Pathfinder RPG PFS Build for a Gnome Dr. Strangelob/Poisoner

The Alchemist is one of the more flexible character classes in the Pathfinder RPG: his extracts function as spells, his bombs function as arcane blasts that ignore Spell Resistance, and he can function as a skill monkey whose talents can include finding and disarming traps.

The class is so flexible that Ogre proposed three distinct builds for the Alchemist: a bomb thrower (Dr. Strangelob), a melee build (Mr. Hyde), and a poisoner build. I’ve only played a bomb specialist, but I found that there were enough feat and discover spaces left over to add a separate element to the character. I decided to go with the poisoner, because certain feats the bomb chucker would already have such as Point Black Shot and Rapid Shot or Two-Weapon Fighting, would have natural synergy with the poisoner.

I decided to go with the Two-Weapon Fighting model instead of the Point Blank Shot and Rapid Shot model because it’s very difficult to make use of the sticky poison discovery when dealing with ammunition. They only way around it would be to use multiple daggers of throwing, but coming across such things in a Pathfinder Society setting can be rather daunting. In order to maximize the effectiveness of poison, you need to hit the target multiple times in a round. Each hit adds a +2 to the DC save versus the poison and increases it’s total duration by half. The sticky poison discovery, meanwhile, allows one dose of poison to be stretched to a number of hits equal to your Intelligence modifier- which is quite a cost saver for the poisoner.
Continue reading Pathfinder RPG PFS Build for a Gnome Dr. Strangelob/Poisoner

Ronda Rousey Uses Judo to Become Strikeforce MMA Champion

Ronda Rousey, who trained a Venice Judo back in her earlier years, used her Judo skills to become the Bantam Weight Women’s Champion over the weekend. You can see the entire fight here. I’ve also made a playlist of all her Strikeforce fights. Each is an incredible testament to real life Judo application to win a fight.

Innovation Killed Socialism

I’ve never liked top-down economic planning, and after reading Brink Lindsey’s Against The Dead Hand, I know why. Plus, it really changed my perspective of free markets and socialism, especially how the death of liberalism came about in the late 19th century.

Apparently, top-down just seemed logical, given their experiences with large corporations; a single big one could organize the resources for a market better than five smaller. A central economic planning body was preferred to competitive interactions between smaller actors in separate fields. The term “progressive” came about as a result of this ostensible idea that that’s where the world’s heading. Of course, our understanding of it all then was limited and ill-founded – and we’d all pay for it later.

I was reminded of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, showing how localized decisions aggregated into a broader network yielded better results than top-down. How? According to this social organizing principle, the group itself acts smarter than even the brightest of its members – providing all have access to different information, are making independent decisions, and aren’t influencing each other. It’s not a new phenomenon, first observed by Francis Galton in a county-fair game guessing an ox’s weight over a century ago. The majority missed it while the average of the group’s responses were within 1% of it.

The most noted has to be the wreck of the USS Scorpion – a submarine that went down with all hands in May ’68, the Navy only having its last reported location days before. To help pinpoint the wreckage, a panel was assembled of diverse talent: mathematicians, salvage experts and sub tacticians – each given all available information to best estimate the location. Using Bayes Theorem, a collective determination was calculated; while its discovery proved none had correctly located it individually, the “group guess” was within 220 yards of it exactly.

So, if the broader network is smarter decision-making, why didn’t top-down planning go the way of the dodo when it proved inferior? Okay, let’s do a quick recap on the history of socialism.

It first assumes the marketplace naturally chaotic, which jives with why top-down planning was a local choice to combat it; observers claimed entire industries become consolidated in the hands of a few individuals. Second, it was born during the Industrial Revolution – a really crazy time – with its pioneer, Karl Marx, believing the whole thing a one-off process: the world needed to transition from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. In Das Kapital, he argued all industries would eventually find themselves controlled by only a handful of wealthy leaders, at which point, the process was complete. He seemed hopeful society would lose its dynamism, returning to a more tranquil time, and leaving these industrialists in possession of “the means of production” of the greater society was an injustice.

Of course, history has an ironic sense of humor. In time, Marxist revolutionaries would go on to do just that, as industrialization was proven not a one-off process after all.

Innovation constantly brought a new stream of products and services to market, and a society run by top-down committee (see: the former Soviet Union) just couldn’t effectively allocate resources to produce what the public actually wanted. And, like we know of any bloated bureaucracy, it collapsed beneath the weight of its own inefficiency.

What’s consistently proven to get the job done? Well, for resource-allocation, the free market is tops. If an oil embargo suddenly restricts its nation’s access, we hardly need an army of bureaucrats to refigure society’s production flow. As a commodity’s price rises, people naturally seek less expensive alternatives or use less of it. The free market allows for a resource to be restricted to those who use it best to benefit society; downright unthinkable to the “progressives” of yesteryear. And it’s that free market mindset which allows the “wisdom of crowds” to do its thing.

Oddly enough, socialism has been almost entirely refuted, and yet, it’s still around. We can only hope, like other “great” ideas – flat earth, phrenology, and stagflation – it’ll find its way to the dustbin of history as people become better educated.

Or just tired of wasting time and money – whichever comes first.

Reflections on My Brief Career at Hollywood Park

Calls from Human Resources are never good. Every time they say they need you to come over right now it means you’ve lost your job. I got this call last Wednesday as I was waiting to clock in. Oh, well; there went that job, propping for Hollywood Park Casino. I can’t say I was particularly nervous walking down to sign job away, (because it was still my second one), and wouldn’t leave me unemployed. In case I needed any more reinforcement that I didn’t need the job, the whole walk down there reminded me of all the things I didn’t like about that casino.

Casinos are inherently bureaucratic organizations: they produce nothing of value and simply take customers’ money. Thus, casino management is virtually always comprised of layer upon layer of bureaucratic departments whose entire purpose is maintaining the status quo. After all, as long as the lights stay on, no drugs are being dealt, and the employees remain relatively civil, why should anything change? The consequence of all bureaucracies is that strange, inconvenient rules seems to work their way into the organization and soon become just another annoying aspect of it. All casinos have these, but I think Hollywood Park’s HR department might deserve honorable mention in terms of its uselessness.
Continue reading Reflections on My Brief Career at Hollywood Park

Seven Barbed Wire VTES Decks for $49

As the former Prince of Dallas and winner of the 2008 Texas VTES Qualifier, I took it upon myself to design decks for beginners. My goal was to design decks that were competitive enough to play with other people’s tournament decks but inexpensive enough to give the decks away to beginners without flinching. Truth be told, this project has become a bit of an obsession of mine. I found that the time I devoted to tuning and refining these decks took my mind off of the other problems in my life. Although I know this confession brands me a geek, these decks represent well over 80 hours of design, testing, and play.

These decks win. Whenever I get frustrated with the current decks I’m working on, I always just reach for one of these. It leads to some humorous interactions with other players. I remember in one game, a local player was testing this !Salubri deck that used Concealed Weapon/Garrot/Sword of Righteousness combo to burn everyone’s vamps. I was playing the beginner Brujah deck and he rushed Tura Vaughn and did his combo. I responded by playing fast hands to steal his Garrot with First Strike, then playing blur to send him to torpor and burn the Garott to burn his vamp. Great fun. I even picked up a couple of VPs playing with these decks in casual games at the 2006 North American Championship- a collection of the best players in North America.

Each deck includes a 60 card library (which works out just fine for a 4 player game) and a 12 card crypt. The flavor of the clans is well preserved in each of the decks: the Ventrue vote, the Gangrel fight, the Malkavians bleed at stealth, etc. The vast majority of these cards are from the base Jyhad set, but I did stretch to include some cards such as Animal Magnetism and Pack Alpha that help a particular strategy.

In fact, check out the feedback I’ve gotten through Ebay sales over the years.

  • One winner of this auction in England sent this email. “Thank you so much! The decks have arrived. I have played a couple of games already – Torreadors got me a win and nosferatu got 2nd place in two 4-way games. Great strategy notes with them. As I am new to the game, they came in very handy, particularly with the Torreador (a wall deck). Thanks again! I have left positive feedback.”
  • Thanx for the decks! I played the brujah deck last night and it ripped up everyones f’in vampires. They said it’s a bruise and bleed deck. Can’t wait to try out the others. 🙂
  • A new player wrote me from Italy to say, “Hello, I would like to thank you for the great job you have done with these decks. I like them very much. Expecially the Malkavian deck always led me to victory when I play with it and I’m never be able to stop it when I play against it with any other deck.”
  • Mark Loughman, a VTES player and game store owner in Columbus Ohio, told me that a player who frequents his store bought a set of these decks from me and that the decks were well helpful for new players. Mark said that the player was able to take my designs and look for ways to improve upon them, which got him trading for other cards and interacting with the larger VTES group.

My experience in playing and selling these decks for over three years has left me so confident that I am going to offer a money back guarantee.

If in the first 30 days you don’t feel they were worth the money you paid, just ship’em back to me and I’ll credit you with a full refund. International shipping is $17 for airmail unless the United States Postal Service charges me a bunch more. You can check for yourself at www.usps.com

Because these decks are for beginners, I have typed up a strategy guide for each deck that includes a list of errata on any of the cards in the deck list (so they will know that Concealed Weapon doesn’t require Obfuscate for instance). In addition, I can also take these errata notes, print them on Return Address Labels, and stick them on the face of the card so that all the relevant information is right there. Note: The cards will be entirely blank and unmolested unless you request this, but it is a free service. Even if you just wanted to buy these decks to play test. Say you wanted to see how your new deck will fare in a tournament, play a 4 player game with your new deck, the Malkavian deck, the Ventrue deck, and the Gangrel deck and you will see how it does against combat, sneak and bleed, and a voter deck.

If you were to buy these cards seperately, their full retail price is roughly $80. If you’d like to see an exact listing of all the cards you get in this batch of seven decks, as well as how I calculated that value, CLICK HERE.

If you’d like to buy my VTES starter decks you can use Google Checkout. This Google Checkout button charges $49.99 for shipping out a set of 7 decks to anywhere in the Domestic United States.








This button, on the other hand, if for my international clients. For $65.99, I will ship these decks most anywhere in the world. If the United States Postal Service comes back and says it’s going to cost a bunch more to ship to North Korea, I’ll let you know, but I’ve shipped to Australia, Europe, and Central America without a problem.








First Day on the Job: An Interesting Hand

So yesterday, Monday September 12th, was my first day on my new job at Hollywood Park Casino. I haven’t left my old employer, Normandie Casino, but as the start of the year they announced they were cutting my pay. Then they cut my hours down to part time. Meanwhile, Hollywood Park starting hiring part time. So I pieced together to pay time positions to make one full time position. As it stands now, if all I do is break even at the game of poker, I’ll we working 46 hours for $1270 a week. Which, given the current economic situation, is really nice.

Now first days on the job are interesting, but I don’t know if it’s ever been quite like this. You see, casinos tend to be run pretty loosely, and that applies doubly so for how they treat house players. Most of time your “orientation” is nonexistent and you just start to pick up habits from other house players in a “monkey see, monkey do” fashion. And, of course, I’m coming from a different casino with different habits. At the Normandie it was appreciated if I helped out in running chips for players, because they ended up getting rid of their chip runners. Not that anyone asked me to, but often I was just sitting around anyway. Another related habit I picked up was “echoing” a call for player checks or food service so the designated people could more rapidly attend to the patrons.

So here I am, my first day on the job, carrying on my old habits. A player busts out, and I’m already calling for the chip runner. As I settle into a $3-5 No-Limit game,  I see one of the long time former hosts of Hollywood Park who has recently be made just another house player like me. You see, Hollywood Park used to have a group of three or four hosts on staff who were responsible for individual games. They would gather player information and call them up to get them to come in and play with them.  This particular guy used to be the host of the big NL game, and this was the first time I was really playing with him. I looked forward to playing some pots with him. Continue reading First Day on the Job: An Interesting Hand

US Treasury Bonds Soar on the News of Their Own Downgrade?

Anyone who’s been seriously securities pricing over the last several years has seen a series of bizarre pricing anomalies in securities as markets have gone from boom to bust- back and forth. Taken individually, any of these pricing anomalies as the market moves would be a challenge to Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) notion that the current price of a security reflects the most current analysis of information regarding that security. EMH proponents have a hard time explaining the internet bubble, or really any security that seems to defy rational explanation.

Still, people put stock in the pricing mechanism of the marketplace and see some wisdom in it. When gold was languishing in comparison to the US Dollar through the 1980s and 90s, the rational explanation was that people no longer felt it was a safe haven. Now, conspiracy minded Libertarians such as myself felt that there was a greater conspiracy at work on the part of the powers that be to get people to believe in the US Dollar as the ultimate safe haven rather than gold. There are certain strange coincidences, such as the decline of the spot price of gold in the wake of most major political news (such as the start of Desert Storm or 9/11) which would be occasions where you would thing it would go up.
Continue reading US Treasury Bonds Soar on the News of Their Own Downgrade?

Stock Alert: Time to Shove All-In on Barrick Gold

The Stock Market is full of strangely priced equities. The things that most often make the news are the stocks that are trading far above any rational price. With most banks offering interest rates on savings far less than the government’s own rate of inflation (with a “real” return of -4% or so) you would think that hot money would be flooding into the stock market in search of bargains. So stocks like Barrick Gold (ticker symbol: ABX) and the other gold miners has been an ever increasing mystery to me.
Continue reading Stock Alert: Time to Shove All-In on Barrick Gold

Paul Krugman: Raving Socialist Moron of the Day

If a Socialist raves in the woods, but there’s no one around to hear it, should the forest creatures still seek to dismantle their private enterprise activities in order to develop a strong public sector? Or, put another way, Kevin sent me another Krugman diatribe. Here he is decrying the debt limit “crisis.”

Krugman’s rantings are rather formulaic. As he is Keynesian Socialist, you know exactly where he stands on all issues before he even opens his mouth. In fact, I’d say you can make you own Krugman rants by simply mixing and matching the following arguments:

  • The free market is an unstable system that will tear itself apart without strong government intervention
  • Depression is the logical result of an unregulated free market, and the private sector could never get out of a depression on it’s own.
  • Instead, the government must spend money counter cyclically to “stimulate” the economy
  • Private enterprise harkens back to our more primitive natures when it was a dog-eat-dog and we had to fight each other over scare resources. Bureaucratic action tends to be far superior because it is arrived as through consensus and often developed with the benefit of more enlightened minds like… well, him!

That last point is not really overtly stated as implied. But keep in mind, he’s got an Economic prize issued in Memorial of Alfred Nobel. As I’ve said in a prior post, Mr. Krugman has been the recipient of a funny kind of prize. Suffice it to say that Alfred Nobel never established a Nobel prize for Economics.

At any rate, let’s check Krugman’s latest rant and see how we did here. Hmm, well this one’s about how the terrible Republicans have sabotaged the Democratic process by demanding the government spend less money. With all the Republican bashing, I guess we can safely establish that Krugman is a Democrat. Oh wait, I already said that. See earlier where I said he was a Socialist. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Raving Socialist Moron of the Day

The Susan M. Greene Shakedown Survival Guide

It would seem that my last post on Susan Green’s shakedown business, “Susan M. Greene’s Notary Business is Here to Shake You Down” is by far my most popular blog ever. I guess there’s nothing that motivates a google search like someone threatening to file suit for the egregious crime of dialing a telephone number.

One respondent to my last Susan Green blog was Becca Wahlquest, an actually an attorney here in Southern California whose client had received a shakedown letter. She contacted me, and we exchanged information. She shared with me (and gave me permission to pass it on to you) that Susan Greene will go away and not bother you again once you stand up to her. This has also been my experience.

A few people have asked for the exact response letter which Ms. Wahlquist sent to Ms. Greene. I asked Ms. Wahlquest if her client would be willing to provide the actual response letter she sent, and, unfortunately, the client declined. However, Ms. Wahlquist has seen her way clear to provide to general gist of what her response letter contained. Furthermore, given that the San Diego Small Claims Docket shows that Ms. Greene has only filed four claims in the past year, your chances of actually being sued by her are quite small. Indeed, Ms. Greene indicated that she was going to sue both myself and my mother and nothing has been forthcoming. So know in dealing with her that you are dealing with a toothless lion: her roar may be ferocious, but she really lacks any bite whatsoever.

Personally, my advice is to ignore her. However, if you find yourself in such a position whereby you absolutely MUST interact with her (say you’ve been hired to represent someone who’s receiving her threats) you need to keep in mind the relevant facts and time line. I’ve prepared a nice summary for you below: Continue reading The Susan M. Greene Shakedown Survival Guide