The Book of Ryan

Ethan Gilsdorf:

On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.

It’s not surprising. I’ve always believed that their DDI implementation was a huge missed opportunity as Web-based product, and 4th edition hasn’t aged gracefully.

Also, from the buried lede department is the last line of the article:

Even if players increasingly bring their iPads, loaded with Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, to the gaming table.

Those rulebooks are pirated copies of PDFs on a computer platform unsupported by any of Wizards’ current products.

I had no idea one of my favorite podcasters, Matthew Jordan, was a wowhead. He writes:

It can be grueling, this fun you’re having. Coldmaker is a little late, not like him, but I think his game privileges were limited, something about a math test. He’s in gun country, the kid’s got a backyard full of broken washing machines now reserved for beer bottles and bullets. Ravheart will be on in a few, this is our third practice this week, one boss, and he’s trying to watch Rescue Me before the evening goes all lumpy. Ichoras is here, the raid leader, and we can hear his son crying in the background.

All of his podcasts are the linguisitc version of a high-end dessert tray, and this one is no exception.

Chris Hanel & Michael Owen:

“Just let me in the raid good sirs,
no disappointment will I be,
and once we’ve stomped heroic mode
we’ll celebrate with PVP!”

but all the server’s raider,
from the Death Knights to the Retadins
just turned away from Totey
though he knew not what could be his sins.

It’s like Wingdings, only use useful.

Hat tip: @mikebrisk.

Great ideas on real reforms for Wall Street, via John Gruber.

Maryn McKenna of Wired, in her last paragraph on seagulls spreading multi-drug-resistant E. coli in their feces.

Deep in the medical literature, there’s another suggestion. In 2005, researchers from the CDC, FDA and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the feces of Canada geese living on bodies of water in North Carolina and Georgia. The geese’s carriage of resistant bacteria wasn’t uniform, however. The resistant bacteria appeared only in geese that were living in waters that were close to large-scale swine farms. The resistance patterns in those bacteria matched ones that had already been recorded by federal health agencies in pigs being routinely fed antibiotics in industrial-model agriculture. The geese “could serve to disperse bacteria between widely separated locations,” the researchers concluded.