Monthly Archives: October 2026

MA Question 3, 2026

Posted on by Henry

If you’re upset with the status quo of Massachusetts politics, voting yes on Question 3 might feel good. It offers what seems like a simple fix for a system that feels unresponsive and unhelpful. I agree with much of what Question 3’s proponents say is wrong with the MA state government and electoral system.

Despite that, I strongly urge you to vote against it. Their solution is even worse than what we already have.

The problem is rooted in a few things: our current voting system, the cost of running a political campaign (and the advantage of having lots of cash), and our campaign finance laws.

Running a political campaign is expensive. Voter outreach and the advertising necessary to get name recognition for your race is expensive. Wealthy people, or people who curry favor with wealthy donors and super PACs (or better yet, wealthy people who curry favor with wealthy donors and super PACs) are in a much better position to get the word out about their candidacy, and thereby get votes. But no matter how big a problem the money is, and how much it skews our current political environment—which is a lot, by the way—our voting system remains a large enough problem that Question 3 will fix nothing. Actually, Question 3 will only make things worse.

I’ll give you some examples.

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5e is wrong about Charisma, part 2

Posted on by Henry

This post is (obviously) a follow-up to 5e is wrong about Charisma. If you haven’t read that post, this post is going to confuse you. If you aren’t familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, or what a roleplaying game is, or what saving throws are, this might be a bit of a stretch.

I haven’t dug deeper into the abilities of various monsters here. I have gone through every spell in the 2014 Player Handbook (PHB) which targets a mental saving throw. That means any spell that requires an Intelligence (INT), Wisdom (WIS), or Charisma (CHA) save. I’ve laid out a table with the spell names (sorted by level, alphabetized), what the original / current saving throw is, and what saving throw I suggest. Where further expansion on my thinking seems necessary, I’ve added notes below the table.

I’ve also laid out my thinking about what the mental attributes represent in their respective saving throws. Strangely the 2014 PHB doesn’t lay out much guidance on this front. The relevant pages are p179 and p205 PHB, and both entries are quite short. The pages preceding p179 are useful for descriptions of attributes, but they run afoul of my gripes aired in my previous post. The 2014 Dungeon Master Guide (DMG) has better guidance in a table on p238, but it seems clear (from comparing that table to the required saving throws of many 5e spells) that many of 5e’s spells from the 2014 PHB only loosely follow the guidance on that page.

So… what are the underlying principles that I’m trying to follow?

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Country, Romance, & expanding my palate, 10/1/26

Posted on by Henry

I used to think I hated country music. Johnny Cash made me reconsider. Now I admit that I do like some country, even if most of it isn’t to my tastes.

But what the devil got me into reading romance genre novels?

When I was younger I volunteered at a library (my hometown’s Fletcher Free, with the wonderful Lorrie and Bill). I handled everything that came through Circulation’s check-in during my shift, and I would shake my head every time I scanned in another Harlequin bodice-ripper—figuratively, not literally, because that would have been too much head shaking. They were extremely popular, getting comparable traction to the detective novels & legal dramas. Those old paperbacks were well-worn and much-loved, with technically-still-clothed beautiful men and women on their covers. Given how close the books were to falling apart back then, I wonder whether any of those books have survived the intervening decades.

Romance novels did not appeal to me. I was still in middle school, and I did not have the imaginative empathy necessary to wonder (much less understand) why people might like them. This, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure younger-Henry had already discovered internet porn.

I had lots of judgments. I never explicitly stated my judgments to the readers, but they were probably obvious to anyone paying much attention. Most readers returning romance novels wouldn’t have seen this, because they didn’t drop off their returns face-to-face. They preferred the anonymity of the off-hours book return. Given the alternative I offered, I get it.

These days, my relationship with romance novels is more like how I feel about country songs. I still don’t enjoy most of them, but I do read a few. Some I even really like. Obviously I didn’t dip my toe into the romance-waters just because other people like the genre—if that were enough, I would have devoured these books long ago. As I mentioned above, romance is popular. It sells.

So what changed?

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