Advanced Reading & Writing, 1st Edition

When you play Dungeon & Dragons, a lot of your time is spent making characters. There's a lot of dice rolling, picking out skills and equipment from various charts, and then cramming all this information onto a character sheet. Here's what a D&D 4th Edition character sheet looks like. Tell me that's not more complicated than your high school homework. But the thing is, all the relevant facts and figures you need to successfully get your Dungeons & Dragons on are right there. Organized, accessible, neat.

The character sheet is one of the greatest contributions Dungeon & Dragons has made to our society -- among many. Where do you think profile pages came from? Facebook totally stole the whole distilling an entire complex person down to just one page thing from D&D! (The Zuck was obviously a tallish half-gnome wizard in his gaming days.) Of course, a genius idea like this needs to be extended to more things. For example, wouldn't it be handy if authors had character sheets?

Now for the few of you who have never played D&D before, the first step is to take three six-sided dice and use them to calculate your ability scores. Dungeon & Dragons uses a few key attributes to determine how good your character is at various tasks: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Of course these wouldn't work for our author character sheets so instead I'll be substituting in key authorly abilities such as (writing) skill, plotting, originality, revision, endurance, and charm. We could probably find a few better ones but that'll have to do for now.

Tack on slots for genre, class, experience points, skills, those all important magic items and here we are, an Advanced Reading & Writing, 1st Edition author character sheet. Take a look at these prototypes for John Green, Stephenie Meyer, and well, me.

See how convenient a character sheet is? And fun? Feel free to make some for your own favorite authors. Next up, collectible author trading cards! Oh right, or you could just buy an author's books and collect the covers. That'll work too.

Music: Cool It Now, Vol 1.

Around a year ago I started my Cool It Now newsletter and now I’m on the fourteenth issue, a special all music themed one! It contains links to an incredible article about the rise of flute rap, as well as a Spotify playlist of my seventeen tracks for the summer. It’s a winner, just like my all Gosling edition from earlier this year. So while the frequency of the newsletter has stalled, the quality has gone up! I mean, I hope. Here are all the past issues, and below is my song notes for the seventeen tracks included in Cool It Now, Vol 1 . And for the record, "Paid in Full" is always the best flute rap! [ #14 Music Issue | #12 Gosling-fest | Past Issues ] 1. Bishop Briggs, “Wild Horses” (2017) This twenty-four year old British singer by way of Japan seems fond of wearing Chun Li buns and got inspired to sing via Tokyo’s karaoke bars. 2. DJ Khaled, “I’m the One” (2017) I’m starting my hunt for the dance jam of the year, the one I hope will be everywhere on a d

Friendship Archetype Hierarchy

You know me, I love lists, categories, and anything that involves names and rankings . Well, here's a project I've been working on for some time. Ever since seeing this NBA Archetype Hierarchy , I've been wondering how such a model could apply to friendships. Even if you don't know much about basketball, it can help to take a look and see how it's set up. There are five tiers, each containing a certain archetype coveted -- or not coveted -- by NBA teams. As you can see, the top tier is an elite point guard or a refined big man. Think Chris Paul and Shaquille O'Neal, respectively. Traditionally, finding a true superstar at either position will set your franchise up for success if you can surround them with the appropriate complementary parts. (Ignore the blue dot that is Lebron James; he's a freak and doesn't really fit into any archetype.) Basically, the NBA Archetype Hierarchy defines the types of players that are available and then orders whi

Friend Rivalries

During a dinner conversation last week, I commented to someone that he's always got friendship rivalries going on. I noted that there's usually some pair of friends in his life that are either subtly or overtly trying to secure or win a higher place on his friend totem. This got me thinking about how to create your own friend rivalry. But before we get into that, let's talk a few basic types of friend rivalries. (1) First, there's the equitable friend rivalry. Two really great friends, two equally valuable people who might even play similar roles in your life. The more the merrier you'd think, but for some reason, these two people just can't get along. You've tried to bring them together and to plan some trio brunches but at the end of the day, "any friend of yours is a friend of mine" just gets proved false once again. The niche these two occupy in the context of your life is too small for them to ever get along. Or they're just w

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