Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is coming, slashing and burning all that has come before to create a new game that ignores the tropes of classic sword-and-sorcery in order to embrace the always-on, always-cool mechanics of digital fantasy.

We see it at every turn. The lack of a 3.x-to-4.x conversion guide. The admonishment to wrap-up old campaigns in favor of 4E. The impending decimation of the Forgotten Realms, and the planned 100-year leap forward in its timeline. Succubi are now devils. Devils are fallen angels. Gnomes are monsters. Tieflings are cool. Evil elves worship Grummosh, formerly god of the orcs. Warlocks are the new baseline of character power.

Wizards isn't just burning their bridges. They're annihilating them.

I'm glad to see that some of the more mainstream publications are coming to the realization that ethanol is a boondoggle that's going to end up costing us billions, both at the gas pump and at the dinner table, without making a significant impact on global warming emissions. The latest of these articles is by Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone , and here's the point that I think everyone needs to understand:

Reason has posted a good article discussing the merits of New York City Department of Education Ronald G. Fryer's plan to give kids monetary bonuses for both taking and scoring well on academic tests. Some have praised the plan as providing much needed incentives to poor students; others slam it as corrupting the noble nature of learning for the sake of learning.

I'll leave aside the debate over the merits of the program; what bothers me is that we don't do enough to foster this kind of creativity, and that the knee-jerk reaction isn't "let's see what happens!" but rather "this is wrong, let's kill it!".

Gamers with Jobs reports on Shadowrun developer Mitch Gitelman's disappointment with the 7.0 reviews that his game has been getting. He laments that reviewers are being too harsh, have unreal expectations, and don't appreciate the game for being innovative. Having reviewed the game for SCI-FI (and giving it a C+) I figured I'd offer my two cents on this.

Wizards of the Coast has launched a new online community for strategy gamers. According to Wizards' press release: "Gleemax will be built on three pillars – community, games, and editorial content – each representing the essence of what WotC has been providing strategy gamers for more than 15 years."

And it's called Gleemax. Gleemax.

Articles like this one piss me off. Men have been hammered for years about not taking an active role in their families, about putting job above family, and all the standard guilt trips that could take you to the Moon and back if only you could clock the frequent flyer miles.

The thing is, guilt trips aren't needed -- in my experience, Gen X dads generally want to spend time with their families, and make job decisions that reflect that. Unsurprisingly, those choices effect their yearly income. So when this story -- which is about the decline in median male income from $40,000 in 1974 to $35,000 in 2004, I just to scream.

Now doesn't this just instill you with confidence in our new fangled voting system?. Kind of makes me long for the days of the hanging chad. Wired had it right a few years ago when they published a back page "relics of the future" shot that had a validated voting receipt indicating when, where and who you voted for. Any system without a paper trail is setting itself up for disaster; any system that lacks a paper trail and transparency in its operation (as is the case with Diebold) is looking at a voting apocalypse.

Listening to my various geek and gaming podcasts has confirmed a curious fact that I've noticed among my own circle of friends: geeks love good beer. While not all of my friends drink, those who do drink tend to choose microbrews over mainstream beer, and even if they choose a mainstream beer it tends to be something other than the Big Three (Bud, Miller, Coors) like Samuel Adams or Yuengling.

With that in mind, I offer this bit of insight into the rise of mass market beer, the subsequent collapse of American breweries, and the resurgence orchestrated by the microbrew market: "The Longneck Tail: A revolution in American beer".

A while back, there was talk on certain libertarian-leaning web sites, like Reason and Tech Central Station, about the rise of the curious creatures known as South Park Republicans, of which South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were the poster children. South Park Republicans were the younger, hipper Republicans -- ones who grokked the importance of small goverment and free markets, but also valued free minds and social liberalism.

Except now, times are a'changing. The Republicans have been steadily alienating their classically liberal would-be allies with their big and bigger government programs and relgious social agendas. Now folks in South Park are looking for a new party.

In a post-WorldCon entry on his blog Contrary Brin, science fiction author David Brin worries that the grey hairs that dominated the convention are yet another sign that science fiction fandom is aging ... and that this does not bode well for the future of the genre.