Ish

Wait... wait... Is that a protective cardboard barrier on your painting table!? HERESY! Without a three inch thick layer of spilt paint, thousands of hobby knife gouges, and a half-empty Mountain Dew that you’ve been meaning to throw out since the Clinton Administration, how can you honestly call it a painting table?

Every lawyer on planet Earth, that isn’t on retainer for or directly employed by Microsoft, would run for the hills... In fact, I believe we have video footage:

“[Justice Ginsburg] could fight with the best of them—but I never heard or saw or even intimated anything other than respect and even, often, affection for her adversaries in these battles. No snide remarks, no nasty innuendoes, none of that. She valued civility and collegiality very, very highly, and I think she helped to dignify the process of judging, and helped make those she was working with better as a result.” –David Post, Reason

It could also be argued that people can pay for Microsoft Excel, download a third-party database for it, and make army lists from that. The Google and Apple app stores aren’t equivalent, they’re charging a percentage in order to do the work of marketing your product and hosting the data. The landlord of your corner grocery store “takes a cut” of what the grocer sells too.

Justices Ginsburg and Scalia were philosophical rivals and extremely close friends. This is the two of them, as extras, in a production at the Washington National Opera. Our republic would be so much stronger if everyone could be a little more like “Nino” and “Ruth.”

I don’t think Gary would disagree, per se. In fact, I don’t even think he really means there isn’t an art to good game design, a well-written setting, or a well role-played scene. I think he was mostly just trying to deflate the egos of a certain hoighty-toighty subculture within gamers. You know the sort...

"Send anyone claiming that their RPG activity is an art form my way, and I'll gladly stick a pin in their head and deflate it just to have the satisfaction of the popping sound that makes…. One might play a game artfully, but that makes neither the game nor its play art." –Gary Gygax

The data repositories are probably* in violation of Games Workshop’s intellectual property rights, but being the decentralized work of dozens of anonymous individual coders and hosted across dozens of fly-by-night server farms... Good luck hitting them with a Cease & Desist letter, let alone an actual law suit Complaint. GW really just needs to put a halfway decent army building app of their own on the market. *I am not a lawyer, don’t use me for actual legal advice. Consult a real attorney.

Dave’s not here, man.

Not technically a Kickstarter, but this thread felt like an appropriate place to share it anyway. Black Site Studios is taking preorders for their new horror survival miniatures game Don’t Look Back. Seems like a great game for that crossover board game to miniatures game market niche:

That giant “ffffrrrrppppttt” sound your hearing right now is every campaign manager for every single House, Senate, Governorship, and Presidential campaign simultaneously ripping up their message calendars and talking point memos that they had planned for the last month of the campaign. Between now and 3 November 2020 there is only one issue: who will get to appoint Justice Ginsburg’s replacement. (I’m going to recuse myself from any further discussion of the upcoming election on this forum.)

“My name’s Ziggy Stardust and I’m here to rescue you!” 🎼 There’s a Sith Lord, walking in the sky... 🎶

It’s not £40 to £175 that he’s comparing; it’s £73 (the inflation adjusted price) to £175 (current product price). Of course, this isn’t a truly fair comparison. Yes, the original Necromunda box came with a large amount of terrain... But it was mostly cardstock stuck into plastic bulkheads. Dark Uprising came with a massive pile of entirely plastic terrain.

Political wonks, like me, have a tendency to inject our pet political philosophy into every discussion about any topic that even comes within a few thousand miles of being related to our pet political philosophy. I'm actively restraining myself from turning this post into a 24,601 word screed on the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena and methodological individualism. So, instead, I'll share my favorite econ meme: