The story of Jonah and the whale is often trotted out as a prime example of one of the most absurd stories in the entire Bible. Atheists in particular, when looking to point out the absurdity of believing events in the Bible to have really happened, are likely to pull out this story.
We all know the story of Jonah and the whale.
We all know that story, because that's Disney's Pinocchio.
That is not the story of Jonah and the whale.
We're all familiar with the tags on mattresses, warning us it is a violation of federal law to remove the tag. Those tags are a form of consumer protection. The purpose of those tags is to state what materials were put inside the mattress, so that the factory can't stuff it with human hair then claim it's goose down. Because wouldn't that be a crooked thing to do? At one point, this was a major problem. So they made a law. You aren't allowed to sell a mattress claiming it's goose down when it's not made from goose down. And so the tag is there as a means of prevention.
But you can kind of understand why someone would sell a mattress made of old human hair, and claim its goose down. You can get the material for free, and sell it for a premium.
And you can understand a hundred other circumstances where a company would do this.
For instance a flour company, stuffing their bags with sawdust, but leaving the "flour" label on the bag.
Sawdust is cheap. Flour is more expensive. That's the point, that's why it happens.
But imagine a company that already had flour, and chose not to use it. They choose instead to fill the bags with sawdust, and just leave the flour to go stale.
It's behavior that doesn't make any sense.
That is the situation we repeatedly find ourselves in with modern movie adaptations of classic stories.
For some reason my youtube feed the past three months has been filled with about 80% people complaining about Rings of Power, even before it came out. There are entire channels dedicated entirely to this, and youtube refuses to stop recommending them to me. The sheer volume of apparently meritless whining informed me that I should probably give the series a chance, and have an open mind about it. I recently got a chance to watch the first 7 episodes (as many as are out right now), and just wanted to comment on the series.
More people than I have gone in length about problems of the show, probably gratuitously so. Yes, there are problems with the series, and really quite a few.
So instead I wanted to focus on things that are done right, or that worked really well.
We meant to ask about prenatal vitamins. Nelly has been taking these gummies that are overly sweet and she has to chew and she can't stand them anymore. The next thing we said was going to be, "do you have any recommendations for prenatal vitamins?"
But I don't know what we did actually say next, because that's when the NP told us the yolk sac was 9mm.
That datum meant nothing to us, either.
Five weeks earlier, just three days after we learned about the pregnancy, sitting six hours in a covid-infested emergency room with a sharp pain in her left abdomen, was the first time I learned what a yolk sac was. It was the thing we needed to see in the uterus where it was supposed to be to know that this pain wasn't what it wasn't supposed to be. It was that thing that finally showed up in the ultrasound, a tiny round black and white bubble that the radiologist labeled without further comment "Yolk Sac", that meant the pregnancy was not ectopic, that we could stop worrying, that we could relax and wait the remaining six hours until a doctor finally saw us to tell us the baby was fine.
In these days, the word "dice" meant normal, cubical six-sided d6 dice. So when Dave Arneson, the first DM, needed a mechanic to resolve hand-to-hand single solider combat, he needed a way to compactify all of the complicated reality of damage done by a man with a heavy piece of metal in his hand trying to strike another man bound in metal plates, and he had to use six-sided dice to do it.
"A game designer from a parallel dimension with no D&D nor Gygax is tasked with designing a game supporting common OSR principles. What would such a game look like?"The original intent of the question was to remove deadweight mechanics form the game. Ideas that started with Gygax and early versions of D&D, that no longer make sense, but that have stuck around because of their historical inertia.
As an example, clerics as PCs and wizards who can't heal. It would make sense for wizards to have healing magic, and the only reason they don't seems to be to stop them from intruding on the cleric's space. But why is there a cleric in the adventure to begin with? Because one of Arneson's friends wanted to play Van Helsing from the Hammer movies while they were fighting a vampire named Sir Fang (yes, that was really the vampire's name) . That's why there is a cleric class in D&D, and it continues to exist because of inertia.
Remove that history and re-make the game again, and you'd probably drop clerics and give wizards healing spells.
But I was actually more intrigued by the literal wording of the prompt. A parallel dimension with neither D&D nor Gary Gygax. What is this dimension, and what kind of game can come out of it? Let's imagine a universe where we are making the first roleplaying game, where D&D has never existed, and where Gygax also doesn't exist. What does the first roleplaying game out of this universe look like?
I was inspired to finally start writing some commentary by a scene near the end of vol 1 of season 4. That is your spoiler warning.
