The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Elemental_Elf

Quote from: NomadicYea same here, got popular in 6th grade and then slowly faded into obscurity. After pokemon faded though magic the gathering saw massive growth. I remember lunch breaks in late middle school and high school that had 12 way MtG games with intricate alliances and backstabbing and all kinds of awesome fun. In high school yugioh got picked up by a few of the anime fans among us and we gladly accepted it in as another way to waste our lunch break. By the time I graduated we had alternating games of magic and yugioh going on in a group of about 20 people (serious and casual players both).

o_O;;; Why couldn't I have gone to your school!?

At my high school, Yugioh players were horribly ridiculed, I really felt sorry for the lunch break duelists (though I was too busy eating pizza and wandering the halls talking about Gundams and Morrowind with my friends). Magic was never really that popular and when it was seen, most people were interested in and/or mystified by it (including the jocks). I suppose it didn't hurt that the Magic players were always kind of creepy and the Yugioh players were nerdy. Of course TCG/CCG players had a refuge nearby - Collectible Cards and Computers - which was the local card shop and well with in walking distance. I used to go there every weekend and play Yugioh as well as a few times a week after school just to hang out with other like-minded nerds.

Well we were most definitely the "nerdy" group. The thing was that we were a very large group and most of us were pretty normal guys who just happened to enjoy gaming, sci-fi, and so forth (as opposed to extreme trekkies or other people totally obsessed with such things). I was probably the most nerdy of the bunch, but that was largely in the computer field and I knew enough useful stuff that I looked more like a computer tech than "that nerdy dude" (heck I spent alot of time helping the school tech set up networks and pcs and install software and such). And again there were alot of us (all the various computer, anime, card game, roleplay, etc groups together was a good 50-75 people). So in short there wasn't much shunning/making fun of us as a result of all of this.

I found this, it's a summery of the last decade:

I proudly graduated in the middle of my class (GPA around 2.67) in May of aught aught.  So this time of year, ten years ago I was probably just starting my second semseter of my senior year at Union high School in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  

This was the semester I had creative writing for first hour.  My favorite class ever.  Most days it could be used as a study hall.  

While there were topic suggestions, unless the project was assigned by a student teacher, the only real requirement was page count:  the equivalent of one double-spaced page of text for a regualr assignment and two pages for big ones.  For this class, my last big project of the year was a twenty page play retelling the War in Heaven and the Garden of Eden with a sympathetic Lucifer.  My own idea.  The suggested form of the big project was a children's picture book.

I had two close friends at school that year.  I'm still sort of in touch with them and they are forum mods on my proboards forum.  

I'd been a fairly serious RPG gamer for about four years at this point.  Some projects posted here on the CBG have their origins in these days.

Nice to see the "real-side" of people.
Let's see, 10 years ago, I was just entering high-school, being the nice kid who studied, had his good friends and liked swimming. Nowadays, I'm a dad, about to graduate and currently working as a teacher...life doesn't cease to amaze me!

Real side? I prefer unreality to be honest. It's much easier... well, sometimes, anyway...

That seems to be a fairly apt chart, EE.

I don't know; where is the climate crisis? : P
seems to have been left out in the dark. Maybe it's just bigger in Europe than on the other side of the Atlantic.

I'm a little surprised too - I would have thought it'd make the "FEAR" category somewhere.

2006, 2005 or 2004 seem to be the most appropriate years- which was the year of Inconvenient Truth? And post-Katrina I would suspect there must have been a great deal of climate fear-mongering. And I thought that the Bird flu worries were in 2004-- not in 2006.

Climate isn't taken that seriously in the real world, out side of Academia, especially in the face of terrorism, pandemics and the economy. Call it a human failing but the immediate and personal problems always take precedence to the long term problems.

It isn't? Hm, maybe it's just the people I know, but it seems to me like it's a genuine worry. Or maybe things are just a bit different across the pond.

In America, real people (i.e. not going to school or actively involved in the green movement) really aren't that concerned with it. The problem is far more distant than the immediacy of the economy, the housing market, the wars, all these threats of terrorism, the ineptitude of the federal government, etc.  In a lot of ways people just don't want another problem to deal with... Plus the government doesn't really support a lot of green initiatives like Europe does, which means even if you want to change it's really expensive. :(

Well, it's taken very seriously over here. It's pretty much what the news and the politicians talk about half the time.

>>Plus the government doesn't really support a lot of green initiatives like Europe does, which means even if you want to change it's really expensive

In the United States:

...The tax incentives for wind power are significant-- by making enough investments, companies can write off a huge amount of their overall tax burdens. Sadly, wind currently requires scaling units, such as natural gas plants, to be useful. In Denmark, wind hit about 25% of their grid-- with current technology its percentage cannot be much higher without endangering the entire grid. Perhaps battery technology will improve to store wind power-- but subsidizing the creation of EXISTING wind turbines does not lead to investment in that technology except in a roundabout manner. Public and Private sector investment should be in the science/technology realm, not in subsidizing construction of more less-than-ideally efficient projects.
 
And even though corn-based ethanol is both economically foolish and environmentally dangerous-- the industry is supported by subsidies, and tax breaks to the tune of billions a year.

Solar is subsidized more than anything else, and produces less.

Per megawatt hour when evaluated for efficiency v. subsidies, solar (especially the parabolic dishes) is probably WORSE for the environment when all the equipment installing it is factored in plus the habitat destruction it creates. And silicon-based solar threatens to push up computer hardware costs.

The United States does subsidize oil, nuclear, and coal- indeed. If it did not, then its goal of energy self-reliance would be even less likely achieved, and the national oil companies would control even more of the worldwide price than they currently do. Independent Western oil companies such as Exxon only control less than 20% of production and less than 40% of refining capacity.

However, per MWH, those subsidies give a lot more bang for the buck for consumers in terms of cheaper energy than renewable technologies.

Clean Coal Carbon Sequestration requires such a large output of energy that a coal plant needs to operate at 125-150% more power to sequester whatever amount of coal it previously possessed. The US subsidizes Clean Carbon Sequestration technology.

>>Well, it's taken very seriously over here. It's pretty much what the news and the politicians talk about half the time.

Glad I moved then. And perhaps in the future I will move again back to China where I lived for over a year-- although China certainly realizes the threat of environmental damage, it has greater respect for the importance of economic growth for the health of society. (Environmental concerns are dealt with to the extent they threaten economic prosperity). While both need to be balanced, making huge sacrifices of dubious value while damaging one's economy is decidedly foolish.

Does the specter of climate change threaten economic prosperity... Maybe.

Climate change has always happened, sometimes with disastrous consequences. What is NOT established is that wasting all this money trying to prevent climate change will do anything-- especially since it makes a lot of sense for non-Tier 1 countries (as defined from Kyoto) to pollute as much as they want while industrializing-- and reap benefits in terms of jobs.

When the smart grid arrives, I'm checking the box desiring delivery of the cheapest and most efficient fuel available- probably coal in the absence of a carbon tax. And I'm keeping my CFLs until they burn out and need to be replaced rather than prematurely tossing them and creating even more environmental waste.

Of course what works in Europe generally doesn't work so well over here. Of course in the big cities things like mass transit, encouragement of biking, etc work just fine. Alot of the US though is spread out and the cost to develop mass transit, alternate energy, etc is beyond what many communities can hope to afford. Modern America was built with the automobile in mind. What is considered a small trip (10-20 mile drive) to the store where I live would be a huge deal in say the UK where walking to the store is far more common.