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everything is spinning.
~stops spinning the merry go round~ Oops! Too much? Sorry! ~starts to spin it again, but faster this time~
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~smirks~ Just for you, Freehold DM. Just for you! ~puts my scales back on~
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I just hope that a naked dragon doesn't increase his nausea.
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You know since Kileanna is no longer around to talk to her own aliases I figure I have to do it once in awhile in memory.
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Has anyone heard from here lately? I hope that she is doing well.
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Perhaps check the character artwork thread or her Dragonlance-Reign of Winter thread.
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Freehold yeah I needed some lessons on being a tourist guide cat.
Before I go on full nature ramble mode with people, I need to ask important questions: How much experience do you have with tropical weather and have you been jungle tromping in tropical conditions before? If so, how long(distance), and which region, how many years ago?
If you have no experience in tropical jungle tromping, have you jungle tromped before, and how many years ago was that?
I think we might have caused Hi lots of ouches...><(He was on pain meds for half a day)
I told him I won't bring him to St John's because it's risky if anything goes wrong, it's not easy to get help there.
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In the US the police will do a welfare check if you haven't heard from someone.
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In the US the police will do a welfare check if you haven't heard from someone.
Yes they will. My dad was in the hospital for a few days. After the second day of his hospitalization, his liquor store guy called the cops to do a wellness check. I had stopped by his apartment to pick some stuff up and the neighbors came out to tell me the police had been looking for him. Took a few calls to figure out that it was merely a wellness check and not something serious.
If your liquor store clerk is calling the police to have wellness checks done on you, you might be an alcoholic.
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Wow.
I am drunk.
Oh... my... goodness!!
You're my younger brother!
Since when have you been black?!?!!?
(NobodysWife called Younger Brother last night to invite him to the last-ever Bats in the Sun day and he was seriously hammered. She had all kinds of fun walking him through making the reservations...
...and holy c**p, no wonder our choir director is thinking of abandoning Disneyland because of the price! $280 for a 2-day park-hopper!?!? Each?!?!? For that kind of money I expect dinner and a movie.)
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Freehold yeah I needed some lessons on being a tourist guide cat.
Before I go on full nature ramble mode with people, I need to ask important questions: How much experience do you have with tropical weather and have you been jungle tromping in tropical conditions before? If so, how long(distance), and which region, how many years ago?
If you have no experience in tropical jungle tromping, have you jungle tromped before, and how many years ago was that?
I think we might have caused Hi lots of ouches...><(He was on pain meds for half a day)
I told him I won't bring him to St John's because it's risky if anything goes wrong, it's not easy to get help there.
LOL. I am sure you have made him VERY happy.
But yes, he does have a tendency to overexert.
Did I ever tell you about his first trip with us to one of the kids' birthday parties at Pump it Up (a giant indoor playground with lots of padded climbing structures)?
He was the most popular man in the building for the 2 hours he ran around with them.
He took DAYS to recover.
Glad to hear he's having fun, though!
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Things you should not say when you are over 50:
"Oh, wow! Next Thursday I'll have set an all-time record for dryness!"
Fortunately, it's still early yet, so NobodysWife missed out on half a dozen Depends references...
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Ok, the brother resend me the mail he sent to mom yesterday, with added link to public notice of auctioning his flat.
Not yet responded to another e-mail.
According to my psychologist friend the ramblings from his yesterday e-mails suggest some sort of paranoid disorder.
No one else has keys to his flat. The lock is messed up anyway, needing some weird steps to be opened, and from inside its closed with a screwdriver.
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Hi needs to work out more! Rawr! You have to drag him hiking so as to get him out of his car!
I think though some of it is due to the heat and humidity here. If I went to California for a hike, the dryness might get me too.
Nah; the dry air is just much more comfortable. You'd just have to have lotion and lip balm to keep your fur sleek and shiny!
And yeah, I hike 2 miles a day just to keep myself in shape for exactly such situations. And I've learned that it makes a HUUUUUUUUGE difference when I'm walking with "the gang".
So yes, go ahead and scold him and he'll take it cheerfully. Hopefully his mood is still upbeat; most of the time he does something silly and ends up in bed for half a day and he laughs and says, "OK, that was stupid of me."
On occasion he gets down on himself for it, but I can't imagine him being like that in Singapore.
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Much to Freehold's dismay, the signs of summer are upon us:
By 8:15 am this morning, both back doors were open (it's an extra-wide French door) and the cats were sunning themselves on the deck.
Yesterday it hit 82. I'm not sure I want to open any more of the house, but the cats are happy.
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We're expecting snow tomorrow.
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We nearly got up to 60 degrees the other day, but then a cloud got in the way.
The next week is a typical spring smorgasbord of 25-48 degree temps with a collage of snow, sleet, and rain.
After that, who knows.
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In the US the police will do a welfare check if you haven't heard from someone.
They can do this to limited extend. Unless there is a reported immediate threat to life, they are hesitant to break in unless neighbors report things like strange smell, etc. And my brother is likely to ignore their knocking or simply be away.
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Especially that there was an e-mail response today.
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So, this is a beautiful example of what bad management can do to a company:
A group is two weeks behind schedule. Their deadline is today. I sat in on the meeting. There are a few non-showstopper issues they have workarounds for, but one group isn't done with its testing.
To avoid getting in trouble with management, they're sending out the formal acceptance of the build before the final group finishes.
This is such a failure in management I don't know where to begin. When you're so terrified of your manager that you're not willing to say, "Well, I know the deadline was today, but one group said they needed until the end of day Monday to finish," you have a messed-up manager.
When I tell my manager I'm going to be late, she asks why, and if my answer is reasonable, it's all good. THAT is how you manage.
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Wow.
I am drunk.
Oh... my... goodness!!
You're my younger brother!
Since when have you been black?!?!!?
(NobodysWife called Younger Brother last night to invite him to the last-ever Bats in the Sun day and he was seriously hammered. She had all kinds of fun walking him through making the reservations...
...and holy c**p, no wonder our choir director is thinking of abandoning Disneyland because of the price! $280 for a 2-day park-hopper!?!? Each?!?!? For that kind of money I expect dinner and a movie.)
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On Tuesday, I need to visit debt collector dealing with his late payments, and try to negotiate payment in rates. Two days later there is deadline... He might or might not agree especially that I am third party and he cannot volunteer sensitive persnal data to me.
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So, this is a beautiful example of what bad management can do to a company:
A group is two weeks behind schedule. Their deadline is today. I sat in on the meeting. There are a few non-showstopper issues they have workarounds for, but one group isn't done with its testing.
To avoid getting in trouble with management, they're sending out the formal acceptance of the build before the final group finishes.This is such a failure in management I don't know where to begin. When you're so terrified of your manager that you're not willing to say, "Well, I know the deadline was today, but one group said they needed until the end of day Monday to finish," you have a messed-up manager.
When I tell my manager I'm going to be late, she asks why, and if my answer is reasonable, it's all good. THAT is how you manage.
Reasonable?! In business?!
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Headache...
Rain? Valerian? Stress?
Most probably all three combined.
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Hang in there, Drejk. Being the responsible sibling/child in the family often has few rewards. Still hoping things turn out for the better for your brother (and you).
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Things you should not say when you are over 50:
"Oh, wow! Next Thursday I'll have set an all-time record for dryness!"Fortunately, it's still early yet, so NobodysWife missed out on half a dozen Depends references...
I would have assumed you were instead speaking of your recipe for roast chicken prepped with a hair dryer.
No really, drying the raw chicken's skin before roasting makes for much crispier and tastier skin.
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Fun today.
"You are seriously overloaded with trays! You've been working a week straight on them and you're still not done! Maybe if we have the students check out fewer trays..." my boss began.
I didn't hear the rest because if I mentally facepalmed any harder, I would have had an aneurysm.
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Off to bed...
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Link is broken. Is this accurate/comprehensive?That's the one!
Apologies for forgetting the http:// nonsense. lol
OK, so spheres of power/might is pretty extensive for a 3pp, and I'm finding myself just kinda getting lost in it. What do you find interesting/balanced/etc. about it?
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@Tac & Kjeldorn, I'm curious which parts of my ramblings you don't agree with? At the risk of fritzy, WHAT ABOUT MY GENIUS COULD YOU POSSIBLY OBJECT TO?! ;)
In Which I Smash the PHB Classes to Pieces, and Ramble About Rebuilding Those Worthy
(Begin at page 6 for the class-smashing.)
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Much to Freehold's dismay, the signs of summer are upon us:
By 8:15 am this morning, both back doors were open (it's an extra-wide French door) and the cats were sunning themselves on the deck.
Yesterday it hit 82. I'm not sure I want to open any more of the house, but the cats are happy.
ugh.
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We nearly got up to 60 degrees the other day, but then a cloud got in the way.
The next week is a typical spring smorgasbord of 25-48 degree temps with a collage of snow, sleet, and rain.
After that, who knows.
good cloud!
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It would seem two days of steadfastly refusing I have a cold isn't working as well as I thought it would.
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Only 36 today.
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I realized while watching this that it is this model - the whole "break point"-thing - that is one of the many reasons I prefer many of the older d20 system games to Pathfinder, 4E, and 5E.
See, the older d20 systems were smooth math curves that left sudden shifts in both power and experiential play due to these break points - and I loved it. When the math is smooth, clean, and linear, and allowed to flow its own way, and it's allowed to mean something in-game, you have a natural internal progression that the world actually feels and reacts to. This feels significant. It feels right. And it feels mythical.
On the other hand, it feels like the history of development in PF and 4E and 5E is misguided attempt to inhibit the existence break points by arbitrarily shifting the math - it's one of my major issues with much of modern game design, that arbitrary shift for "balance" that seems to so captivate the modern design. One of the reasons why I adore the 4E (fan-made) "monster manual on a business card" is because it exactly eschews much of the fluff and simply displays a clean mathematical curve that indicates, "This is how the world is - work with it." - and presents a rules system that I found exciting and worth applying to player characters as well as monsters.
Breakpoints can definitely cause problems - and the 3.X paradigm has many "breakpoints" (in fact an incredibly high number of them) for casters - but the basic theory is sound, and, frankly, the balance felt right.
In any event, it's one of many thoughts I had, and the only one I could capture at the time.
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Also, the new ReBoot reboot is secretly just, "Power Rangers - now with Tron flavor and a smattering of visuals and words that you heard in the ReBoot cartoon!"
And by "Power Rangers" I mean exactly that.
The villain is just Rita Repulsa, only a human who wiggles his fingers on a keyboard instead of the air, and who's monsters are (currently*) limited to cyberspace. I mean, his monologues are just as cringe-worthy as hers were. (See also: Lord Zed, Goldar, and literally all the other bad guys.)
The good guys are just young high school teens with morphers power suits in their secret base with robot A.I. assistant (no floating head, sadly).
First episode was literally, "Oh, first day of highschool, let's find our homerooms on our phone maps; oh, it brings us to a dead end but shows a room there; oh, hey, secret room with our game avatars in that game we all play (but only just now are learning that we were all on the same highest-ranked team in the world, 'cause internet anonymity, lol), coolest school ever; oh, hey, we're in cyberspace killing cyber locusts for... reasons, I guess? they're probably bad - man, this is just like playing the game, but we could die, maybe. Okay, I suppose we listen to the weird robot computer lady and also don't tell anyone, and let's go to class, now."
What I'm saying is that it forces me to look back at a beloved franchise from my childhood and realize, "Holy crap. Power Rangers actually super-sucked! (I mean, I already knew this, but still.)"
All I'm saying is if you're fine with, "Rita Repulsa," you'll be fine with, "the Sourcerer," and pretty much everything that goes along with that.
If you don't want to be forced to reexamine your childhood memories of Power Rangers and recall exactly how terrible that show actually was, in retrospect, don't watch this.
Because that's what it's doing to me.
The bad guy is named the "Sourcerer."
Like. Guys. Guys. Guys. They named their bad-guy hacker, "the Sourcerer," guys. Like, guys. "The Sourcerer."
They really did that.
And his goal is legit to destroy the world.
Guys.
This is.
Wow.
That... really should tell you all that you need to know.
"At last after ten thousand years I'm free! Time to take over the world!" is about the same as, "Time to send humanity back to the dark ages! Go my cyber-locusts! Devour the power grid!" (or whatever he says, I don't know, you can't expect me to remember something he only said once).
The acting is about on par with the original Power Rangers (including the dopey lines, akin to when whatserface pink ranger Kimberly tried to be cool and fake-out with the whole "bad for my hair" thing). In this case, they're all, like, really good at an online game, you guys, and are anonymous friends with each other with the highest ranking "group" in a competitive MM(O?) game called, "Cyber Guardian." See, it's funny because only two of them know each other in real life, and at first they don't realize they all are on the same team.
The Sourcerer has monologues worthy of Rita Repulsa and Megabyte from our childhood, but it's harder to take as serious as the show wants us to.
I mean,
"<heheheh> The cyber locusts are destroying the power grid. It's time to send humanity back to the dark ages in three... two... one..."
-----------
"Perfect... the PLAN is WORKING..."
(I don't know why he emphasized those words, though.)
-----------"What's this? Antivirus software. I expected it - not too surprising. But it's not gonna stop me."
------------
(after the good guys close something off) "What? Access denied - impossible! My access cannot be denied, I made the rift, I have access."
>insert HACKING in the Hollywood style of dude clicking keys rapidly like he's me writing a post, here.<
----------
(after "cyber locusts" being defeated): "No. Impossible!"
--------
"Nrrrah!"
>knocks stuff over<
"Rrrrryagh! I won't be defeated!"
>pause; realization of something<
>insert evil laughter<
Oh, and then the fake-out where someone totally dies in the first episode, but after about a minute, he shows up fine, laughing at the idea that he'd be killed.
The animation is surprisingly good for a series meant for kids - not because kids don't deserve good animation, but because it's often cheaply done to save on expenses. To be clear, this is no different - it's clear that it's cheaply done, but it's doing its best to remind us of the Tron films (including the cyber-beat music) as well as elements of the old Reboot show (but darker and "more serious" or something). The animation has enough jerky parts and enough smooth parts that don't feel like reality to make it weird, but it's smooth animation, so that's uncanny valley-esque stuff. But it's not actually bad... for what it is.
The show, over-all, is about on par with the original Power Rangers - if you're okay with the ludicrously over-the-top Power Rangers show, it's about the same.
This is not a recommendation, by the way. It's... it's rough going.
I mean, I knew it would be, but... it's a different kind of rough going than I thought it would be. It's just kind of amazing.
*
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I am frequently flummoxed by my co-workers, and not in a good way.
Our team lead for this project is testing all our practices before we send them out for external review.
TL: Oh, by the way, NobodysHome, your inbound email lab didn't work. I got no response.
NH: OK, checking... Er... I see that you didn't delete and re-create the communication channel?
TL: No, I did not.
NH: In spite of big red letters and the note saying that if you don't do it, the lab won't work?
TL: Correct.
NH: And the lab didn't work, you say?
TL: Yeah, and I can't figure out why.I swear, I need a protective helmet for banging my head on my desk...
WHAT
I AM NOT YOUR COWORKER!
(I mean, I don't think I'm your coworker. That would explain the really weird emails I never check, though...)
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Walked past the Rainbow discussing tactics in the hall.
...why can't I get them that focused on English class?!
Because I'm just such an interesting person? I dunno! Not my fault!
Because English is an NPC class and it has unimpressive class abilities?
Well, look, I'll be honest: lion blade isn't the best class, either. I mean, I want it to be, but you're basically also describing my own class, too.
Feel better soon, John!
The difference it makes when the one tactical player is present is amazing.
Hey, thanks! I like to think I make a difference!
That might be why they're talking about me!
... oh, wait.
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Oh, and Just a Mort, just a "cultural warning" on Hi that'll take a few sentences to explain:
In the U.S., determining who pays for food (and how) at restaurants is very much like gun control, politics, or religion: Everyone has their opinions, and many people get extremely offended if you violate their personal protocols.
Hi is NOTHING like that.
But in our group, we don't want to be bothered with such things, so we've developed the habit of just grabbing the bill and paying it. We don't divvy it up, or try to work out who ate what, because that detracts from our overall enjoyment. Whoever grabs first gets it. It's a fun, twisted competition.
So my *belief* is that he'll let you take the lead and tell him how you want to handle things, but if he snatches the bill away from you and won't even let you look at it before he covers it for you, please don't be offended. Blame me and Shiro; we've trained him that way.
** spoiler omitted **...
Nothing you've reported in your spoiler has anything to do with being from the south, in my experience. Just kind of sounds like bad social behavior in general*.
*
It's that wonderful time of year where I get to grade research papers!
It... it is. I'm so, so sorry. We are going through it here, too.
** spoiler omitted **...As someone born and raised in the deepest heart of Southern Hospitality, I'm admittedly flummoxed as to the problem. Unless there's something major missing from this retelling - which given your previous records of excessive detail, seems unlikely - it sounds to me like it was all in their heads.
My best guess is that they expected NBW to stand up, shake hands or hug each and every one of them, individually tell them how welcome they were and how happy she was to see them, and to have been personally escorted to seats near her (as they clearly believed she was the hostess of the gathering and thus "near her" would be the "important seats") and attended to throughout the dinner with constant discussion and inquiries to secure that they were happy and all their needs were being quickly and adequately met.
Which, all in all, is incredibly pompous, rude, entitled, self-absorbed, and assumptive, not necessarily in that order.
More likely they're just stuck-up, self-important dimwits who were looking for a reason to get offended in hopes that Southern Hospitality would demand you scramble about trying to "make it up to them" in some way.
Yeah, this.