Thursday: I was suddenly confused, because it feels like Friday

Yay, holidays?

Well, at least he has a hammer, and not matches, I guess.

• There's a burrito place on the north shore?
• Huh.  I didn't know that the guy in charge of Clarence was crazy and dangerous to be around.  It sounds like being fired was a good thing for everyone else at least.  Hopefully they can replace him and keep the show going.
• Chipmunk.
• So here's a horrible statistic to ruin your day.
• I saw this yesterday, but didn't post it because I couldn't see how all the Pokemon could possibly be on the dress, given that I could see repeats in the pattern.  Turns out that doesn't matter, because the art was stolen in the first place.
• I have no idea why people would be unhappy that he got a credit in the new D&D.  His blog seems to be fairly consistent with "here's a good idea to make the game better."  On that point:

Apparently there's a new edition of D&D.  This is the free "Basic" version.  From my quick read-through:

1. Humans get a +1 to all ability scores?  That's the new way to balance humans and demihumans?  I see level limits are gone (at least I didn't see them), but this doesn't seem like the way to do balance.  Humans are a good choice because they pretty much run the world.  You don't need to give them a +1 to make them attractive to play.  Unless you skip the roleplaying, and just stab everyone.
2. All classes advance at the same rate?  Did they really sit down and rebalance all the classes so that makes sense?  Different xp requirements made since, because this dude can now stab three people every two rounds, but that dude can blow the entire room up with a fireball, so maybe Jimmy PyroPants should level up a bit slower than Stabby McSwordhands.
3. Tying the various novel series' descriptions in as flavor text is a good idea.  Why it took like thirty years is a mystery.
4. Thieves having d8 hit dice is probably overdue.  Ditto with mages getting d6.  I still like the Hackmaster "everyone starts with 20 hp + HD" method better, as it ensures low-level survival before the HD difference splits everyone.  Still, the "non-fighting" classes have been overly weak far too long.
5. Ability score improvement.  Hackmaster did it better.  Each level you get a percentile die increase.  When you roll over to a new integer, that becomes your new score.  It gives a better feel of a slow improvement in ability.
6. It looks like they've tried to make spell casting slightly saner.  This new method seems to get rid of the "cast and forget" stupidity.  You now prepare spells, and then you can cast any prepared spell given that you still have a spell slot unused.  So you should be able to prep light and magic missile, and then cast MM twice if you need to fight.  My preferred method is similar, but with a far more flexible mana-pool system:  a mage has a number of spell-levels available, and can cast however many spells needed until that pool is exhausted.  This makes spell cast far more flexible.  The balance on this is that casting an excess of high-level spells should require constitution checks or something.  The idea being that you can keep casting meteor swarm all day, but at some point you're going to start pushing too much energy through your body, and if you can't keep it together, you start puking up blood, which is going to make continuing casting kind of hard.
7. The spell slot caps at 4 now?  Lame.
8. Elementals write in Dwarven script?
9. Electrum continues to be stupid for like the 40th year in a row.
10. It looks like they cut down the polearm selection to three or so?  Pokey-stabby (pike), slashy-cutty (glaive), and hacky-axey (halberd) really are the only types needed.
11. So skills are like they are in World of Darkness?  Except not quite?  Proficiencies have never been super great, and I like the Call of Cthulhu (every skill in existence is an option, and you assign percentage points to your ability) and WoD (broad categories with 0-5 "dots" that provide an extra roll to determine ability) methods far better, as they either de-abstract ("no.  You have 0% ability in electronics") or significantly abstract ("ok, fine.  You can roll intelligence + science, but it's now difficulty 7") the question.
12. Combat -or- Let Me Tell You About THAC0:  Although it was overly jargony, the 1/2e version was mathematically simple:  Take your THAC0 (level based), add your opponent's AC, roll that number or higher.  That's it.  Special modifiers (magic sword, specialization, etc.) are technically subtractions, but they're subtractions to the THAC0, which is still a number you can store on the character sheet and not bother with it.  It's really fairly simple, it just got ruined by not telling everyone to write down their modified THAC0 and adding.
13. Astral projections shouldn't be in the school of necromancy.
14. Fireball with a level-based damage is more fun.
15. I've never liked the hp limit on power word: kill.
16.