I regularly used some flavor or another of Pascal from the start of the 1984 school year until I left a company which used Pascal as its primary language in 1992. At nearly 8 years, that was a pretty solid run, and probably the second longest I've used a language. Naturally I learned other languages, and most of my upper level classes were K&R C, but I never quite got away from Pascal.

In 1984 Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC with DOS was pretty awesome. For its time, nothing was better. I was sorry to see the Turbo line loose out to the Visual line.

I agree. There is too much diversity for any sort of mean/median to be useful. Especially as humans shift so much. But I applaud any attempt to try. Who knows, maybe someday someone will actually come up with a human based system that makes sense and stands the test of time. I wouldn't bet on it, but that is no reason to not want it.

You get it. In the 1790s they might not have thought much about glacial melting, but they understood tides and mountains. They might have even known about equatorial bulge as it is just an application of centrifugal force, although I doubt if it could have been measured before satellites. And today we know about internal deformation due to lunar gravity, so the baseline of "sea level" is increasingly bogus.

"Arbitrary" means "someone just made it up". At the time, humans were thought to be more consistent then we have turned out to actually be. I don't like making fun of people in the past for trying and getting it wrong because that is just "ignorance shaming", which isn't cool.

How is F more arbitrary than C? The goal of F was that 0 is when human blood froze and 100 is the normal body temperature of a healthy adult human. While it easy to say that humans are too variable to be a good measurement baseline, use of a brine rather than human blood for the measurements was sloppy, etc. None of that is bad science, even if it is bad engineering. It certainly isn't more arbitrary that using water at Earth's sea level, which varies by atmospheric conditions so STP ends up being a bit arbitrary.

Plus 1/10000th the distance from the pole to the equator has always seemed pretty arbitrary to me as it is constantly shifting. And is measured as badly as Fahrenheit. But that is distance, not temperature, so technically a different topic.

I would be happier with metric if the standard unit of distance (a meter) cubed to form the standard unit of volume (a liter) and the mass of something inside that would be the standard unit of mass (gram). Make the meter much shorter, and switch from water to air (how ever you want to define that - perhaps pure Nitrogen to be consistent) would have worked better. Or maybe pure Hydrogen as it is the most common element in the universe.

BTW: I used to live in Europe, so I'm comfortable with both systems. They both suck. But Imperial is more human centric, and I prefer to keep us (humans) front and center. But I might be willing to switch the the French Revolutionary Calendar just for the fun of it. 10 day weeks. Awesome.

I agree with most of what you said, but not the bit about Golarion. It is a great setting, certainly one of my favorites, but it isn't top tier. You should look into Glorantha. As much as I admire James Jacobs, Erik Mona, and the rest, they're not in the same class as Greg Stafford.

Comparing it to JRRT's Middle Earth is difficult because the needs of a literary setting are different than a gameable world. The Silmarillion certainly is a tour de force, but it is more inspiration than usable content.

Not true. Lets imagine a kickstarter to create a paper book. I doubt if the margin on of that would be 20%, so if the book is successful, all sales above $750k have a 20% fee (25% for non-kickstarter), so there is now a loss per book. The only thing to do is to jack the price from day one, or cap the sales.

Had it been 20%/25% of profit rather than revenue, then I wouldn't have been bothered by that part of the OGL 1.1. Getting a percentage of costs is abusive. I do agree that few make it to the $750k mark, but it could happen.

BTW: Even without this profit sharing rule, there are other reasons to dislike OGL 1.1.

Are they? I'm in the camp that thinks a lot of this is to drive folks to D&D Beyond and other WotC web platforms, with the ultimate goal of getting control of VTTs and charging microtransactions. They don't want another Paizo to popup, but existing Paizo isn't big enough for them to care about. They want to make sure that Foundry VTT, roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc are always struggling.

Paizo created Pathfinder 2nd Edition and intentionally did a clean-slate rewrite. They removed the legacy D&D content then. So you are correct, but a few years late.

Any chance AmaryllisGardener lives in Highlands, NC?

http://knowdirectionpodcast.co...

http://www.heliosinitiative.or... is not quite the same thing, but if you're the type who does homework, you might find interesting stuff.

Actually I did do a double take in that I read "peak" as in "peak activity". That didn't make sense, so I re-read it and figured it out. This is one of the few times where I think a minor oops did matter.