Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
Last Saturday (February 1, 2025), to give myself some practice running 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons using the Masterplan software, I ran a couple of my synDClash delves. TL;DR: They were written for my convention, synDCon, as competitive, 4th edition delves. Five players playing one pre-generated character each goes through three combats, and whichever group of five players goes the farthest is the winner. My friend, Dusty, won, but I never got the prize to him (i.e., the set of five beholder mins). If I ever see him again, it’s his. But I digress . . . .
I think this is the one. I mention it only because my shame is my penance.
Each of the delves was based on classic 1st edition adventure module (what I always called a “mod,” which has strangely generated some grief on the internet). Why did I based them on 1e mods? Because I’m old. The mods were based on B2: The Keep on the Borderlands (easy), C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness (moderate), G1-2-3: Against the Giants (moderate), D1-2-3: The Drow Series (difficult), S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (difficult), and Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits (impossibly difficult). I converted those delves into Masterplan project files, which can be found on my D&D 4e Resources page along with the pre-generated characters.
How It Went
In short, it went tremendously well. Everyone had a blast, and the software was smooth almost all the time. There were only two downsides. First, 4e is inherently slow, and despite delves being relatively fast, this particular group really likes to have side conversations. This meant that we got through only two: Return to the Borderlands (based on B2) and The Great Metal Dungeon (based on S3). Second, there was a clear error in my math for skill checks during the second encounter of The Great Metal Dungeon, which resulted in an unfair TPK. (Revisions have already been made but not yet uploaded.) The delve is labeled as “difficult,” but I assure you that those numbers were still unfair.
You know what I’m talking about.
But what this means is that there are still four more (plus perhaps a retry of The Great Metal Dungeon) available for my group to play during weekends on which we can’t get a quorum for our regular gaming.
New Delves?
Over on BlueSky, someone posted an image of his four copies of the original versions of C2: The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan. That triggered a thought inside my soft human brain. If we get through these delves, I’m going to write at least two more based on Tomoachan and S2: White Plume Mountain. I don’t think there are any other mods that, though iconic, have much special meaning to me. Even Keep on the Borderlands didn’t, but I needed an easy one, I knew it was special to a lot of people, and I knew what the three best encounters to use would be. Perhaps I’ll convert S1: Tomb of Horrors as well considering that Wizards of the Coast already converted it to 4e, though that one would be hard to run as a delve. If so, for obvious reasons, I’d have to make it as impossibly difficult as The Demonweb Pits was. If I convert them, I’ll post the to my D&D 4e Resources page as Masterplan files.
And now for something completely off topic for this blog.
The Supreme Court of the United States (“SCOTUS”) allowed the so-called ban on TikTok to go through. I refer to it as “so-called” because, as the holding states, it’s not a true ban; it’s a conditional ban. Political rhetoric always clouds the truth, so despite this being a unanimous decision of the Court, I still feel the need to preface this discussion with a brief discussion of the role of appellate courts.
Some Pontificating
The reason most of you are so angry at SCOTUS, or particular justices, is at least in part because you don’t understand (or care about) its role. Appellate courts, including SCOTUS, aren’t there to make policy decisions. They don’t make law. That would be a violation of the Separation of Powers principle, a violation of their individual oaths of office, and anti-democratic. In other words, SCOTUS doesn’t ask what the law should be; they ask what it actually is, for better or worse. What the law is, whether statutory or constitutional, is determined by Congress (and state legislatures). All the appellate courts do (that’s relevant to this conversation) is interpret that law, resolving ambiguities in the language or in how it might apply to a particular set of facts. So, you may absolutely be upset that TikTok is banned if you want, but the blame for that doesn’t lie on SCOTUS, and it would be horribly inappropriate if the justices sitting on that bench changed the law because they didn’t like it either. Stop shooting the messenger. That includes me. Much like SCOTUS just tells you what Congress says, I’m just telling you what SCOTUS said.
Enough of that. Let’s talk about what they said.
The Facts and the Law
In the interests of brevity and clarity, I’m just going to get right to the point, simplifying everything and leaving out a lot of fluff (and perhaps some important nuance).
TikTok, Inc. (“TikTok”) is an American company, but it’s owned by ByteDance, Ltd. (“ByteDance”), which means, like ByteDance, TikTok is subject to Chinese laws. This means that TikTok must “assist and cooperate” with the Chinese government, granting them “the power to access and control private data.” In other words, not a single piece of information you put on TikTok, even data indirectly coming from other connected social media platforms, is truly private. The Chinese government has access to all of it.
Important: This information includes age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages, videos watched, and behavioral data (e.g., keystroke patterns and rhythms). Remember this list or come back to review it if necessary.
Trump tried to shut down TikTok, but the appellate courts stopped that, seeing that as outside the scope of executive power. Biden took office and tried to negotiate with ByteDance, but that went nowhere. In the meantime, Congress than passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (the “Act”). Under the Act, entities may not “distribute, maintain, or update a foreign adversary-controlled application” in the USA. There were some other details, including exceptions, but the point, of course, is that TikTok fit the definition.
I mentioned “conditional ban” above. TikTok could continue to operate under the Act if it underwent a “qualified divestiture.” That means that ByteDance would have to sever its control over TikTok, which would prevent ByteDance, and thus the Chinese government, from accessing your data on TikTok.
Applying the Law to the Facts
This gets complicated for the non-lawyer, so I’m going to leave it up to you to ask questions if you want a more detailed analysis. Here’s the short version. The first issue was whether the First Amendment applied to the Act, and SCOTUS said yes. The second issue was whether the Act’s constitutionality was subject to strict scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny. The Court said intermediate scrutiny, which is an easier test to pass, in part because the Act didn’t impose restrictions based on the content of any speech. In fact, the Act doesn’t care what was being said at all. In legalese, it was “content neutral” as opposed to “content based,” so it would be easier for the Court to find the Act constitutional (though not “easy”).
Applying intermediate scrutiny, the Court asked whether the Act 1) “advances important governmental interests”; that 2) don’t “burden substantially more speech than necessary”; 3) “to further those interests.” In other words, the goal must be important, and there must be a causal connection between the restriction and achieving the goal.
The Entire Point
I’ve been discussing this case with a coworker, and I know what she’s going to want to know. It isn’t going to be all the details on how all the conclusions above were reached. I imagine you want the same thing. Here it is. Congress passed the Act to prevent China from “track[ing] the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build[ing] dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct[ing] corporate espionage.” This isn’t unreasonable. The Free Speech clause could certainly interfere with legislative acts that prevent such employees and contractors from using the TikTok app, so prohibiting the app’s availability is the only way to protect national security.
Or is it? Well, no, there are indeed other ways to do so, but under SCOTUS precedent, Congress is under no obligation to select those other ways. Congress made this choice after extensive hearings and other fact-finding processes and determined that all the evidence suggested that this is the best way, all while doing so in a way that satisfies intermediate scrutiny.
You may also want to know whether other platforms are next. It should be obvious that US companies are clearly outside the scope of this law, so Facebook, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and MeWe are safe. As for other foreign entities, SCOTUS points out that TikTok has “special characteristics” (i.e., foreign control over large amounts of private data) that have always justified a different analysis. This is why SCOTUS chose to “emphasize the inherent narrowness of [the] holding. . . . A law targeting another speaker would by necessity ential a distinct inquiry and separate considerations.” This case won’t immediately affect any other social media platform.
c/o The Babylon Bee
Is This a Good Idea?
As I said, SCOTUS doesn’t ask what the law should be, but we certainly can. I read somewhere (but didn’t verify) that a content creator can make 10 times on TikTok what they can make on Facebook, and YouTube is even less generous than that. This will certainly hurt content creators, but is your profit more important to you than your own privacy? What about the names and phone numbers of your friends that will also be exposed without realizing it? With everyone complaining about Facebook tracking confidential information, you’d think you’d be even more concerned with a foreign adversary doing so. All that considered, and putting aside matters of censorship, is this a good idea?
This is a decision you must make for yourself, and you can let your congressperson know how you feel about it. SCOTUS did not tell Congress it had to keep the Act; it just said it could. There is nothing stopping Congress from repealing or amending the law. That said, please keep in mind that Congress made its decision based on extensive research I’m sure you haven’t done, and arguments without specifics will fall on deaf ears. The nature of a republic is that you elect people you trust to do that research and make those decisions, because you don’t have time for a proper analysis. But they still must answer to you.
Final Note: I’ve left out a lot of details. However, I’ve uploaded a PDF of the decision with highlighted text and commentary from me. If you want to dive into the detail and have all your “Why?” questions answered, download it here. I’m happy to discuss the Court’s reasoning in greater detail. As long as you’re polite. 🙂
There are a ton of movies I’ve never seen, and I try to watch as many of them as possible. This means not watching movies I’ve already seen. Of course, like all of you, there are still some movies I like to rewatch. One of them I’m watched again tonight: The Devil’s Own.
This is the first I’ve seen it since quite some time before everything switched from DVDs to streaming (well over a decade). I saw it was available on Hulu/Disney+, so I figure it was about time to give it another watch. Brad Pitt stars as a member of the IRA beside Harrison Ford’s Irish-American New York City cop. Ford’s wife was played by Margaret Colin just off her breakout role in Independence Day, and his eldest daughter was played by a young Julia Stiles. Treat Williams, Ruben Blades, and (of all people) Rob McElhenney round out the lead cast. I love the movie, and I love the soundtrack even more. James Horner is probably my favorite musical writer of the 90s. His soundtracks are more valuable to me than any of the popular music that came out in that decade.
A Weird Connection
Right before law school, I moved to Westchester County, NY and worked in the Wall Street district of Manhattan. I was intending to attend the New York Law School, but the more prestigious Chicago-Kent College of Law accepted me two weeks before class started. I changed gears and moved to Chicago the day classes started. However, during the four months I was working in Manhattan, there was an area blocked off for the filming of a “new Brad Pitt movie.” I never saw Pitt because I never had the desire to hang out and watch filming, but I saw the set up for the scene when (spoiler alert!) Diaz was killed. It was filmed right outside my office, and whenever I watch the scene, it reminds me of the lead in to what was probably the best time in my life.
I spent a lot of time here.
In any event, it didn’t have very good reviews, but I thought it was great.
I recently came across an article about 10 songs that wouldn’t work in today’s social climate. Sure, I’m kind of old (56), so for the most part, those songs didn’t bother me, but culture revolves around the young, so my opinions don’t matter. However, I never understood the stupidity of the objections to one song in particular that appeared in the article: Suicide Solution by Ozzy Osbourne.
I post this with no fear any of you will kill yourselves after listening.
Ozzy was famously sued for causing the suicide of one of his fans by releasing the song. (That was the dumbest sentence I’ve ever written.) The article seemed apologetic to those from the 80s and today who objected to the release of the song. The idea is that Ozzy is trying to advertise suicide as the solution to your problems. Moreover, there’s a part of the song where Ozzy stutters over the word suicide, saying, “Su, su, su . . . .” I remember the attorney representing the plaintiffs saying that it sounded too close to “Shoot, shoot, shoot,” which, of course, is how the fan committed suicide. Ozzy fought back saying that the song was about the dangers of alcoholism, which is a sort of slow suicide by way of the chemical solution of alcohol. (I know there’s some disagreement on whether alcoholic beverages are “solutions” or “mixtures,” but that’s not a concern of this post.)
So, who’s right? (I am right.) Well, form your own opinion. (Your opinion will be stupid unless you admit I am right.) Here’s the opening lyric to the song.
Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker. Suicide is slow with liquor.
Do I really need to post the rest of the lyrics for you to understand what this song is about? Well, just in case . . . .
Take a bottle, drown your sorrows. Then it floods away tomorrows. . . . Now you live inside a bottle. The reaper’s traveling at full throttle.
Seriously, may I stop? While the other lyrics can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, they should be interpreted within the context of what you just read. Clearly, this song is about the dangers of alcohol excess. It’s actually a fucking public service announcement, but because a couple of parents couldn’t accept that the life they provided their child with a life he felt wasn’t worth living, they needed a scapegoat. That’s some serious cognitive dissonance, but their personal failings carried potential consequences for society at large, and ideas like this still swirl around in people’s insecure brains.
Of course, there could be even more to this argument. Suicide requires a complex combination of circumstances and emotions. No song could be causally linked to a suicide. Free fucking speech. But none of that should matter because the song itself is telling you not to commit suicide through irresponsible alcohol use. Ozzy knew something about this, as a fellow musician he knew had recently drank himself to death (so to speak). This song was absolutely the wrong target to attack.
I’m probably preaching to the choir among my few readers, but apparently there are still plenty of people who cling to this incredibly stupid position. Even my YouTube search warned me about what’s coming.
I don’t mind the phone number going viral, but I really don’t need the warning at the very bottom. Duh.
Because it came up on Facebook, I want to share a funny story that might give you a little laugh. It relates to the only time in my life I went skiing.
Not just thematic. Foreshadowing!
Context
It was the early 1990s. I was newly-graduated from the University of Maryland, as was my cousin, Mike, but from the University of Virginia. Mike and I were taking occasional trips to Boston where his younger brother was attending MIT. Mike had been skiing before and suggested driving up to the Killington Resort in Killington, VT. (Spare me your “East Coast skiing sucks” claims. They mean nothing to me.) This was a relatively expensive trip for me, because I didn’t have much disposable income, and I was on my own financially, suddenly having to buy things for myself previously taken for granted. Bill Clinton had gone on late night television and when asked, “Boxers or briefs?” said “Briefs.” While that seems like a diversion, it really isn’t. On with the story.
Killington Resort
Mike took me on the bunny slope so I could get the feel for skiing, but we both agreed that if I were to learn, I’d just have to get on a real slope, so I did. I went down the slope the first time and thought, “DId the temperature suddenly drop? My legs are a bit cold all of the sudden. And why are people staring at me?”
I chalked up the latter concern to me being paranoid for being a new skier, and I got back on the lift for another run. Halfway up, I realized my jeans had ripped. Yes, I was wearing jeans because I didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have on skiing equipment I might never use again. Also, I was wearing gaudy, bright-red briefs, which were hard not to see in clear weather. To me, brightly-colored briefs were new and cool.
Never accuse me of being cool.
So, I took off my jacket, tied it around my waist, and made one more run down the hill. Mike tried to get me to change my pants and try again, but I had only one more pair of jeans with me, and as far as I knew, there were no clothing stores nearby the resort. With limited time to ski, driving off site didn’t seem practical. I changed my pants and spent the rest of the day in the resort, hanging out and bored out of my mind.
My office really gets into the holiday spirit regardless of what the holiday is. For Halloween, most people are in costumes, and the office is decked out in Halloween decorations. For the past two years, everyone in the office was assigned someone to whom to give a gift bag. Once they received it, they’d have to give one to their assigned recipient. Both years, I was the last recipient, so I didn’t have to give anyone anything. (As a recovering Catholic, that makes me feel very guilty.) That’s probably a good thing, because as you’re about to see, I don’t understand these people at all.
For the past 4 years, my coworkers (yes, primarily women, including the boss) have been decorating my office, insisting on a pink motif right down to the mouse pad (not shown).
I also don’t want plants in my office.
Maybe that’s why my costume this year is “old guy with no sense of fun.”
Here’s my gift bag.
Digging a little deeper, I received some socks. Women’s fuzzy socks.
I don’t think they understand me either. If they did, they would have included this in my gift bag.
HR would not approve.
Fortunately, I also received the following to wash away the frustration.
Another day, another celebrity death. Today, it’s Teri Garr.
I never understood the concern for celebrity deaths. If you don’t know someone, their only value to you is the work they’ve done, whether in film, TV, music, or whatever. Everything they’ve done is still available to you. Sure, if they die young, then you know your’re missing out on what could have been, but that’s a selfish interest, not a concern for the celebrity in question. I have more to worry about than people who, because I don’t know them, can easily be replaced to the extent they affect my life. What do I have to worry about?
Towers 3 and 4 on the left were my home for 4-1/2 of 5-1/2 years in Chicago.
This weekend in Chicago was great. It really was. It was filled with nostalgia from my law school days, and allowed me to catch up with great friends. I saw the Commanders beat the Bears in improbable fashion while within enemy territory. However, there were almost as many discussions about bad news as there were discussions about good news. We discussed friends who’ve cut off contact presumably because of depression; friends who have had recent or current, serious health issues; and friends that have died. Not people I’ve heard of, but friends. Quite a few of them. People with whom I’ve dined, drank, and paintballed. One I should have married.
At my age (56), someone in my life dies every four months or so. The last one was July 16, which means November 16 is about when I should expect the next one to go. This weekend reminded me of that. That’s why celebrity deaths don’t bother me very much.
FYI, I’ve updated my (modest) 4e resources page. It includes support for the Masterplan campaign manager. For those that don’t know, some guy (a pro software engineer) built a campaign manager for 4e and left it on GitHub for all to use. It’s a great tool. The glaring problem it has is that some of the monster files cause the application to crash if you try to open them. (A good example are several of the hobgoblin files from the Monster Manual.) Well, I’ve fixed a lot of those. I can’t say whether I’ve fixed even half of the issues, but I’ve made a ton of progress. I’ve also updated a lot of the stat blocks to Monster Manual 3 format. My edited libraries are available on that page.
In addition, I ran convention in 2010 and 2011 (synDCon), and one of the events I created was a dungeon delve we called synDClash. These were common in cons. All combat. Just try to finish three combat encounters in 45 minutes. Rather than have only one adventure that people would have to play over and over again, I created six, each based on a classic 1e adventure. (In hindsight, I wish I had added “Revisiting the Mountain” or whatever as a homage to S2: White Plume Mountain.) Those files are up there too as separate Masterplan projects.
In other words, there are project files and libraries available for download. Moreover, the character sheets — both the ones used for synDClash and the offline Character Builder versions I created over the past couple days — are linked to there. (Please let me know if the link to my dropbox file works.)
All of this is a work in progress. I’ll continue to create whatever fixes are necessary and update sourcebook stat blocks to Monster Manual 3 format, but if you’re running an in-person 4e game and weren’t aware of Masterplan, you should consider it for tracking initiative, etc. We use it with a big screen TV as our battle map. This was my goofy way of letting everyone know that the set up was ready for what was the upcoming session: Reveal.
If you enjoy this post, there’s something wrong with you.
And now for something really stupid.
New, overpriced Star WarsOreos! Will they be Jedi Oreos or Sith Oreos? Only those dumb enough to pay for the same exact cookie with an intellectual property markup will ever know.
Sorry Not sorry for the naughty word.
Somehow, this video received no copyright strike. Go figure.
I accidentally stumbled across a movie I saw as a kid: C.C. & Company. It came out when I was two, but I saw it a few years later and loved it. It’s memorable to me because 1) Joe Namath plays the main character, and 2) it starts out with a scene where Namath is making lunch in a supermarket. That is, he opens a bag of bread and steals a couple of slices, opens a package of cheese and puts it on the bread, etc. After eating the sandwich he just made, he politely asks an employee where the cupcakes are, and then calmly goes over there and eats one.
What I didn’t know then, and didn’t find out until I re-watched it is that Sid Haig is in it.
A Horror Icon
Wait, that’s not right.
There you go.
Sid Haig threw me a little bit. Some of my friends won’t stop talking about the guy’s impact on horror, but because I don’t like slasher-type horror, I never saw House of 1,000 Corpses. (I assume that movie is of that genre.) As far as I knew, this is the only movie in which I’ve seen him, but looking at his credits, I saw him in THX 1138, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2. Not knowing who he was, I never noticed. I wouldn’t have noticed here if Amazon Prime didn’t display the scene’s cast during the movie.
Review
Anyway, a couple of early scenes of C.C. & Company hold up, but the movie in general? Not so much. It’s one of those movies about a particular subculture (bikers in this case) written by people who I assume don’t know anything about the subculture. It’s also quite dated. If you’ve seen it before and have even vague memories of it, it might be worth a watch. Everyone else my age should be watching Cobra Kai. I finished part one of the new season of Cobra Kai the night it dropped.
On second thought, no one should watch it; it sucked.
Play What You Want 