Troacctid

I saw your comment on my inquiry to Mark Rosewater, and I'm going to have to disagree with your statement. What I meant by "indirect targeting" is that the creature is targeted, but not directly, I suppose a better term would be "inadvertent targeting". Damnation doesn't DIRECTLY target Progenitus, but it does target the field he is on, hence "indirect targeting".

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:44:00 -0500

If it targeted the field he was on, it would say “Destroy target battlefield.” That would be weird. That would be some Circu, Dimir Lobotomist shit right there.

Magic doesn’t target indirectly. Maybe some games do, I don’t know. Yu-Gi-Oh! had some pretty messed up rules the last time I played it, it’s the sort of thing they’d pull, maybe. But in Magic, there are two possibilities: it uses the word “target”, like, the actual word “target”; or it doesn’t target. (Technically it might be compressed as part of a keyword, as in the case of Provoke or Bloodrush, but you can always look up the full text of those keywords in the rulebook and the expanded version will always say “target” somewhere.)

It’s a game term, is what I’m saying. See Rule 114.1. Damnation doesn’t “target indirectly” for the same reason a baseball player can’t grope the guy next to him in the dugout and then tell the umpire he must have just hit a double because he clearly got to second base there.

I hope that answers your question. :)

Happy new year. Do you have any New Years' Resolutions?

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:27:00 -0500

Um…no.

But I guess that sounds lame, doesn’t it?

I’ve never done the resolution thing. If I’m making self-improvement goals, I don’t need a special holiday to do it. I can just do it.

Tell you what, though, since you asked, I’ll make one. I need to get into the ENL 100 series. That means I need writing samples to submit. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. So here’s a resolution: I’m going to write some actual stuff. Not just durdling all the time like I’ve been doing lately. I’ll produce something. Sound good?

Sure. It’s on. I guess.

Is Santa Claus real?

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 02:59:00 -0500

Good question. Santa Claus is a popular Christmas legend. However, people have told so many stories about Santa Claus that over the years, it has become difficult to separate fact from fiction. Because of this, it’s not just a “Yes or no” question: some of the legends might be true, and others might only be stories.

One thing we do know for sure is that the Santa you meet at the mall is not real. Malls hire actors to dress as Santa Claus. It’s a show, similar to how you might go to see a play. (The littler kids don’t know. I wouldn’t tell them if I were you; it could spoil their fun.) Similarly, the Post Office can’t really deliver letters to the North Pole, and the government can’t really use radar to track Santa’s sleigh. Furthermore, presents that seem to appear magically under the Christmas tree are, in most cases, secretly placed there by your parents. (True Christmas miracles may happen from time to time, but this is unusual.) These things are holiday traditions, and we do them because they’re fun, just like it’s fun to dress up and eat candy on Halloween or give out mushy cards and chocolates on Valentine’s Day.

But that doesn’t prove Santa Claus isn’t real. After all, actors also play doctors and racecar drivers and police officers in movies and TV, and we certainly have real doctors, racecar drivers, and police officers.

The problem is that Santa Claus covers his tracks very well with his Christmas magic. If he can turn invisible and come and go by magic, how would we know if he exists or not? Scientists have tried to prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but so far all they’ve concluded is that he could only be real if he had magical powers—and in all the stories, he does have magical powers, so all the scientists can do is shrug.

The widely accepted theory among those who believe in the real Santa Claus is that he doesn’t bring you toys—he brings you Christmas Cheer. That is, he sprinkles everything in Christmas magic that makes it more fun and exciting. You know that feeling you get when you wake up on Christmas morning and you just can’t wait to open the presents under the tree? Some people say that’s Santa Claus’s magic. It would also explain why we can’t drink eggnog all year, or leave up the decorations until July—the magic wears off. This theory answers some questions, but it’s still difficult to prove, so we don’t know for sure.

The short answer to your question, Anonymous, is maybe. We’re pretty sure not all of the legends are true, but we can’t prove he’s not real, so who knows?

How was your first chorus practice this week?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 02:58:37 -0400

It went fine.

There are five pieces in our repertoire: Mozart’s “Te Deum” and “Laudate Dominum”; Beethoven’s “Fantasia”; and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Requiem”. On Thursday’s rehearsal, we started on the latter two.

For my part: never heard them before this week. So I’ve got some learning to do. I don’t know the melodies and I don’t know the words. The plan is to try my best to pick it up as we go along.

It was certainly a productive first day, I guess. We got some work done on the Beethoven and the Lloyd Webber. I got a decent handle on the German lyrics to the Beethoven piece.

It’s been a long time since I last sang in a choir. I’ve missed it. Choral singing is a team effort—each chorus member contributes only a tiny portion of each piece, and it all comes together into something bigger than the sum of its parts. I think that’s beautiful.

How many helium balloons would it take to lift an elephant to the top of the Chrysler building?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:17:00 -0400

According to Google, 1 liter of helium is enough to lift 1 gram. Also according to Google, your typical balloon would contain roughly 12 liters of helium, and an African bull elephant (the biggest kind of elephant) probably weighs about 7000 kg, or seven million grams.

So a rough estimate? Maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 balloons. That would be a good place to start.

You would probably need more. You’re not just lifting the elephant, you’re also lifting the balloons and the strings. And you’ll need some heavy-duty strings too, since I imagine your basic length of yarn is going to snap under the weight of an African bull elephant no matter how many helium balloons are attached to it.

At some point you would need to question why you aren’t simply renting a blimp.

There is an additional problem with this scenario in that the Chrysler building isn’t open to the public—it’s leased out to private buildings. The elephant wouldn’t be allowed past the lobby. Once you airlifted it to the top, it would have nowhere to land. So now the question is, what happens when an elephant falls 1,050 feet onto the pavement of east Manhattan. I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

I'm sure people have told you how much they dislike Runescape. How would you convince these people that the game is worthy of your time?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 06:19:00 -0400

Worthy of your time? Are you kidding? It’s a time sink. That’s the whole point of the MMORPG genre. You wouldn’t play it—or any of its competitors—unless you had time to kill.

I’ve played a lot of RuneScape, and I’ve dabbled a little bit in other MMORPGs. As far as I can tell, they’re all pretty much the same. I’m certainly not going to recommend one over another. If you’re picking between MMORPGs, you should go with whichever your friends are playing so that you can at least have a shared experience. And if you don’t have any friends who play MMORPGs, then you might as well play a single-player RPG instead.

If you really want reasons, here’s a few advantages RuneScape has over similar games:

Cheap.
Some of the best quests I’ve seen in an MMORPG.
Accessible. (Browser-based, low system reqs, etc.)

Those are the big ones. I’m pretty sure none of them can trump “I have friends who play [other game]” anyway.

Way I see it, there are three types of people who dislike RuneScape:

There’s people who play a different MMORPG, and for those people it’s perfectly reasonable not to want to play RuneScape, as MMORPGs require a significant time investment and there’s usually not much reason to swap between them.
There’s people who don’t play MMORPGs at all, and they’re usually disliking the entire genre moreso than any individual game. That’s fine; there’s no accounting for taste.
And there are ex-RuneScape players who quit because they got bored, or because they thought some update or other “ruined” the game. Well, they probably got their money’s worth back when they were playing, so bully for them.

Me, I pretty much beat the game, more or less, so I don’t play much anymore except to make my weekly contributions to clan projects.

Have you ever played through your Pokémon game so long that you’ve beaten the story and found all the secrets and filled up your Pokédex, and the only reason to play it is to train Pokémon for competitive battling? It could be one of your favorite games of all time—heck, you wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into it if it weren’t—but at some point you hit a ceiling where you just can’t squeeze any more play out of it. Sure, you could try and endlessly beat your Battle Tower high score or something, but when it comes down to it, no matter how addicted you might have been to it before, there’s no longer much reason to turn it on again.

That’s basically where I’m standing in RuneScape. I’ve completed all the quests and I have all the levels I ever wanted. Do I really need to try and max every skill? I have nothing to prove and better things to do. Regardless of how good I think the game is, I don’t really have much reason to keep logging in anymore.

Anyway, I hope that answers your question.

Have you decided on a major? What do you want to be?

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:42:00 -0400

Yeah I’m majoring in English.

What I’m really interested in is writing. Writing is cool. I like writing. It’s not offered as a major, though—just a minor. So I’m going with English because that’s pretty close.

How come your tumblr is blank

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 03:24:00 -0400

Well now that I’ve answered this question, it’s not blank. Technically speaking.

It was blank before I answered this question. That’s because I only made this account so I could follow other people. You don’t strictly need your own Tumblr account to do that, but have you ever tried keeping up with Mark Rosewater’s feed using only the RSS? It’s a nightmare! Only 20 at a time! It just doesn’t work. Plus, I need an account to comment on posts or to ask questions without being anonymous.

The other upside is that I can follow multiple people and then see everything in one big feed. It’s a one-stop shop.

I don’t have to actually make any actual posts in order to follow people, so that’s why my page is blank. Was blank. See, here’s one.