Orthos's page

Getting dressed on St. Patrick's Day always reminds me how much I loathed this holiday as a kid.

My Depression-era parents gave me nothing but hand-me-downs from my older brother, and they preferred to buy darker shades to hide the dirt to reduce washing. Plus 1970s. Clothing with any trace of green on it was hard to come by. Plus, even as a shy child who could never self-advocate, I was a non-conformist. Why the h*** do I have to wear green just because everyone else does?

So I got pinched. A lot. So I hated St. Patrick's Day.

This reminds me of my own hatred for April 1st.

I don't enjoy pranks. I don't enjoy performing them, and I don't enjoy being subjected to them.

I'm sure there's some flavor of neurospiciness involved that results in or exacerbates my distaste for what is, essentially, an entire day dedicated to a disruption of the daily schedule by a series of what are usually poorly-performed jokes, small-scale lies, and annoying mini-assaults.

Of course, having two younger siblings meant that my disdain for the day made me an easy target, and my parents were not particularly sympathetic to my irritation, so that also contributed and essentially created a feedback loop of dislike.

Needless to say I do not bemoan the complete lack of April Fools' involvement in my life as an adult.

Same~

(Technically it's teal, specifically a darker teal that's closer to the green end of the spectrum than the blue.)

NobodysHome wrote:

** spoiler omitted **

Many people saw machines and automation take their jobs away too, and they weren't exactly happy.

It's almost like the Luddites had a point and weren't just the industry-hating terrorists they keep getting portrayed as.

Cyz has an anonymous survey for her course this semester if anyone doesn’t mind helping out. Link.

Done~

Fantasy Monster: Ghostly Muncher

Not all dogs go to heaven. The Earth is too much fun for them.

... okay I want to play a White Necromancer with one of these as a familiar.

I believe we're resuming the 5e game tomorrow. No idea what to expect beyond that we're picking up after we all recuperated from taking out the vampire-devil cult.

I have so many emails I just never get around to reading. I could probably just mass-delete them all and lose nothing of value.

That's two. Is the one remaining one of the longer ones, or the short one from the necromancer?

Went on a hike yesterday. I am so out of shape, and it was a rougher one than expected - we went thinking it was a moderate but still appropriate for novices challenge hike (so 3-4 out of 10 difficulty) but it turned out it was more of a light expert hike (7 out of 10). So I only made it about 20% into the hike before I just plain couldn't walk anymore. So I ended up crashing at a rest spot and playing Pokemon on my phone until the cars arrived to take us back down the mountain and the rest of the hikers came back down to meet up with us.

Scint made it about 80% of the way before she had to call it quits as well.

I'm both excited I got to go and highly disappointed with myself in that I only made it such a short distance in.

So I guess if I needed more motivation to keep going to the gym, there it is... because I definitely don't want this to be how things go next time. And there will be a next time.

At that point, just watch the show yourself >.>

My sister, codenamed girlboss. Has to be the best example of LE around.

"All you've been doing this week is sleep.

"Yeah. You didn't move the cars like i asked. SO shoveling the drive way was harder, and i was tired from that. And then I had to stop a car from rolling you over, and stopping that hurt, and then I shoveled the driveway at 2 am and 6 am."

The common mindset of "It doesn't count as work if 1) it doesn't benefit me in some way and 2) I don't see it actually happening" continues to vex me.

I apologize for my absence. Various things have come up and were taking lots of time. I'd hoped they'd be behind me by this point but that doesn't seem to be the case. I think I'm going to have to quit this game.

Good luck and I hope you all have a great game

Unfortunate to hear, but I understand how life goes. If things change you're always welcome to return, as I said with the others who've stepped out. Thanks for participating thus far. :)

I downloaded my W2 from TurboTax and won't be touching them further, even though I could theoretically file for free using their services since my taxes are nowhere near as complex as Impus Major's.

But given we're dealing with international taxes and me not working for half the year and all the other fun stuff as a result of our move, we're going to actually look into having someone take care of it for us this year.

NobodysHome wrote:

Yeah, just checked in with Shiro because he has much broader work experience than I do (he was a 1970s line worker at an auto factory, for example), and he has the exact same life experience I do: You get 10 paid holidays a day, and they're aligned with Federal holidays as much as possible. So seems like this is yet another, "Screw you, Millenials and younger!" moment...

Every company I've been employed by? 6 at most.

New Year's Day
Memorial Day
4th of July
Labor Day
Thanksgiving
Christmas Day

Yes, the big 6 federal holidays are there, but not Presidents Day, MLK, Veterans Day, Juneteenth, etc.

I worked for the State of Kansas before we left the US, and this was my experience as well, plus Veteran's Day and - for 2024 and 2025 - Juneteenth. Rumblings from On High suggested that Juneteenth might get un-holidayed for 2026, but I left well before that was determined one way or another.

When I worked for a private company in Tennessee, it was just the Big Six plus Black Friday, with half-days on Thanksgiving Wednesday and Christmas Eve.

Orthos wrote:

Nothing this weekend which is good because I picked up a stomach bug somewhere and spent all morning and early afternoon here sleeping.

I catch those damned things at the drop of a hat. I hope you feel better with much quickness!

I slept hard on Sunday as well, but have pretty much recovered completely now, and am more or less back to my normal schedule.

Nothing this weekend which is good because I picked up a stomach bug somewhere and spent all morning and early afternoon here sleeping.

I say this, while planning to go into getting an accounting degree in the next 2-3 years (basically waiting for Scint to finish her Masters, then a wait time to give us a financial buffer), so there's a part of me that's strongly concerned that any possibility of getting a degree in that field is going to be competing against robots.

This issue isn't going away in a year or two without something drastic happening...like an AI powered device killing someone.

Might be me being a pessimist again, but I don't even see that as a guarantee, or even likely. Not with... *gestures vaguely at the everything*

It'll take the bubble bursting and the entire system collapsing on itself to get it through these corporations' heads, and I don't think an AI-caused death will be the needle that pops it. More likely it will be something failing catastrophically in a way that costs a corporation money rather than any harm to normal people.

And as always the corpos will get out mostly scot-free except the one chosen as a scapegoat, and/or get bailed out.

Here's to quick mending. Take care of yourself.

Andostre gave me some solid advice on getting this going again so I'm going to do my best to kick-start this game back to proper gear. Thanks for sticking with the game this far, I'm definitely a bit newer to this format than I am most other game functions.

We are now going to be no-gaming for pretty much all of February. Almost the whole group - basically only minus myself - is either out of town or otherwise busy tomorrow and the week after that due to the Chinese New Year holiday, and the last weekend of February also has some stuff going on that means we're not going to be able to play, though I forget precisely what it was.

So we're basically taking a long inter-chapter break and starting again fresh in March.

NobodysHome wrote:

Y'know when your kid goes to live in an apartment on their own for a couple of weeks and you think, "Oh, good! They're finally going to learn about shopping, and housework, and all those good things!"

The shopping is a very interesting take, as he comes from an exceedingly-privileged family. As I've said both here and to him, we have the luxury of being able to choose our groceries based on quality, not on price. A good example is ham: We buy nitrate-free ham to avoid the whole ultra-processed foods thing, but it easily costs 2-3x as much as Oscar Meyer. But I'm old enough and rich enough that I don't want to eat crappy-tasting crap. Impus Minor shopped with his girlfriend, who's very obviously raised with Midwestern frugality in her soul. Her parents are well-off; I know that they own a large house in Minneapolis and are doing quite well for themselves. But... Midwestern. So the food he brought home is Target brand everything. Butter (shudder), ham, peanut butter. If it was available in the dirt-cheap store brand version, they got it. I can forgive the peanut butter. But dairy? Cured meats? Please, no! Such an interesting take, since we were paying for everything for them. Price didn't matter, but she still couldn't overcome her frugal sensibilities.

As for cleaning up after himself, the other thing he brought home was paper plates and plasticware. So much for frugality! And cleaning up after themselves!

An interesting juxtaposition, in my mind.

Having grown up firmly middle class, and living more or less just above the poverty line most of my adult life, eating that low quality processed crap for so long does something to your taste buds. Either that, or it has to do with being a smoker. When I started making decent money, I tried a few of the "higher quality" things I couldn't justify getting before. For most things I find that I either can't taste the difference or even prefer the taste of the supposedly lower quality things. I can't bring myself...

Never smoked, and very much in a similar position. I've yet to encounter a more expensive brand that is so immensely better than the cheaper stuff that it's been worth the extra cost - the difference just isn't sufficient enough to justify the expense. So I don't think it's the smoker part.

Also prefer margarine over butter, which has been something of an adjustment as actual butter is cheaper here. Thankfully the preference is only slight, so it's not intolerable and I've been adjusting just fine.

Drejk is playing Nioh 3. I can see him.

On steam? How do I not have you as a friend there already?

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

Ya know what I think might be fun? If we could somehow work out a plan for us to meet online and play a one off game. I know time zones are pain the assorted places, but I think we'd roll dice and laugh ourselves silly.

You can do play by post right here on this website. There is a 24 hour turn over as people from around the world post in, but if everyone actually posts each day the game can move along at a reasonable pace.

Play by post games usually die out because people don’t keep the posting schedule. There is initially great excitement, then it fades away.

Yeah that seems to be what's happening to my game. Lost a couple players to IRL, then lost a little under a month of posting due to holiday travel followed by airport sickness and busyness offline. Came back and it's been rough getting the game moving again.

Yeah Serini is a veteran adventurer from an epic campaign. She's definitely higher level than Nale's CL.

So is Belkar going to go out in a blaze of sudden heroic glory? FIND OUT NEXT TIME ON ORDER OF THE Z!

With slight adjustments - translating, and because we're going to have a room league of our own - I guess that would make me Theo(dora) Apple(s).

(That strikes me as a bit more baseball-y than ladies going with their grandmum's first name, though Anne Apple would make for fun introductions with the near homophone. :) )

Admittedly I'd rather be Kenna or Donna than Eugenia or Betty Mae >.>

Anyone else care to share?

Either Kenneth or Don

I haven't been an egg for a few years now, but ....

I do miss having a dishwasher. None here in this apartment, so it's back to washing things by hand, which is admittedly how I did things for the majority of my childhood - as soon as we were tall enough to reach the sink, our parents pawned off all the dishwashing duties on myself and my brother.

We went to Hokkaido for Xmas specifically because we wanted a snowy holiday. It doesn't get cold enough to snow in Sichuan. XD

Orthos wrote:

Mr. Granderson wrote:

Orthos wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

FFXIV is such a cozy, polite game.

I miss it. My connection isn't good enough in this apartment to play right now, so at best I get on once a week to do Fashion Report and Cactpot and then don't touch it for a week. The times I've tried to do raids it's been so laggy I can't contribute.

Here's hoping when we move out and get an apartment that isn't on campus our network will be at least a little better.

Maybe your social credit score is too low.

Nah, this is an issue everyone has here. It's a campus apartment with the cheapest internet they can install. Some people have already sprung for something better, but we're going to hold off until we move out to somewhere we're comfortable spending over a year living, now that we know the area better and how things work here.

So, it's about actual credit score, not social credit.

I mean, it is housing.

Orthos wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

FFXIV is such a cozy, polite game.

I miss it. My connection isn't good enough in this apartment to play right now, so at best I get on once a week to do Fashion Report and Cactpot and then don't touch it for a week. The times I've tried to do raids it's been so laggy I can't contribute.

Here's hoping when we move out and get an apartment that isn't on campus our network will be at least a little better.

Maybe your social credit score is too low.

Nah, this is an issue everyone has here. It's a campus apartment with the cheapest internet they can install. Some people have already sprung for something better, but we're going to hold off until we move out to somewhere we're comfortable spending over a year living, now that we know the area better and how things work here.

I have my first ever sernik (Polish cheesecake) in the oven, because American-style cheesecake is gross and anything containing cream cheese should be banned under the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

Send me any American cheesecake you don't want, I will happily devour it to the last crumb.

Speaking of ens****ification, we broach the topic of toilet paper. [snip]

The hotel we stayed in during our Japan trip had a bidet, as did most of the public restrooms. We have considered everything since a disappointment.

EDIT: OMG. They're even worse. They're of the "AI can do everything for me cult." "Oh, I just love that answer the conversation I can use the Zoom AI notetaker to track what was said.

Have you USED that notetaker? It's epically awful. We pitted it against my notetaking in a John Henry-style competition, and it wasn't even a competition; the Zoom AI notes were terrible.

In my experience, these sorts of people don't care about the quality - the appeal of AI to them is that it does the thing they want, with no work put in from them, and with no complaints, disagreement, or expectation of treatment.

They don't care that, in actual practice, they have to take two or three times as long to get the job done, and the actual quality of the work will be noticeably worse.

The AI giving vanilla answers is even often a plus for those sorts, as it means they don't have to deal with difficult questions or responses. It's all very plain and straightforward and simple for them.

Also hi I'm back.

We've had one game since the new year started. First week back, we gamed one person short.

Second week, more people were sick so we cancelled.

Third week was a school function happening at the same time that we were all attending, so obviously no game.

Next week we should be back to normal schedule.

Also I'm working on setting things up for a second game on Saturdays running PF1e, running a conglomeration of COTCT/COT/HR/HV, with a big focus on the players being underclass unfortunates, thieves guild types coming up from the bottom rung. Should be fun!

quibblemuch wrote:

The American South.

I recommend it. Sure, the humidity makes Satan wilt, but I can count on the toes of one foot the number of times in the past two decades that snow has created actual problems.

That is okay, I'd rather deal with the snow than people and politics from the south every day.

AND HOW.

FFXIV is such a cozy, polite game.

I miss it. My connection isn't good enough in this apartment to play right now, so at best I get on once a week to do Fashion Report and Cactpot and then don't touch it for a week. The times I've tried to do raids it's been so laggy I can't contribute.

Here's hoping when we move out and get an apartment that isn't on campus our network will be at least a little better.

The trip was great! Had a lot of fun, got to see a lot of interesting stuff, and got a proper white Christmas which we do not get where we currently live.

The ensuing two weeks of airport crud/possibly COVID that followed, on the other hand, was not.

That's why I've been not on Paizo, so once again my apologies. Happy belated new year! I hope everyone else had a nice holiday and a nicer beginning of January than I did. ^^

Today (December 4, 2026) marks the 65th anniversary of Erwin Schrödinger's death. Or does it... he had a closed casket funeral, so we can't really be sure.

You mean January?

Best of luck and get well soon Cal.

Not nearly as dire here but similar news, two players are sick this week so was no Ravenloft game on our expected resuming day. Thankfully here just seems to be a cold.

Yeah I only use my wireless headset on my phone when I'm walking the dog, otherwise it's typically connected to my computer at home, or not in use at all if I'm traveling anywhere else, since I don't drive anymore.

Definitely had it always-on when I lived in the states except when I needed to connect bluetooth to the computer instead.

Upselling is so exhausting.

At my age, my nurse practitioner recommended I get a hearing screening. Checked the local pharmacies. Nope. Googled. Apparently I should see an audiologist. I call one and leave a message that all I want is a hearing screening. Nothing more. And the receptionist calls me back to welcome me to my "hearing improvement journey". I ask, "Can I just get a screening?"

And I know they're going to try to sell me about 15,000 different hearing improvement items once I get there. It's like, "Can I just have a basic test and go home now?"

Apparently not.

They do similar here, the difference is they don't charge for it. It's all covered by the same one payment as part of the comprehensive wellness care program.

NobodysHome wrote:

After tirading yet again about my cell phone, I realized I'd probably save time by just doing what I suggested: Turning off cellular data and bluetooth at home, and turning off WiFi and turning on cellular when I leave the house. Takes a few seconds and remembering to do it, but suddenly my phone's performance is spectacular.

Still irritated that I have to do it, but it works...

You lost me on not having bluetooth turned off by default... o.O

I turn it off on the regular, mostly to either keep it from conflicting with my computer when using bluetooth there (as most bluetooth things want to default to the phone) or just to save battery.

For Christmas, my nieces gave me a "LEGO" "Serenity" from the show Firefly. It's actually much better quality than I would have expected from a knock-off brand. Anybody else get anything fun?

Besides the trip to Hokkaido and all the souvenirs I got there, I got this Pokemon "Ugly Christmas Sweater" (It's adorable not ugly but you get the idea), some fuzzy slippers, and the heavy coat I needed for the trip.

Orthos wrote:

Yep. Summer vacation has already been planned to New Zealand, and we have a long list of other places we'd love to visit that we're considering just putting on a spinning wheel to decide.

I've heard that the US is a good place to visit. Or, used to be, at least.

Been there done that

Yep. Summer vacation has already been planned to New Zealand, and we have a long list of other places we'd love to visit that we're considering just putting on a spinning wheel to decide.

Jargon has a place, but it's usually in the space of "field-specific language" where words are created or repurposed for use in the specific context of a working field, niche interest, or complex subjects.

For example "code blue" means one thing to a soldier, and another thing to a physician.

That said, I wouldn't call leet and jive jargon, they're more slang or argot, or just culturalized linguistics which kinda overlaps with both, especially the latter.

There's definitely still some things about the early internet I look back on fondly and think are sad that they've been lost to the annals of its history and the changing landscape of the web.

Leet is not one of them.

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and/or happy holiday time!

Apologies for the lack of activity here over the past week. My partner and I went on vacation to Japan this year for the holiday, and I expected to be able to get online and make some posts during the evenings.

Unfortunately, despite expectations to the contrary, we did not have suitable power outlets in our hotel room, and thus no internet for the duration of the trip.

We're back home now so I'll be able to resume posting. Thanks for your patience and I hope you have a happy holiday season of your own. :)