So last night I was doing the dishes after dinner and inspiration “struck like sudden lightening out of a clear sky.”

This time it was about D&D, the d20 combat system and a new way to deal with damage and death in combat. (I have always been unhappy with ever increasing hit points as a system. This creates the situation where high level characters simply ignore the guy with the bow ’cause 1d8 even tripled for a crit simply isn’t going to slow them down.)

I am not going to go into my new system here. It is simple and it can be overlaid on the existing D&D 3.5 rules with a minimum of fuse and alteration. Perhaps in a notehr post I get into the whys and hows of the combat system. (I hope to test it soon.)

What I find interesting is how often I get my spark of creation while doing something utterly mindless. Brushing my teeth – fixed Space MacBeth; washing Dishes, fixed D&D; cleaning a floor – solved the ending of a tough story. It happens again and again. Clearly having the body engaged but the mind wandering the paths of a mental Fangorn Forrest is good for creativity.

So should I seek out mindless physical activity in hopes of more creativity? Would exercising two or three times a week in the complexes gym make me a better writer?

The neutering and castration of the Star Trek franchise started with Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the series the people and officers of the Federation became boring in the homogenous perfection. I didn’t watch all seven season of that series, and watched less and less of the following series until when it finally degenerated into Enterprise I could only stomach the pilot and no more.

I pine for the days when real men captained starship and had the grit to issue general order 24. I’d enamored that the Federation had such a bloody gun-boat history that the destruction of all life on a planet surface was a General Order. This is something that used to be part of every captain’s tool-kit. Check with HQ? Heh, that’s for weak fools without the stomach for command. Shout the order and just sit back and wait for your crew to eliminate a pesky and annoying civilization from the spin of the galaxy.

A lot this post is tongue in cheek, but Star Trek did become a very cautious environment. We went from Kirk ordering the destruction of Eiminiar Vii to Janeway and Picard surrendering.

This was not progress.

Sorry my friends I have a terrible near migraine headache so I will not be pontificating on anything at all tonight.

See you tomorrow.

So tonight my sweetie-wife and I went to the World Famous San Diego zoo for a night time bird show. We walked around the zoo for about thirty minutes before show time looking at other animals then went to the show.
One of the more amusing sights before the show was a mountain lion. It was just at dusk and the cats were active. Pacing back and forth in their enclosure. a small scrum of people were up close to the fencing only a couple of feet away from the lions including a couple of families. The lion at one point spotted a baby, maybe a year old at most and the lion froze, its gaze intent on the child. Oh every knew exactly what was in that predator’s little mind.

The show was fun. To raise money that had a trained African Raven that would accept bills from people and stuff it into the big collection box the conservation charity. I tried desperately to get a photo of the raven with a wad of bills in its beak, but I failed.

Damn it.

This was taken from a Yahoo news article about stars and their unusual phobias.

I know people who do have a phobia of graveyards and who get creeped out just passing near or through one. (One of our trolley lines in San Diego passes through a graveyard.)
Me? I’ve l always liked graveyard ever since I was a teenager.I spent the summer of ’77 with my sister in the mountains and I used to climb up the hills into this tiny almost forgotten graveyard. I’d sit and read there. It was quite peaceful.

Here’s an article on a company that is looking at doing orbital solar power satellites for earth base powers.

Will The Star Align For Space-base Solar Power?

A h/t to Instapundit for the link. (Not that he needs any traffic help.)

Of they can do it I am all for it. We need power solutions like this and more nuclear based power. Of course all this is by the way side if Polywell works out.

So I had just finished climbing the hill from the trolley stop and getting inside when I notice my wife has dropped the mail on the table.
Fine and dandy, it’s got the usual assortment of bills and other doo-dads you expect on a normal mail day. It also had my current issue of Scientific American but there was one other magazine and that was a surprise.
The current issue of Realms of Fantasy. This is surprising because I have not subscribed to this magazine. I read the odd bit of fantasy here and there, primarily Terry Pratchett’s stuff, but not enough to warrant a magazine subscription.
I wonder why those chose me out of the blue to try and tempt into a subscription.
No matter, it’s something new to read.