[Update: character sheet updated after playtesting; also added extended powers page for wizards and high-level characters]

I’m still tinkering with these, and I haven’t even started on the creation/leveling worksheet, but I think they’re a solid version 1.

The official character sheet has a lot of problems: first, it’s cluttered with ugly header boxes; second, a lot of the space is devoted to calculating values; third, a lot of information that you need during play is either on page 2 or just plain missing.

My goal was simple: put everything you need during combat on the top half of the first page. That leaves half a page for recording all other useful information, and frees up the second page to be a coherent worksheet for character creation and leveling.

The half-page rule also gives you a clean design for a combat-tracking card that can be used for monsters as well as players. This is always useful, and critical for large con events (we run 20-30 players, and the finale is always a massive player-versus-player battle). I actually started with the 4x6 combat card, and then expanded the design into an 7.5x10 layout that can be printed on both US Letter and A4 paper.

Here are the PDFs: character sheet, combat card.

Sometime this weekend, I’ll adapt my character-creation document into a proper worksheet that can be used to maintain the other two.

[side note: I’m working in Adobe Illustrator CS2, and the best way to get a small PDF file is to “save a copy” as EPS, then open it in Mac OS X’s Preview app and save. The only semi-downside is that it clips the bounding box to the objects rather than generating a full-sized page.]

Now that the Supreme Court has unambiguously ruled on the only “right of the people” ever to be considered “the right of state governments”, the Chicago Tribune has come out of the closet: “repeal it!”, say the guardians of freedom.

We’re just not sure whose freedom they’re guarding.

It’s cute that you like Morning Musume so much that you want to sing and dance like them in public, but may I offer you a bit of cautionary advice?

1. Your performance was uploaded to Youtube with the title "Shock! 10-year-old lolita in a sailor suit". You may not understand why this is a problem, but you should make sure you've got a trustworthy adult with you when you go out singing.
2. Please, however much you admire Morning Musume and wish to emulate them, ignore their fashion sense. You'll thank me later.

[Her role models perform the song here]

The first two generations of Morning Musume, frolicking happily on the beach after making a movie about fighting back against stalkers. My, that’s a young Mari.

[Update: Oh, my, I’ve never seen this one before. It’s a short clip of a more recent edition of the group singing a song called “please don’t strip off my sailor suit”.]

Quoting:

"The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child"

I agree, but only in the sense that hanging’s too good for him, not, as this court has decreed, that it is cruel and unusual punishment incompatible with “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”.

Feh. They’d better rule against the Second Amendment in Heller, if they want to keep themselves safe from parents everywhere.

Someone with a stronger stomach than I has taken on the task of documenting the worst abuses of the Hello!Project costume designers.

Way to bolster your credibility, Hansen:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Actually, I’d like to see this happen, because the defense teams would quickly subpoena the source code for all of the computer models being used to project future climate conditions, opening their assumptions up to real independent investigation. You know, “science”.

I spent too much time working in a university computer science department to have too much faith in the results of highly-tweakable computer models. Between twiddling the knobs to get what you want and simply leaving out variables that are inconvenient or too difficult to model, I suspect most sophisticated models could be replaced with:

10  PRINT "WORLD ENDING, PLEASE FUND MY RESEARCH"
20  GOTO 10

With my mind already broken by the folks at H!P, today was not the day to confront me with a contradiction. I give you メロンパン風 Flat Pretz:

Yes, these Pretz possess both delicious flatness and melonpan-fu. The mind boggles.