirring, except for a mouse.
The children were hung by their stockings with care,
in hopes that Count Dracula soon would be there.
Mommy was screaming, and daddy was dead,
and Junior was splattered all over the bed.

That led to another memory of a friend, John, who wrote a Christmas-themed adventure during the 4th Edition days involving (Drow) elves working for and evil Santa Claus. (Santa might have been under mind control. I don’t remember.) I also recently observed that Jacob Marley is a Kyton (a.k.a., chain devil). These three memories came together to encourage me to write my own Christmas-themed adventure replete with carnage. While I intended to use the poem, a Visit from St. Nicholas, for the narrative, the fact that there were four encounters in a Christmas Carol made that story the better source material for the adventure. The goal was to write the second encounter in 1st Edition D&D, the third in 4th Edition D&D, and the fourth in Gamma World 7e, which is based on the 4th Edition D&D game engine (I hadn’t decided which to use for the first encounter). This in turn would mirror an adventure three of my friends and I wrote called “A Brief Tour of the History of Dungeons & Dragons” in which each of us wrote two hours of adventure each in a different edition of D&D, but all part of the same story. Each encounter was designed to exemplify the general feel of those editions. That was a fun adventure to write and run.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to write the encounters in the different editions, so I decided to write them in 4th Edition because I have a group playing that edition, which increased the chances I’d be able to run it. Whether not anyone will have time in December to play remains to be seen, but in any event, I’m publishing it for everyone.

If you prefer another edition (or game system), you’ll have to create your own stat blocks and perhaps modify the poetry to reflect the abilities of the enemies. “The poetry,” you ask? All my box text is written in verse, and it was surprising how much the beginning of a Visit from St. Nicholas synchronized with what I was doing. It inspired me to write everything in verse. So, when a player makes a successful knowledge check to determine what their enemies can do, even that information can be delivered in verse. However, moving from one edition to another may force you to change the enemies’ abilities and thus the verse describing them. On the other hand, you could just dispense with the verse and recite what they know without all the rhyming. For all I know that verse will quickly get annoying.

Despite being written for 4th Edition, I didn’t reproduce my Dungeon Tiles maps. Wizards of the Coast owns the copyright to the images on those titles, and while their use is almost certainly fair in this context, WotC is always looking for an excuse to threaten people. So, without the software to make my own maps, I’ve created some terrible ones based on my Dungeon Tiles maps, then told you the sets you could use to recreate them.

Also of note, I acquired the Krampus stat block from Kobold Press as envisioned by the Dread Gazebo.

If you have any doubts as to the legality of what I’m publishing here, or you’re publishing elsewhere, please visit my post here linking to relevant materials.

EDIT: After running the adventure on 12/13, the PCs are being tweaked, but the adventure is getting a major overhaul. In short, this was way too easy. While that doesn’t bother me completely — the primary purpose is to impart a moral lesson — this is D&D, and D&D should be a challenge.

I hope you enjoy the adventure. I had fun writing it. You can download it by clicking here (unless you may be playing it soon with me). The adventure is suitable for 5, 11th-level characters. James generously created pregenerated characters.

  • The Adventure in PDF format
  • The Adventure as a Masterplan Project File. You’ll need to delete the extension “pdf” from the end of “The Night Before Deadwinter.masterplan.pdf,” which will leave the name of the file “The Night Before Deadwinter.masterplan” (to be updated soon with the pre-generated characters).
  • The Masterplan Library with the monster stat blocks. You’ll need to delete the extension “pdf” from the end of “The Night Before Deadwinter.library.pdf,” which will leave the name of the file “The Night Before Deadwinter.library.”
  • Pre-generated characters and tactical advice for their play.

Of the pre-generated characters, Cameron is the most complex, and Argus and Fellick and the easiest to run.

Remember, the maps suck.

Disclaimer: Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to, nor endorsed, the contents of this publication. (Okay, jackasses?)

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Strange News out of Ohio

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Odd goings on in the midwest.

Generally speaking, trite, but this is a new twist to me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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You Learn Something New Every Day, Even When It’s in Plain Sight #DnD #ADnD #RPG #TTRPG #gaming #football #NFL

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How have I, a rabid (American) football fan, never noticed that these typeface are identical until today, November 24, 2025?

Quentin EF Font

Seriously, I never noticed this until tonight while watching San Francisco beat up on the Carolina Panthers.

There’s something wrong with me.

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Vegas, 2025, Part III

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My first post talked about my comps and the hotel, and my second post talked about the gambling. This post is about my bottom line, which involves some whining. You can find my review on Tripadvisor here, but this is the text:

I’m a blackjack player, and my trips are almost always just about that. That makes this a difficult review to write. In most ways, Park MGM is a phenomenal resort. The staff went out of their way to be helpful and make me feel wanted. It’s the only smoke-free casino on the strip. The spa was incredible. Just awesome. There were two issues. The first is minor: I had a Nighthawk suite. It’s bathroom wasn’t as nice as the bathroom in a regular room at Mandalay Bay. It’s floor plan is meh. Instead of walling off the bedroom, giving you the added privacy you’d expect from a suite, the foyer is instead what’s walled off. The foyer has no tables, chairs, etc. That results in wasted space. Not the end of the world. The second problem will keep me from going back. In my first four hours of blackjack, I won $1,150 on a $2,500 bankroll. Even by my standards, that’s remarkable. However, I was constantly taking with other players, so there’s no way I could have been counting cards, and how else could I be cheating? (Note: Card counting should NOT be considered cheating.) Nevertheless, one of the pit bosses made inappropriate comments towards me, constantly delivered dirty looks, and even made another player uncomfortable by suggesting I was cheating. This is unacceptable to me, but if it isn’t the sort of thing that affects you, then by all means, stay at the Park MGM. You’ll love it. I, however, will be highly unlikely to return. A single, unprofessional pit boss can overshadow the positive experiences I had with literally every other member of the staff.

This is an honest review. If you don’t gamble, or if you always lose, then you should seriously consider the Park MGM. My room is always comp’d at any MGM resort because of my M-Life Mastercard, so I don’t know how expensive it is relative to others. I’m sure you’ll spend less at Excalibur and Luxor, but among MGM properties, Excalibur is bottom of the barrel. You’ll survive there, but paying a small amount more for Luxor goes a long way.

Gambling

I skipped Vegas last year, and I’d never been to Park MGM, so prior to the trip, I went to that cesspool known as Reddit, found the Vegas subreddit, and asked what the betting limits on the tables were. I guess I bring out the trolls because all but a couple people that responded were arrogant and insulting. They all acted as if they were high rollers, ridiculing me for even inquiring about low-limit tables, which they defined as $50 per hand. (I seriously doubt these trolls play $100 tables, but if so, they’re completely tone deaf to the experiences of most gamblers.) They also accused me of thoughts I never expressed, and put words into my mouth (easily refuted by what I actually wrote) to justify their insults. I don’t know if they were ignorant or trolling, but either way, they flat out lied. Unfortunately, that subreddit gets far more foot traffic than my blog, so I’m posting this to both my blog and that easily-googled subreddit. You’re more likely to find the subreddit. This is the actual truth.

I visited (didn’t necessarily play) Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, NY, NY, Park MGM, and Aria, and I played from Monday evening to Friday morning. My comments are limited to these casinos on those days, which are the days I told the trolls I’d be gambling. I took notes so that I could verify whether the trolls were full of shit. Wanna guess whether or not they were?

Vegas still has many $5 tables on the strip at Excalibur, which goes out of their way to advertise them on a billboard of lights, and there are a plethora of $10 and $15 tables at Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, and NY, NY. Because of inflation, those tables aren’t the money-makers they once were, so it’s understandable that those tables pay only 6-5 on blackjack to make up the difference, but contrary to what the trolls claimed, $25 tables still pay 3-2 at Mandalay Bay, NY, NY, and Aria (at least). The trolls were claiming that you have to go to a $100 table for 3-2, but the $100 tables at Park MGM pay 2-1. I played at one for my “last hurrah” before flying out Friday afternoon. Moreover, at NY, NY, the $25 tables allow multiple splits on double aces, which is great for players. That is, I drew four aces in a row and played four hands. (On a table beneath $25, if you draw two aces, you get one card added to each ace, and that’s it. You can’t take a second hit, and if your second card on one of those hands is an ace, you can’t split again.) The point is that the rules on $25 tables are still reasonably fair to the players, and those are the tables I prefer for that reason.

The problem with Park MGM is that all the tables are either $15 tables or $100 tables. There were literally no other tables available. Of course, I can (and did) play $25 hands on the $15 tables, but then I was limited to 6-5 payouts on blackjack. My money was tied up in an account with Park MGM, so all I could gamble (practically speaking) elsewhere is what I had won. Fortunately, I won enough ($1,150) to move over to NY, NY, where things went particularly well because of the better ruleset on the $25 table. Next year, I’ll probably send my funds to NY, NY for that very reason. I could also send them to Mandalay or Aria, but Mandalay uses “continuous shuffle” machines, which I like to avoid. I didn’t notice if their $25 tables used those machines.

My strongest advice is to ignore the comments that follow on the subreddit because the trolls will just be trolls. I’ll immediately unfollow my own post because I’m not interested in what they have to say. They’re all full of shit or simply have no idea what they’re talking about. What I wrote above is what I saw with my own eyes. and it wasn’t much different than what I experienced two years ago. Ignore the trolls. You won’t get good blackjack payouts on low-limit tables, but they absolutely exist if that’s where your budget takes you. There’s no shame in that. If, like me, you play on $25 tables, then absolutely nothing has changed since 2023.

I’m no more a whiny little bitch than the casinos are.

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Vegas, 2025, Part II

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My earlier post talked about my comps and the hotel. Now, onto the good stuff.

I finally got to a blackjack table. I withdrew $2,000 from my accout and the spent four hours at the table. I won $1,150. This is very unusual. It’s tough to earn 50% of your bankroll, but to do it in fewer than 10 hours is nearly impossible. The only reason I stopped is because I was very hungry.

Then I went to dinner at Strip Steak in Mandalay Bay. It wasn’t open when I arrived, so I spent 45 minutes losing $300 or so. After dinner, I returned to Park MGM and spent 3 hours turning my remaining $850 into $1,400. So, as of Tuesday night, those are my earnings.

Two side notes. 1) For some reason, everyone wanted me to cut the deck, and before the night was over, they were calling me the Lumberjack. 2) Until tonight, I’d never had a pit boss watching me as if he thought I was cheating. Not only did a Park MGM pit boss do that, but he actually told another player he was watching me. He made sure I heard it, and he wasn’t kidding.

This means that all my expenses that comps don’t cover are paid for. came back and won another $250 in about 3 hours, which is more in line with what i should expect. Now I’ve made enough money to pay for my airfare (< $550), tips on meals not covered by comps (maybe $300 if I tip ridiculously), and a lower bowl seat to the Vegas Golden Knights game on Thursday ($350). That gives me $150 in wiggle room to assure that, in all ways, this trip will be absolutely free despite having so much fun and eating so well.

But it’s still Tuesday, so we’ll see how much damage I can still do.

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Vegas, 2025, Part I

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Well, I took a year off from Vegas and didn’t miss it, but this year, I came back because of all the ideas I had for a stateside vacation, it was hard to ignore the fact that my Vegas comps made the trip here so damn inexpensive. I arrived yesterday (Monday), and I’m fimishing this post up at about 10:30 am Tuesday. There’s some good and some bad, and as always some lessons to be learned. Let’s home the rest of the trip is more of the good and less of the bad.

The Good, or Should I Say the Really Good

First off, I have an M-Life Mastercard, which means that every time I pay for groceries, utilities, internet, dinner at a restaurant, etc., I earn comps as if I’m gambling. Over the course of a year, these add up, such that I walked into my trip this year with $465 to pay for meals — including alcohol but not including tips — and entertainment. I don’t drink very often, most of the entertainment options don’t appeal to me, and those that do aren’t available during the says I’m there. So, that meant steak dinner every night.

But wait! There’s more! My suite (yeah, suite) at the Park MGM was free for four nights without me having to spend any of my reward points. It just comes with the card. Nevertheless, my smoke-free room at the only smoke-free casino on the strip comes with a $400 resort credit, so in fact, I have $865 to spend. Maybe I *will* drink after all.

Oh, do you think I’m finished? Nope. It just gets better. I don’t play slots, so all these years I’ve built up a balance of “Slot Dollars” I never used. The current balance was $1,181, so I was expecting to have to burn through those dollars playing slots. If I made $10, it’d be a free $10, so why not. Well, I went to the cage to set up my account (I had wired my gambling funds ahead of time) and asked what I thought was a stupid question: “Can I covert my Slot Dollars to regular rewards?” They said yes, so now I have over $2,000 to spend on dining.

Pretty sweet.

There’s no way I’m spending that much, but the points don’t expire, and I’ll be heading down to the MGM National Harbor in Maryland in January for our office holiday party, so I plan to get there early and have a free, overpriced dinner before our event. Also, there’s always next year.

BTW, despite having recently reserved this room at Park MGM for this trip, I can still get a free room at any other MGM property. There’s got to be an upper limit to the number of nights I can get per year, but I’ve spent four nights here, and spent four nights earlier in the year (will explain in a second), and yet I havent reached that limit yet. Unbelievable.

One last thing before we get to the bad news. MGM’s program merged with Marriott Bonvoy, so those four nights spent earlier in the year? They were at a Courtyard Marriott in Ft. Wayne, IN.

I can’t imagine a better rewards program as long as you like Las Vegas.

The Bad: The Hotel Itself

The staff is great, and the fact that the entire building is smoke-free is awesome, but for me, Vegas is a blackjack trip. After eating breakfast at my favorite breakfast joint in Vegas (Ri Ra between Mandalay Bay and Luxor), I came back to Park MGM to play. There were only two blackjack tables open at 9:30 am, and both were full. I asked the pit boss if he was opening new tables, and he said, “Not until shift change at noon.” As you might expect, he unhelpfully told me that I could always play in the high limit room (minimum bet $100 per hand).

Gee. Thanks, buddy.

Moreover, those tables, and all the tables I saw last night, were $15 tables that paid only 6:5 on a blackjack.

For those not understanding, this is something of a scam. If I bet $10 on a hand and win, I get $20, which is my $10 bet plus the $10 I get for winning. Simple enough. If I get a blackjack on that same bet, I win a bonus amount instead. Traditionally, that bonus amount was another $10 (2:1), but over the past couple decades, that’s dropped to $5 (3:2). Now these low bet tables pay only $2 (6:5). There’s a logic to this — inflation makes the low bet tables worth less to the casinos — but it really cuts into any chance you have of winning without counting cards, which most people can’t do, and even fewer people can do without getting caught.

Fortunately for me, this year I planned to play only one day, which was Tuesday. I play $25 base hands, and I don’t count cards, so it seems like this isn’t much of a burden. However, if there are no 3:2 tables available, I’m stuck as if I’m playing only $10 or $15 hands. Considering that my money was tied up in an account with Park MGM, that’s where I had to gamble. If this were nothing but a blackjack trip, wiring funds to Park MGM would have been a disaster for me. In order not to have to carry $5,000 with me on my way home — I almost never carry more than $20 cash and have only $8 in my wallet for this trip — I can’t move my money over to another casino.

Side note: Because I was staying at Park MGM for the first time, I went to that cesspool known as Reddit to ask the Vegas subreddit what the tables were like there. In addition to these guys trying to swing their dicks and pretend they’re high rollers (or if they are, completely ignore the fact that most people aren’t), they all flat out lied about the nature of the tables while needlessly insulting me. (Seriously, there was no reason for the insults. They came out of left field.) On my walk to breakfast, I verified that Excalibur, Luxor, and New York New York still offer plenty of $10 and $15 tables, and $25 tables still pay 3:2. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I was stuck at Park MGM for gambling.

Now, the suite itself is large but not terribly impressive. Mandalay Bay’s bathrooms in ordinary rooms are far superior. It has a foyer separated from the bedroom and living room, which makes no sense. The bedroom should be separated from all the other rooms (but connected to the bathrooms). As it is, the foyer is simply wasted space. That still makes the room bigger than an ordinary room, but meh. It’s hard to ignore how great a slight redesign could be.

All of this is to say that despite coming here virtually every year for decades, you always learn something new.

More to come.

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Halloween, 2025 #Halloween #costume #Jason #horror

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I’m in the unfortunate position of not being able to fully participate in my company’s Halloween costume contest. I have to wear something that can be quickly removed and put back on, so things like face paint are out of the question. In order for people even just to like my costume, I have to tell a story. Last year, I wore a prison jump suit. This year, I give you the prequel to that costume.

Did Jason wear dress shoes?

It’s hard to be scary when everyone knows they can outrun you.

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Perfect Albums

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This post is a bit convoluted because it’s dealing with two related topics that each deserve their own post, but I’m lazy, so you’re getting one that’s probably going to just as long as the two posts would be collectively if written separately.

Perhaps I’m not as clever as I think I am.

Topic One

About 5 years ago, I published a post about an apparent consensus among 80s music professionals that Boston’s first, and self-titled, album and Def Leppard’s Pyromania were perfect albums.

Topic Two

I love listening to entire albums at once. By doing so, you see where a band is in their current development as artists. Listen to more than one, and you see their evolution (for better or worse). Additionally, concept albums can be fascinating even in pure isolation. Finally, if you’re in the mood for Maiden, all you want to hear is Maiden (or whatever band is infecting your brain at the time. If you’re

The Convoluted Mess

As of late, I’ve been listening to entire albums on my commutes to and from work, inspired in no small part by several recent deaths of musicians that meant a lot to me. On my worst day, my commute is 25 minutes, so longer albums are spread among a few back and forths. I began to think about perfect albums. Boston and Pyromania may have been consensus “perfect” albums to a particular set of people at a particular point in time, but whether an album is “perfect” is obviously subjective. So, my list will differ from yours (perhaps drastically), but the theme will remain relevant. I should also add that the implied definition of “perfect album” is that 1) there were no bad songs, and 2) the album was ground-breaking or stupendous in its artistry. While that definition may make for some interesting discussions, I want to use a definition that has more practical value, and also opens up the door to a larger number of albums, thus encouraging even more of those interesting discussions. Nevertheless, the definition should still meet the commonly understood meaning of “perfect.”

An album is perfect if there isn’t a single song on the album that you want to skip when listening to the album, regardless of whether even a single one of those songs is what you consider “great.”

To help appreciate the subtle shift in new definition, my favorite Night Ranger album is Seven Wishes because in the aggregate, that album has their best collection of music, but it’s not a perfect album. I’ll skip a couple of songs on that album that I don’t like. On the other hand, I never have any desire to skip a single song on their Big Life album. Big Life is perfect by this definition, but it’s still not a desert island necessity. If given a choice between the two albums, I’ll take the imperfect Seven Wishes and spend my remaining days marooned on that desert island listening to only part of it.

I mentioned above that I may want to listen to an entire album simply to hear where a bad was at the time, but if I’m listening for nothing but pure entertainment value, I’ll skip through the stinkers.

This definition certainly opens up the door to more perfect albums, but it’s still a very high standard to meet. Many albums come very close, but if you think it through, they fall short. Perhaps the best example of that is True Blue by Madonna. Yesterday, I listened to that album (minus one song) for the second time in less than a week. It’s so good that I had to hear it again, but I never liked, La Isla Bonita. It just doesn’t do it for me. The same can be said for Madonna’s Like a Virgin. It has my favorite Madonna song, Material Girl, but I find myself skipping a few songs.

I just want to say why Material Girl is my favorite Madonna song. It’s a bouncy, ditzy, simplistic song with a horrible message. Though the music video shows that the message is being delivered sarcastically, it’s still just silly, bubble gum pop. But somehow, within that context, when that chorus kicks in, it drives. How does she pull that off? You have to respect that.

Sticking with 80s pop for a little while longer, I love the Outfield’s first album, Play Deep, but Nervous Alibi sounds like a song that they added to the end of the album just to make sure side one and side two were about the same length. Switching to some harder stuff but staying in the 80s, I feel the same way about Inside on Van Halen’s 5150. 5150 is one of my favorite 80s albums, but it ain’t perfect. Inside is boring, repetitive, and clearly a song for them, not me. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m going to skip it every time. My favorite Cars album is imperfect. Obviously, my favorite album of all time, Duke by Genesis, is perfect no matter the definition you use, but Genesis’s self-titled album from 1983 falls short for the opposite reason as Play Deep and 5150: it’s first song, Mama. Though very popular even among merely casual Genesis fans, I never liked it. Every other song on that album receives my full attention, but it’s not perfect.

It seems almost unfair.

Bands with Multiple Perfect Albums

Not many artists have perfect albums, and even fewer have multiple perfect albums. Being that Rush and Fleetwood Mac (with Stevie and Lindsey) are my favorite bands of all time, they obviously have several perfect albums. In fact, it’d take far less time to tell you which of their albums are not perfect, so let’s skip them. There are a couple of artists that are high on my list of favorite bands, and they fall into this category. I think that Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, Powerslave, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son are perfect. Piece of Mind and Senjutsu are close, but no cigar.

Ozzy has two: Blizzard of Oz and The Ultimate Sin. As with Play Deep and 5150, many albums fall short of perfect because of the last song on the album. In sharp contrast, The Ultimate Sin ends powerfully with Shot in the Dark. It’s almost daring you to call it imperfect, then says, “Sike!”

No More Tears is oh so close, but it’s ultimately imperfect.

Supertramp’s Breakfast in America is perfect. Billy Joel’s Glass Houses and Yes’s 90125 are perfect, though not their best albums overall. Jefferson Airplane/Starship is one of my favorite bands, but they don’t have a perfect album, and that bugs me. I feel like I failed them.

Overall, I have a small amount of fun revisiting albums with this question in mind. Maybe you will too.

Or not, losers.

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