You would build this dream together, standing strong forever.
Biscuits.
This song was my favorite jam when I was thirteen. I still have to sing along with Grace Slick and play an air drum solo when it plays on the oldies station.
GothBard was in the original music video. But the one on YouTube now has ads so she isn't visible any more.
I hate that youtube puts those stupid cards up over the end of the video. And worse, it only happens if I'm on my phone. On the Xbox or my laptop, they don't show up because I disabled them in the settings menu (or adblock takes care of it), but the mobile app or mobile site shows them regardless.
Hmm... we always watch YouTube on our Roku. I'll have to try on my desktop and see whether she reappears...
You would build this dream together, standing strong forever.
Biscuits.
This song was my favorite jam when I was thirteen. I still have to sing along with Grace Slick and play an air drum solo when it plays on the oldies station.
GothBard was in the original music video. But the one on YouTube now has ads so she isn't visible any more.
So, when your infant is 6 months old and crying for 2 hours every morning because your pediatrician told you to "just let him cry", that's a parental choice. I disagree with it, but I may be in the minority.
When your toddler is 2 years old and walking and talking and still crying for 2 hours every morning, it really feels like something is wrong there. But you can't exactly walk up to your neighbors and say, "Hey, I'm really concerned that your toddler is crying all the time. You should get that checked out."
The Bay Area's microclimates are a neverending source of amusement. We've been getting warnings about a massive heat wave for about a week now, and I keep checking the weather and see nothing remotely akin to a heat wave locally...
...and apparently it's here...
...and it's still struggling to break 70°F here in Albany...
EDIT: Oh, I know that we'll get ours come late September or early October, when we get a week's worth of 95-105°F weather in uninsulated houses never designed for that kind of heat with no AC, and we'll listen to the hand-wringing about how, "It's never been so hot around here before," when it happens every. Single. Year. But that's months away. It's July. It's cold. (57°F and foggy at the moment.) I'll be smug all the way up 'til when the heat wave actually hits me.
Blacky continues his entertainingly clueless ways, last night nearly falling into the toilet because his sense of depth perception is apparently nonexistent. And his attempts to steal the Fluffernutter's food continue in the vein of, "NobodysHome puts out food. Blacky runs up to it. NobodysHome carries him out of the room. Blacky wonders how his clever plan was foiled again."
Fluffy, on the other hand...
As I mentioned, she'd already learned that going straight for the food was a no-go, so she'd been waiting for me to leave the room before descending on it. I'd come back in, catch her in the act, and go out.
So she's started hiding until after my first revisit. The only way I caught her this morning was because I like to do a kitten check in the morning and after a search of the house didn't reveal her I went back to the bedroom, and there she was, happily nomming the Fluffernutter's food. She'd hid through multiple revisits until I took long enough that she was confident I was gone for good.
The fact that it was called 'breakfast stout' should have been a warning sign, since nobody but the most abandoned rakehell actually drinks stout for breakfast, and Heaven hides its face in shame and anguish from someone who voluntarily drinks beer that tastes of jam - jam! - at any time. Revolting, but I shall still finish it, since it cost me £4.90.
"So how am I supposed to know who is behind in their work? Open all their emails? Please advise?"
(1) Unlearn any and all stupidity someone whose brain resides in the 1970s taught you.
(2) Determine the industry standard expected production from each employee based on their role.
(3) Instead of monitoring their emails, or how many bathroom breaks they take, or whether they're watching YouTube or YouPorn at their desks, monitor their production as well-defined for every job in every industry.
(4) If they're meeting their production quota and their work is of acceptable quality, leave them the f*** alone.
EDIT: I swear, such requests enrage me because they show such a fundamental lack of comprehension as to why you hired an employee in the first place. You needed a job done. You hired someone to do that job. Either they are doing that job satisfactorily or they aren't. Anything else is none of your f***ing business unless they're breaking the law.
My mom's cousin flew out from Sacramento so he could see all of the kids (lifelong bachelor, Eve's daughter and my two are the closest things he has to grandchildren, and he treats them that way).
He ended up trying to teach WW, Val and me to play Bridge yesterday. The guys couldn't deal with it. I quickly got hooked, downloaded a tutorial app, am up to lesson 38 (advanced bidding).
Why did not one ever tell me this game was so cool?
It's like Japanese black sesame ice cream. You would never guess until you try it.
OMG. The moment our father thought we were old enough (I might have been 13-ish?) he taught us Bridge. Instant addiction. It's such a good game, and so underrated.
And yes, Bridge etiquette is a constant thing of ridicule out our table ("If you'd done that at a real table a little old lady would've shot you,") but it's still a really fun game.
Self-congratulatory true story:
So, I'd been playing for several years when I was helping chaperone a ski trip and some of the other chaperones needed a fourth for Bridge. I admitted I'd never played outside of my family game but I'd be happy to try. I proceeded to get the most ludicrous set of hands ever, performed two slams, and was never invited to play with them again, because I was obviously a Bridge shark.
We're in a massive (1000+ attendees) Zoom presentation, so only the presenters have sound. And one of THEM started watching a movie without muting themselves. You heard the swelling opening music and the industry jingle before they realized what they were doing and muted themselves. It's like, "Seriously? You're watching a movie while you're presenting?!?!?"
Impus Minor pointed out one of the unspoken benefits of living in a stupid-rich area: "One man's trash is another man's treasure" takes on a whole new level of stupid.
Three or four weeks ago he found a fully-functional 42" nearly-new Samsung TV set that the owners discarded because the batteries in the remote had leaked and ruined the remote. "Honey, the remote won't work any more!" "Oh, I guess we'll need to buy a new TV, then."
Around that time he declared that he needed a work table and co-opted one of our TV tables.
Yesterday GothBard and I were walking and found a fully-intact drafting table on the curb for disposal. And not a crappy one: Powdered steel base, laminated top; probably a $300-$400 table. Thrown out because the plastic cupholders on the side were bent a bit.
So Impus Minor is furnishing his entire room using other people's throwaways of top-tier items with trivial flaws.
It's why I don't use grocery delivery services. "Buy this brand or don't buy it" is an option you can select, but since they get paid based on the total bill they always try to choose a replacement instead.
From what little I know, some shoppers(it may now be most or even all) get in trouble if they do not make a substitution.
Which wouldn't surprise me one whit. The illusion of choice is a classic megacorporation tactic. Next to each items is a, "What should the shopper do if this item is out of stock?" checkbox, with, "Choose a substitute item" or "Do not purchase this item". But the shopper is instructed to ignore that checkbox and always purchase an item, thereby generating more money for the corporation, and they can chalk it up to "an honest mistake" and say, "They'll contact the shopper about the issue."
...a couple of months ago, our neighbors had an arborist come by and the aborist recommended cutting the dead part of a tree overhanging our yard away. GothBard objected, because dead tree full of crows. The arborist relented.
Our gardener, Force of Nature who wouldn't even stop for COVID (we taped the money to the back door because he just kept right on coming even when we told him we'd pay him not to), came to the same conclusion as the arborist. He examined it, thought about it, thought about our cats, and without so much as a by-your-leave came by today and took the tree out. When I asked him to tell us next time his response was simply, "It could have hurt your cats, so it had to go."
When a man picks up a chainsaw to defend your cats, it's really hard to be peeved at him.
Terms differ, sometimes wildly, over the many, many years. I have received and delivered talking tos over the same many, many years. What was acceptable when you were 20 may not be acceptable today and vice versa, which is a shock to some.
O.M.G. Don't get me started on the number of words we considered perfectly "fine" back in the day but that are now verboten. Some of them smack me in the face like a frozen halibut when I say something and the kids gasp and shudder, "You can't say that word!"
Gender is a mess; an interesting mess, to some of us, but another one of those things that really highlights how humans are a weird bunch of social primates, I guess.
** spoiler omitted **...
An older definition:
Remember that I'm from the Rocky Horror Picture Show days, so "transsexual" back then translated almost perfectly to "bisexual" or "pansexual". I really appreciate that Impus Major opened my eyes to gender (societal roles and the sex you identify with) vs. biological sex (for over 95% of us, either XY male or XX female).
The curiosity for me, as I said, is someone who declares themselves trans but who, to an outside observer, does nothing beyond changing their pronoun. And I think that's a fundamentally deeper issue with me. There's a trans woman in the kids' weekly game who bursts into tears and curls up into a ball whenever she gets misgendered; it's a very strong, very deeply felt reaction for her. And yet people trying to explain her response to me ask me, "How would you feel if everyone started calling you 'she' and 'her'?" and my answer is, "I really wouldn't care."
But that is obviously an aspect of me and my comfort with myself, and not everyone shares my honey badger attitude.
So as I said (and Orthos repeated), I don't have to understand it, I have to respect it. And I do that. But the scientist in me is still curious as all heck.
I think my entire issue is the "gender" vs. "sex" issue. If you look at the U.S. "definition" of gender, I'm a woman. I cook, clean, take care of the kids, pay the bills, don't like sports, guns, or muscle cars, and would rather spend an evening cooking for and chatting with an exhausted group of women who'd all had s****y days at work than go to a bar, strip club, or just hang out with the guys. But I ignore any and all grief people try to give me over that 'cause I'm obstinate. So although I fulfill all the gender requirements of being a woman in U.S. society, I don't consider myself a woman. So transgenderism is hard for me, because if you don't like your gender role, ignore it.
We don't have a solid term for transsexism; "transsexual" was coopted and is utterly useless as a term. I consider a transsexual to be someone uncomfortable with the biological sex they were born with.
And I think therein lies my bafflement (and Drejk put it well -- since I don't suffer it I may never understand it): If you don't like your gender, you do you. If you don't like your biological sex, it seems odd that you'd continue to pursue all the trappings of it (makeup, lipstick, dresses, etc.)
But yeah, I appreciate Orthos and Drejk providing some context, and I think Drejk is right; my issue is a complete mental disconnect from that feeling -- you can't empathize with something you don't feel. You can respect it. You can accept someone else's choices about it. But you can't fundamentally understand it.
So, posting here because I'm hoping some FaWtL folk will be able to shed some light for this old cis White male.
Non-Transgender Transgenders?:
So, being a parent in the Bay Area, we encounter more trans kids than most, from our neighbor to two members of the kids' gaming groups to another kid's boyfriend to the first transgender person I chaperoned.
Yet the boyfriend baffles me. He insists on being called "he". But that is the end-all and be-all of it. He is a biological female. He puts on makeup and lipstick every day, prefers flattering dresses, and carries a purse. No one who casually sees him on the street or hears him speaking would ever think of him as anything other than a biological female. And yes, he has a boyfriend.
So it begs the question: What is the point of calling yourself "he" if you are going to continue to fully live your live as a biological female? I'm sure there is one; even around here I'm sure he gets no end up crap for choosing "he" as a pronoun. And he doesn't seem to be doing it just to make a point. Yet he's the second trans person I've met who switched pronouns and nothing more. And I'd love to know what I'm missing.
EDIT: I asked Impus Major and he doesn't know, either. He made the point that we don't need to know, we can just respect their decision. But as a scientist, I want to know. Human gender and sexuality is a fascinating, barely-scratched realm of study.
I think that really shows the difference between a "friend" and a "loyalist":
I was looking up an old friend because we're desperate for a cat-sitter for our Vegas trip and his son is responsible enough I'd trust him to do it. On my Google search for his phone number... oh, my! Turns out he was ousted from his long-time government job in a major corruption scandal. I knew the guy for years, and it's hard for me to believe he got caught up in something like that.
A loyalist would say, "It's obviously a set-up job! Someone planted the evidence! My friend can't possibly be guilty."
It's a terrible attitude to have, because it enables people in doing terrible things.
I still consider myself his friend, but I read the mountain of evidence and investigation, and I have no reason to doubt that he really did it and really ****ed up. I'm baffled, but I'm not so blindly loyal that I say, "He can't possibly have done that!"
Which is always why I despise the phrase, "A friend is a person who has your back no matter what."
No. A friend is someone who will believe the evidence when it turns out that you did something horrible, but who will still be there for you in spite of it.
I swear, Morrigan (Stripey) has an attitude of, "If it is alive and I can see it, then it's prey."
She weighs all of 4 pounds.
And yet...
...my brother's S.O. just texted us a couple of days ago decrying the fact that they kept two of the kittens, and between them and their mother the entire property had become a killing field. She wanted to write a letter of apology to the wildlife still surviving on that dire acre of doom. But apparently the three of them are bringing back 5-10 kills a day to the house.
There are many times a cat's territorial nature ("I am terrified to be anywhere outside of my own territory") can be frustrating. Last night was one of those instances.
As has become the bizarre standard around here, the biggest 4th of July shows around the Bay Area were last night. And they must have been something, because the resonating explosions were enough to rattle the house.
Our cats' reaction? "Oh, the house must be purring. Time to nap."
They absolutely. Did. Not. Care.
Neighbor's dog with anxiety issues? Not a good scene.
And if we could have preemptively put the kittens over there, they would have been sleeping on her (because all kittens know that big dogs are the bestest pillows), she would have started, and they would have been, "Go back to sleep! You're warm! The house is purring!", and it might have helped...
To summarize a lifetime of expectation-setting, when my mother turned 60 she asked each of us, "If I were mentally incapacitated, would you pull the plug on me?" I was the only one who unhesitatingly said, "Yes," because she'd been emphasizing how important it was to her for our entire lifetimes, so I got medical power of attorney.
Fast forward 30 years. She had a stroke. It was not life-threatening, but it seriously impacted her mental acuity. On that test that Trump was so proud to get 30/30 on, she got 16/30. She has serious short-term memory issues and isn't really "there" any more. She is in exactly the situation she never wanted to be in: Mentally feeble and a burden on her family. This is what she prepared us for her entire life, begging us to make sure that if she ever got to this point we would mercifully kill her.
But nope. That's illegal. Because life is somehow sacred, even if the person desperately never wanted that life. She has signed legal documents, powers of medical attorney, discussions with all of her doctors. But the only person who can decide to end her life, even in a euthanasia-legal state, is her. And she's too mentally feeble to make that decision any more.
I understand the legal protections: Too many evil people would try to exploit their relatives and get early inheritances by killing their elders off. But if you can provide a lifetime of writings by the person in question that say, "I never wanted this life," you should be allowed to let that person peacefully move on.
...aaaaand, Stripey squirreled under the fence to visit labradoodle. 80-pound dog did no harm to 3.5-pound kitten. Kitten has lost her outside privileges 'cause excited dogs that big can be lethal dangers. But the labradoodle is half labrador, and there is no gentler breed.
Another sign of how different the new generation is: Yesterday our gardener was supposed to come so I put his payment ($100 cash) on the door, as usual. And forgot about it. And he didn't come.
The kids' entire gaming group came over -- around 10-12 people all aged 20-25. They were here for about 9 hours. And after they left, the cash was still there.
I am sorry to say that this was not how things were when I was young; I can't imagine any of my friends having a large gathering with cash on the door without that cash vanishing.
OK, that's pretty fricking adorable. Wish I could claim any credit for it whatsoever.
Old Neighbors have a labradoodle rescue. Apparently she has serious anxiety issues, especially around other animals. Unbeknownst to any of us, Fluffy (Lenore) has been going up to the fence, touching noses with her, and calming her down. And the other kittens have followed suit. And now the kittens are the only animals the labradoodle fundamentally trusts.
Neighbor: "I wish the trainer we're bringing in was as good with her as your kittens."
(The labradoodle also stopped barking at us, but started barking at one of the kids' friends who visited. Apparently, we're "with the kittens".)
(Annoyed that I can't find a shorter version)
Being well over 50, I feel justified in this tirade. The kids' friends range in age from 20 to 25. None of them are disabled. None of them are obese. Some of them even participate in competitive sports.
And yet over half of them cannot manage to step over our 24" kitten barrier. (OK, they sell it as a small dog enclosure, but I'm sure it was intended for kittens.)
Admittedly, I keep myself in shape. But I've never had an issue. GothBard had a shoelace catch *once*. Impus Major moves past it as if it doesn't exist. Impus Minor finds it annoying, but has no trouble.
How can so many 20-25-year-olds be so incapable of getting past a simple 24" barrier that they constantly knock is over, get tangled up in it, or otherwise can't manage a remarkably simple physical agility test?
Got food. Walked into the back yard. Showed the girls the bowl. They watched me put it down and head back inside. They trotted straight over to the bowl and started chowing down.
Got food. Walked into WhimseyShire. Showed the Furminator the bowl. He watched me put it down and head up the stairs. He chased after me, begging for the food he'd just seen. He got confused when my hands were empty. I had to physically pick him up and put him down next to the bowl for it to register to him.
...and, for the first time in 40+ years of cat ownership, a cat has managed not only to remove his e-collar, but to hide it so well an entire family searching the house couldn't find it.
This tom is a monster. A little black deity of chaos and destruction. And purring.
Blacky barged out of WhimseyShire at 4:00 am, collar-free, and ran amok. At 5:30 am GothBard got up and administered the opiate. It didn't slow him down at all. It's now 7:50, he's exhausted both other kittens, and he's still rampaging around the house.
I had an epiphany this morning: Although I was an alcoholic between 40 and 50, before then I drank very little and did no mind-altering drugs at all.
And I just realized: It was fundamentally important to me to always be in control of myself because my friends were sadistic pranksters. I give the origin of the phrase "buttweiner" as an example.
So if you want to avoid drugs and addiction, make sure you have friends who will ruthlessly exploit your helplessness.
This message brought to you because I've started smelling smoke from the neighbor's house, and I suspect their tween son is starting to experiment, and I'm always absolutely baffled by anyone who inhales anything these days after all the negative publicity, but then I have to realize that I was a very special snowflake in that there was no way in h*** I was going to incapacitate myself anywhere near my friends...
So, how bada$$ is Mephisto Zoolander Meatball the Magnificent?
9:00 pm: 75 mg gabapentin. We couldn't particularly tell that he'd been dosed.
6:00 am: 75 mg gabapentin. This time he was obviously completely unaffected. When he got to the vet at 8:00 am, as they described it, 'He wouldn't stop yelling at us 'til we took him out of his cage and held him, at which point he just started purring."
10:30 am: Surgery. The anaethestic actually worked, much to everyone's surprise, but...
12:00 noon: He was already awake and demanding food. They fed him a little and he had no trouble at all.
2:00 pm: After two solid hours of him bouncing off the walls and attacking everything in sight, then getting moved to the studio and doing vertical laps around the cat tree and desk ("he'll sleep after the surgery" my eye), we dosed him with 0.03 mg of Buprenorphine.
3:30 pm; He settled down into his basket to watch the world. Which is his [i]absolutely normal behavior at that hour[/b].
In short, they haven't given us a drug yet that even slows him down.
I was concerned that the vet recommended 1.5x the dosage of gabapentin that Fluffy had gotten. Shouldn't have been. He shook it off as if it was saline.
Now he's back from surgery and I honestly don't know how they knocked him out. He's up, he's hyper, and we're sitting here begging the vet, "Please! We know he just came out of surgery, but there must be some safe sedative to give him!"
Boy plays hard.
EDIT: I emailed the vet for help and she said it was OK to hit him up with the opiate that knocked Fluffy cold for 12 hours at a time. We'll see whether it even slows him down.
Advice to anyone providing training: Don't consistently insult your audience's intelligence trying to reassure them.
I've been watching this training for 8 minutes.
"I know it's really hard to understand a screenshot during video training so you probably won't be able to navigate this the first time, but we'll provide you with the PDF with all the instructions."
"Providing or getting feedback can be really daunting, so I know you'll be really worried about it."
"The navigation here changed from just 'Feedback' to 'feedback center', and I know that can be confusing, but..."
I have absolutely no desire to listen to these people any more.
Yeah, once they learned that it was cheaper to sell you devices with no controls *and* they could make money by making you install a data-slurping app to control said devices, we were all boned.
gran rey de los mono wrote:
See, in the settings menu, the app asks for permission to use Bluetooth (Makes sense), the camera (Uh, what?), and location services (Why? Also, I keep this off all the time.) So I try turning all those on. And it works.
Case in point.
And every time I see one of these, I'm grateful to Global Megacorporation for their very pragmatic, "If we catch you collecting data you don't absolutely need for business purposes specifically for our company and not some other company, you're fired," approach. Yes, I understand that because we're a multinational corporation, it's much cheaper to write our software once to adhere to the strictest privacy standards in the world than to re-format it for every country based on their privacy laws, but it could be done with a swappable "privacy module" and we don't. So I appreciate it.
They're now climbing all the shelving, knocking off and breaking all the little knick-knacks that clutter every square inch of horizontal space in the house.
Throwing out SOOOO much decorative stuff makes me happy. And probably Evil.
I just saw one of Vany's favorite kinds of customer questions:
Context: We disable configuration tools on production environments because duh. You *NEVER* modify your live production environment, and we've been bitten enough by customers that now we just disable it outright.
Customer: Why won't the configuration tools work on my production environment?
(Yep. He knew they were configuration tools. He knew it was a production environment. And he was going to go ahead anyway. Like working on wiring while the circuit is live and hoping everything goes "fine".)
I swear, I wish they'd kept up the Let Me Google That For You web site (http://lmgtfy.com, now shown as insecure so no linky). The number of co-workers who come to me with stupid questions that could be answered by either a check of the application or a quick Google search is appalling.
This morning:
"Hi, Nobody! Do you know how to get to this page of the app?"
(Nobody takes the time to sign in, go to the obvious place where we keep ALL of these links, finds it there, and sighs because yet another co-worker just wasted both of their time instead of first checking on their own.)
"<path>".
Yeah, I didn't even say, "Here it is," I just sent them the path, hoping that the implied, "...stupid." won't be missed.
All the cats get a weekly weigh-in; the Flutternutter to make sure she's not losing weight, and the kittens to make sure they're growing at an appropriate speed. To encourage easy weigh-ins, they get treats as soon as they're weighed.
So yep, weighed the FlufferNutter and carried her out to the studio for her morning brushing and peace and quiet, came back in, and found all three kittens piled around the scale. Two of them were on it, with Fluffy (too big to fit on it with the other two) huddled next to it. They know the routine.
Back to work after a 5-day weekend. Not one, not two, but three "Hi, @channel!" alerts making Slack go bonkers asking why I haven't dealt with these "urgent" messages.
In terms of lost productivity for every one of the 800+ people who have to stop what they're doing, check the alert, and ignore it, I think Global Megacorporation should hire a professional abuser at $100k/year whose sole job it is to hurl abuse at anyone who uses @channel or Reply All inappropriately.
Insert NobodysHome's requisite Grumpy Old Man tirade here. Yeah, once they learned that it was cheaper to sell you devices with no controls *and* they could make money by making you install a data-slurping app to control said devices, we were all boned.
Continuing gran's trend of, "In general, people are stupid and horrible even when they're trying to be nice," I give you Dog Lady.
A couple of weeks ago there was a timid knock at our door over lunch. I answered, and an "older" woman (maybe 60s or 70s) told me her dog had the runs and left a mess on my sidewalk and could she please use our hose?
What a wonderful person! Of course I consented, and while she got started I even went out back and got her a spray nozzle and attached it for her to make her life easier. She cleaned up, packed away our hose and went on her way.
And I know you already know where this is going...
We have one of those "spring hoses" that's coiled like a spring so it's really easy to extend and retract. Except... she somehow managed in her short time in front of our house to tie it into a Gordian knot. I spent 20 minutes just now trying to untangle it, but it is absolutely astonishing... I mean, "How?!?!? How did you get my hose this messed up in only 10 minutes?"
I love that she wanted to do me a solid and took responsibility for her dog. I hate that it's going to take me and a kid a good half hour to restore the hose.
Uber Update: It's better and worse than I thought:
(1) No, GothBard did not have to ride with the same guy who ditched her.
(2) The new guy told her she should never make reservations for an Uber, and explained:
- Uber allows drivers to cancel after 3 minutes of waiting in the specified location, and then pays them a cancellation fee. The driver estimated that the other guy made about $50 by leaving without having to drive all the way out to Heathrow.
- Uber does not require the driver to be there at the appointed time; they can arrive a few minutes early and then leave.
- This has become a cottage industry for Uber drivers in the U.K.
So in summary, GothBard made a 5:30 pm reservation. The driver arrived at 5:25 pm, called her, then left at 5:28 pm. BEFORE THE RESERVATION TIME. He was paid some amount for this. GothBard was charged a $20 cancellation fee (which she appealed and they waived... ONCE). And, according to her second driver, this is standard practice for Uber drivers in the U.K. if you make reservations.
GothBard set up a ride from her workplace to Heathrow (a 2-hour trip costing over $150) two days ago. The driver showed up 5 minutes early. She was ready, but still in her hotel room, so when he called she told him, "I'll be right down." He canceled her as a no-show.
To make things even more "fun", she re-booked with Uber and Uber sent him right back to pick her up. It's not just that it's going to be an extremely unpleasant ride with someone who obviously didn't want to do it, but a woman alone in a foreign country with a guy with obvious issues for the next 2 hours is pretty darned dangerous, thank you, Uber. (Not so much that GothBard is in danger from this guy -- she's in a country where guns are far less common, and I'm fairly sure she'd kick his a**. But she is a strong woman with years of martial arts training.) Uber should've flagged this guy as bad news the moment he canceled someone's ride before the appointment time.
Watching the monthly, "Now Amazon orders its workers to relocate to xxx," continues to make me pat myself on the back for dodging that bullet. No amount of pay would be worth the crap their employees have to put up with.
Str 16, Dex 15, Con 13, Int 12, Wis 8, Cha 14; Bluff +6 (+7 vs. Ulfen), Intimidate +8, Knowledge (all) +2 (+3 about dwarves), Perception +3, Perform (wind) +6 (+7 vs. Ulfen), Prof (sailor) +3, UMD +6; ACP –2
Inspired Rage:
Accept or not each round;+2 morale Str/Con,+1 morale Will,–1 AC pen.Can use own rage bonuses.Can’t concentrate/cast spells/use own rage powers/(Int,Dex,Cha) skills except Acrobatics,Fly,Intimidate & Ride
NG (Ulfen) Human Skald 1; HP 10/10; AC 16; TAC 12; FF 14; CMD 15; Fort +3 (+4 performing); Ref +2; Will +1; Init +2; Per +3; Spd 30 ft; Inspired Rage (8/11 rounds used); 0/2 spell slots used; soft green light emanates from his horn
(84
posts)
Kayden Al'Connor
Senses: Golden Eyes; Scent; Sense Emotions (DC 15 Per); Per +19 (+27 Scent)
Skills:
Acro +22; Bluff -1; Climb +14; Dip +1 [+6 illicit barter]; Disguise -3; Handle Animal +12; Heal +4; Intim +1; K (geography) +13; K (nature) +5; Perc +19 (+27 scent); Prof. (stablehand) +4; Ride +18; Sense Motive +16; Stealth +18; Survival +13; Swim +5
HP: 100/100; AC: 24; FF: 24; Touch: 24; For +6; Ref +14; Will +5; CMD: 25; CMB: +9 (+11 w/gauntlet); BAB +8/+3; Rep +6
Attacks:
Gauntlet +15/+10 (+19/+14 vs T*) [1d3+2 B (+2d6+2 vs T*)]; Dagger (10') +14/+9 (+16/+11 vs T*) [crit 19-20/x2] [1d4+2 P or S (+2 vs T*)]; Improvised Club (10') +9/+4 (+11/+6 vs T*) [1d6+1 B (+2 vs T*); TWF: -4 to attack rolls. *T=trollocs
count as humanoids & construct.+4 racial bonus on saving throws against mind-affecting effects,paralysis,poison,stun effects.Not subject to fatigue/exhaustion;immune to sleep effects & disease.
**Emotionless:Never gain morale bonuses.Immune to fear/emotion effects.
Captain Drake
Drake II
Captain Drake Silver
Watashikana
Fighter Deck - Valeros
Drake XXI
Drake XXII
Drake XXIII
Drake XXIV
Drake XXV
Drake XXVI
