Saturday News & Notes: 49 Days to Football

Army's season kicks off the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend.

I don't know what the rest of football nation is doing, but it ought to be fun to see how Coach Monken's squad starts coming together after a full year in the system.  Here's hoping!

50 days until kickoff! #ArmyWestPoint #WestPoint #USMA #USArmy

A photo posted by Army West Point Athletics (@goarmywestpoint) on Jul 16, 2015 at 4:07pm PDT

5 Things on a Friday: Texas Enters the Union at Last

Thank God it's Friday.  I don't know about you, but this has been a really long week for me.

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1. The Commodore PET Has Been Reincarnated As A Phone (TechCrunch)

The guys who bought the Commodore name are releasing an Android smartphone for about $300. The price includes some bog standard specs but, most important, includes two emulators so you can play classic 1980s games right on your screen.

D&D: 8 Spelljammer Story Ideas

When I call these Spelljammer ideas, I don’t mean that they are literally tied to the Spelljammer game setting.  I mean that they are fantasy / sci fi ideas for D&D that might involve some kind of planar travel in space or on the Astral Sea.  As it happens, I’ve been struggling to come up with ideas for a campaign like this, so I thought maybe laying some down would help jog something loose.  

And anyway, I’m way too tired to do any real writing this morning.

D&D: 13 Things I’d like to see from 5e (Part 2)

Part 1 of this article was wildly popular, with 100% of respondents saying that they wanted to see a revisitation of the Spelljammer universe.  I confess that I was expectingPlanescape to be the big winner, but the old adage really is true.  “There’s always enough fantasy but never enough good sci fi.”

For what it’s worth, I think the odds of new Spelljammer content approach zero, which is why I went back to the guys at En5ider and pitched them a new sci fi / fantasy adventure based loosely on last week’s feedback.  We’ll see how that goes, but privately I’m not overly optimistic.  I also think there’s room for homebrewing on the blog, but right now that’s just a set of ideas sitting in my notebook.  I haven’t even started putting together the Wanderhaven Campaign Guide, and here we are talking about a new would-be setting.  Honestly, it makes me tired just thinking about it.  

This post is the second half of our list, “13 Things I’d Like to See from 5e”.  Hopefully the feedback from this half will be as interesting as it was for the first half.  Regardless, thanks for coming by!

5 Things on a Friday: Russia Spies Danger in Selfie Nation

Happy Friday, folks.  Hope everybody’s primed to have an awesome weekend.

Let’s get to it!

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Short Tempo Run

Today's lunchtime run was a touch over 24 minutes.

--12:00 easy warm-up

--5 x :30 intervals (tempo pace)

----:30 rest (easy jog) between intervals

--3:00 @ 5k pace

--1:00 easy jog

--Charge hard up the hill (~1:00)

--Easy jog to finish

That totaled right at 2.5 miles; ~9:00/mile average pace.

Army Football Preview: Pondering the Imponderables

Army’s summer program starts August 3rd.  That puts us about a month out, and since I’ve already started seeing websites and Twitter pages talking about the coming season, now’s as good a time as any to put out some thoughts of my own.  I may eventually do a game-by-game breakdown, but for the time being it strikes me that there are too many unknown to make any actual predictions.  As one of my old squadron commanders used to say, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”  The first thing to do, then, is to figure out what we don’t know.  From there we can develop a set of questions that we hope camp can answer, and when we add that to the scuttlebutt from the teams on Army’s schedule (and maybe a little statistical analysis), we can maybe start making some predictions.

Let’s start with the Big One, and no I’m not talking about who’s going to play quarterback.

D&D: 13 Things I’d like to see from 5e (Part 1)

The new edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been out for awhile now.  We’ve got all three core rulebooks, a super-high quality Starter Set to introduce new players to the game, and a small-but-growing collection of longer adventures for those looking to go deeper into the game’s core themes.  With the advent of the latest D&D poll from publisher Wizards of the Coast, however, we also seem to have an opportunity.  The poll asks the following:

Which of the following campaign settings would you like to see updated to fifth edition D&D rules?

Which of the following character types from prior editions would you like to see updated to fifth edition D&D rules?

Which of the following races from prior editions would you want to see updated to fifth edition rules?

There are a lot of choices.

Training Log: PLYOGA & Triathlon Training

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a training update.  If you follow this blog a lot, you may know that I got hurt in April and then again in May, and that made it tough to train.  I’d been fighting knee problems off and on for the past year or more, and not surprisingly those problems got worse as I got more and more into running over the winter.  By the time April rolled around, I’d realized that I needed to stop running--and I changed my routine accordingly.  

At a certain level, this was no big deal.  I like triathlon, but it’s no secret that I’m a better swimmer and cyclist than runner, and more importantly, backing off on running gave me more time to dedicate to the weight room.  Against that, though, is the reality that enjoy running, and anyway, you can’t very well swim-bike-run without that last bit.  But then in May I hurt my shoulders and elbows doing a combination of ropes-course work and weight training.  That sucked!  So then I had to take time away from swimming, running, and weight training, even being on the bike made me hurt sometimes.

This Week on the Blog

Here's what's coming up on the blog this week:

D&D: Fan Mail

On behalf of myself and my PCs I would like to thank you for these great storys. I have DMed on and off for 4 years but only recently started with 5th ed. I was also hoping you would know any more storys like these. Regardless, thank you for your work.

 -- From Lukethanuke, commenting on "D&D: Journey through Crocodile Crossroads".

My response to Luke's question got so long that I decided to make it an actual post rather leaving it as a comment that no one but Luke was likely to see.

5 Things on a Friday: Unpayable Debts, Unpayable Wages

Happy Friday, folks.  Today kicks off a nice, long weekend here in the States, and if you’re me--and I am--it’s the start of four days off.  Hallelujah!  I’ve been busy as all Hell lately and can use the time.

Let’s get to it.

Comic Review: The Punisher (MAX)

I don't generally think of myself as a fan of the Punisher.  You look at folks who wear Punisher t-shirts, who talk about how awesome the Punisher is, and well, these are not typically your most well-adjusted folks.  On top of that, The Punisher tends to be a little mean-spirited.  Frank Castle's family is gunned down amidst a mafia gang war, and he goes on a rampage.  That rampage involves killing, torturing, maiming...  Castle is not a nice man.  It makes him hard to like.  In fact, half the time you're reading the Punisher, the point of the book is that Frank's an asshole, that you're not supposed to like him.  He's an anti-hero in the sense that he's actually a villain.  But sometimes we tell stories about him anyway.