Author: Dotan Dimet

The Biggest Dragon

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date January 22, 2004

Someone mailed me a question about what is the name of the biggest dragon?

The obvious answer is that the biggest dragon is the Midgard Serpent, Jormungund, who is literally world-spanning (he encircles the earth).

Looking up more info (and a better answer) i ran across Phil Hine’s meditation on Thor, a scientific article about animal size, the promising but quite incomplete Dracopedia (which I found by looking up Ancalagon the Black – searching for Dragons+Size just gives a ton of pages selling Dragon brickabrack). Best of all (as usual) are the loony sites.

In the end it occurs to me that the Biggest Dragon is the constellation Draco, which is light-years across…

Oddities

Mail and Bears

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date January 21, 2004

Looking for information about IMAP (my mail folders got f***ed), I came across the personal web page of Mark Crispin, who invented IMAP and wrote the Unix email client Pine. He’s got an amusing page of
Important Information Which Everybody Should Know, such as:

The basic rule with any treatment of injured victims is: if it is
wet and it isn’t yours, DON’T TOUCH IT!"

Also some good stuff about charging bear attacks.

Finally, he points to the site of an Alaskan Town called Eagle, which he says could serve as a good model for the fictional town of Cicely on the show Northern Exposure. This might have been better than Kotzebue for my purposes.

Resources

Self-aware genomes and all that

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date January 18, 2004

Bacterial Wisdom, Gödel’s Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs (from Eshel Ben Jacob‘s Bacterial Cybernetics site).

Roleplaying

Mutants and Masterminds

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date January 17, 2004

I got Mutants & Masterminds while in London last weekend, and am busy admiring it. Also, looking for info about it’s potential bugs and options for players to powergame it into the dust. So far, I found this fan site noting some issues (basically, he’s complaining about combat going slow, as players think over their options, and about characters built for effectiveness rather than to fit a concept. Maximizing attributes is mentioned as an example).

Roleplaying

There Is No Spoon

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date January 17, 2004

There’s now another fan-produced Matrix RPG online which is worth reading, Steve Darlington‘s There is no spoon:

The First Rule
Reloaded does not exist. It never existed. It
will never exist. The same goes for
Revolutions. Likewise for any animated films
you might have heard of, and any other
derivative products. If a player mentions any
of these, the GM is allowed to smack them in
the face.