Some Security Basics, aka "How To Fly A Computer"

This is adapted from a post I originally made on a Facebook group after two members started posting spam from their accounts.

Computer Security For Normal People:

1) Pick passwords with both letters and numbers. This is an easy way to protect yourself from bots that use simple automated attacks to guess your password. The first documented computer cracking case in 1986 involved a cracker who wrote a program that guessed passwords from a dictionary.

2) Make sure your email account's password is different. If someone can guess your password on your twitter account, he might try the same password on your bank account. Make sure your email password is different than every other password. It's not necessary to have a different password for every single website you use, but you should have more than one to protect yourself. For example, I have a "dumb" password for services that I don't plan on using more than once, a "secure" password for services where I care about privacy and people doing things with my name, and a "banking" password for services where getting the account cracked would be real-life inconvenient and require me to file paperwork.
 
3) Keep your computer's software up-to-date. If you're running Windows, then use Windows Update. Make sure you install all updates that are marked important, then change your Windows Update settings so that your computer automatically downloads your updates for you. If you're running a Mac, you should be fine unless you have trouble with #5.
Also make sure your web browser is always up-to-date. If you're using IE6 you're doing it wrong. Older versions of Flash and Java have security holes, make sure they are up-to-date too.

4) Use antivirus software. Microsoft distributes an excellent lightweight antivirus called Microsoft Security Essentials. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download Schedule your computer to scan itself monthly.
It's probably not the best idea to run two antiviruses on your computer. Use whatever one you have available. If your computer came with a trial version, it should be okay as long as the trial keeps its virus definitions up-to-date.
5) Don't run it if you don't know what it is. If your computer tells you it wants to run software and you don't know what it is, click No, click the X on the window, or press Escape. Do not download and run software from sources you do not trust or do not recognize.
If in doubt, Google things and do some research. Be wary of fake reviews, scammers are known to pay people to write tons of positive reviews to inflate their review scores and search rankings.
Look closely at the URLs of download links (right-click and copy the link into a new browser tab if you're not sure), it's common for scammers to register temporary short-URL sites on co.uk and similar sites. Only the last two parts of a domain count, "download.microsoft.com.totallynotascam.co.uk" is a bogus site.

 6) Check your plugins. One of the most common types of malware is web browser "toolbar" plugins. Check what plugins and extensions are installed on your web browser, and research any you don't recognize.
Facebook and Twitter now allow external apps which can get access to all of your personal information, and also can expose information about your friends. For Facebook, click Settings (the Gear icon in the upper-left)>Account Settings, then click the Apps tab on the left. For Twitter, click the Settings Icon (the gear)>Settings, then click the Apps tab on the left. If you see an app you don't recognize or don't use, it's probably best to remove it.

Why We Want Monsters In Fiction

Yhatzee Croshaw had a humorous insight in his most recen Zero Punctuation review:

"But surely the whole long history of human endeavor has been to find monsters. Because surely it justifies our existence to know that a monster considered our face worthwhile enough to peel from our skull. But we didn't find any monsters in the forests, or the oceans, or the skies. The moon was kind of a last hope, wasn't it? I'm not saying we wanted to see Niel Armstrong get blindsided by a hairy, giant moon spider while he was fiddling with the flag. It's just, you know, some of us would have gotten some sense of fulfillment from it."

I honestly can't think of a single fantasy or science fiction universe that lacks man-eating beasts. Even if those universes have a lot of deep thought behind their civilizations and politics (like Mass Effect), there's still something out there that attacks humans on sight. Sometimes it's a concession to gameplay, so that the player has something to put bullets into without feeling remorse, or something to slay so the player can gain XP before moving on to the next challenge. But thematically, monsters are usually just there to give the protagonist an opportunity to demonstrate his skills, no matter what role he plays.

D20 Crash System

This is a custom free-form D20 system I made a few months ago. I based it around the concept of "wagers", where characters bet their hit points on attacks and all attacks are opposed checks.

I'm just distributing it for free for now, but I may come to revisit it at a later date.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cc0c4IhmQvE13qnRpny3P1RjRs8Iu-xrk50eH33KeZw/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone wants to playtest it and give me feedback, that would be great.