He probably would walk 500 km.
And 500 more.
And I would walk quickly somewhere to find some clothes.
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Random school spam. If anyone is able to participate, we'd appreciate it.
My name is Shanna Schopmeyer, and I’m conducting a research study through Northern Arizona University to explore how tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) impact the experiences of neurodivergent individuals. If you are 18 or older, have a diagnosis of Autism, ADHD, or Asperger’s, and have played in at least five TTRPG sessions, you may be eligible to participate in a 30–60 minute Zoom interview.
Your story could help increase awareness and improve therapeutic practices for neurodivergent individuals. Participation is confidential, voluntary, and IRB-approved project 2335787-2.
If you’re interested or want to learn more, please scan the QR code or follow this link to complete a brief screening and consent form:
https://qualtrics.nau.edu/jfe/form/SV_6lGlXsZdYNkcjwW
Thank you for considering being part of this study! Should you have any questions about the study or just want more information, please reach out me at ss3897@nau.edu.
Thanks,
Shanna Schopmeyer, Ed.S
Random school spam. If anyone is able to participate, we'd appreciate it.
** spoiler omitted **
May I forward this? That's pretty much Impus Major's entire Sunday "therapy" group. (They pay him to teach neurodivergent kids how to recognize social cues from others, and I'm pretty sure tabletop RPGs are involved.)
Random school spam. If anyone is able to participate, we'd appreciate it.
** spoiler omitted **
Not opposed, but I imagine the time difference will be a bear to negotiate.
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So, to absolutely no one's surprise, Las Vegas isn't my cup of tea. I don't drink, gamble, nor carouse, and I don't like late nights, so I'm definitely not in their wheelhouse. But the reasons I misliked it were quite different:
(1) Transportation: We intentionally chose the Venezian because it was about dead center on the strip. The entire strip is only 4.2 miles long, so we were thinking we'd be able to walk almost everywhere we wanted to go. But no, the casinos go out of their way to make walking difficult and confusing, and the everyday highs of 107-109°F were so punishing that we ended up taking cabs everywhere we went. Even our ghost walk at 9:00 pm was in 103°F darkness. And completely out of Las Vegas' control, a California wildfire rendered the atmosphere so smoky it was nigh-unbreathable; I was constantly taking allergy meds and my inhaler just to be able to breathe. But even without the weather and the smoke, the strip is not designed for walking. And that really bothered me. It's only 4 miles long! I'd like to be able to walk the length and see everything. But it's fundamentally designed to be driven.
(2) People: Surprisingly, the visitors to Las Vegas weren't particularly annoying; I was expecting a bunch of drunken, loud, belligerent people who only came to Vegas to cause trouble and then use, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," as an excuse for their misbehavior. But to my astonishment, on the entire trip I only encountered one truly obnoxious visitor, and he was only obnoxious because we were on the ghost tour with him and as soon as he heard we were from California he decided he hated us. It's hard to imagine going through life being so hateful, but not my problem. But the retailers were another matter entirely. So, on the West Coast you walk into/past a store and the person working there will strike up a conversation. "Where are you from? How are you liking Vegas? Did you have any questions? OK, well, let me know if you need anything." And that's it. There are no pressure tactics, nor psychological manipulation other than, "I'm going to be sociable with you so you'll be more inclined to buy from me and you'll feel guilty if we hit it off so well and then you leave without buying anything." It's amazingly effective. My impression is that what the Vegas salespeople were doing was East Coast B.S. They start out by complimenting you. "Oh, what's it say on your shirt? I love it!" Then comes the insult. "But that eye makeup just isn't working for you. Come in here and let me fix it for you."
And if you refuse, they get even more belligerent and awful. Just a great big high-pressure, "The more you resist, the more they call you a loser for not buying their products."
Not our cup of tea, so we ended up not buying anything from any of them.
So not the reasons I thought I'd mislike Vegas, but no one was in the least bit surprised that I did.
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So Val and Hermione have taken to calling each other Pietro and Wanda, which is creepy but kinda cute, but they're doing it in a faux clipped British (not Cockney at least, thank the gods) accent, which is just wrong.
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A heavy faux Eastern European accent might be better, or, perhaps, very much worse.
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Half-squid, half-snail, all full of consumed glyphs, sigils, and symbols...
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And today, after well over a decade of heavy use, we're saying goodbye to Roku forever.
Why?
Because unlike every other phone, PC, or streaming player, Roku decided to keep Crunchyroll subscriptions proprietary; to watch Crunchyroll on a Roku device you have to subscribe to the Roku channel and purchase Crunchyroll as an add-on to it. For every other device you own, you can get a straight-up Crunchyroll subscription from Crunchyroll itself and play Crunchyroll anywhere.
You're already making me pay a monthly subscription fee for everything I watch; don't you dare try to dictate where I can watch it. Especially if your primary existence is as a hardware manufacturing and your streaming business should be only a secondary source of revenue.
/tirade
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In lighter news, the Planet Kibbeh races are proceeding apace; Fluffy (Lenore) continues to lead the pack at 8.75 pounds, but she's getting a bit tubby so we're watching her diet and trying to slow her gain a bit to let her body catch up with her weight. Blacky (Meatball) faces no such issues; at 8.04 pounds he's a mass of solid muscle and is going to be one h*** of an intimidating cat when he's fully-grown, because he's easily going to break 10 pounds of well-muscled terror. Stripey (Morrigan) finally broke 5 pounds, and I think that's all we can ask of her; she is a bitty little thing.
After nearly fifteen years of two 7-pound cats, it's going to be a bit disturbing to have two 10+-pounders; hope the furniture can handle it.
So Val and Hermione have taken to calling each other Pietro and Wanda, which is creepy but kinda cute, but they're doing it in a faux clipped British (not Cockney at least, thank the gods) accent, which is just wrong.
If possible I would give them the associated powers. I'm sure their parents wouldn't find that problematic in the least.
I had been dreading coming in to work tonight, which is nothing new, but specifically because it was one of the newbies' first solo shift. She is the one who, last week, worked with the girl who was quitting and they didn't do any laundry on 2 days. And we were sold out yesterday. So, I was really worried that I would come in and there would be a massive amount of laundry, all of it untouched. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised. She had everything washed and dried, and all but about half a load folded. That took me less than 5 minutes to finish. So she really kicked ass today.
Well finally some good news!
Let's make the water turn black!
Let's make the water turn black!
You have got to stop whispering such sexy things into my ears.
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In training at headquarters for the week. Sitting in 2 hours of traffic last night (in a commute that would take 40 minutes if the roads were clear), I realized just how inimical the commuting model is:
(1) Cities make themselves dependent on tax revenues generated by workers commuting in and spending money on parking, food, gas, etc.
(2) Cities grant tax breaks to corporations for filling their buildings with said workers.
(3) Corporations force workers to commute to the city, need or relevance be damned.
There's absolutely no reason this training couldn't be remote; we're in such a large room that we're watching the presentations on our laptops on Zoom anyway, and the breakout teams are groups of people who already work together. So we're here because Global Megacorporation gets a tax break from the city for forcing us to be here. Sitting in a line of tens of thousands of cars spewing who-knows-how-much pollution into the air, burning finite resources, and costing individual human beings tens of thousands of hours, I was... displeased with the entire model.
I have come to the conclusion that I despise large round tables designed to seat 8 or more people.
I'm at such a table, and while we're crammed together around the circumference bumping elbows, the vast sea of open space at the center of the table sits there, mocking us.
If you need to seat 8 or more people, use a shape that fully utilizes all the space.
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Or spreadeagle yourselves across the table and have the meeting that way.
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I like where this is going…
Is it just my connection from work, or is Paizo all kinds of flaky this week?
I have seen some hiccups this week.
I made a lam stew... I think it is the first time I am eating lamb, as far as I can tell. It's quite good, if horrendously expensive (I only bought it because it was half price due to short due date).
I made a lam stew... I think it is the first time I am eating lamb, as far as I can tell. It's quite good, if horrendously expensive (I only bought it because it was half price due to short due date).
Yeah, people love my lamb curry... until I point out that it's over $50 every time I make it.
I made a lam stew... I think it is the first time I am eating lamb, as far as I can tell. It's quite good, if horrendously expensive (I only bought it because it was half price due to short due date).Yeah, people love my lamb curry... until I point out that it's over $50 every time I make it.
I paid 30 złoty for about 600 grams (a pound and a third for you silly 'Muricans), while normally I get meat for 20-30 złoty for kilogram or two of meat, and typically spend ca. 100 for groceries for a few days.
With full priced lamb I'd have to spend around 100 for one kilogram...
Killergrams. Like a telegram, but with more…
Killing.
I paid 30 złoty for about 600 grams (a pound and a third for you silly 'Muricans), while normally I get meat for 20-30 złoty for kilogram or two of meat, and typically spend ca. 100 for groceries for a few days.
With full priced lamb I'd have to spend around 100 for one kilogram...
50 zloty/kg ==> $6.20/lb. That's surprisingly expensive; if I went to some of the bottom-tier stores in this area I could probably find lamb at that price. "Normal" lamb is $8.99-$9.99/pound, and the high-end boneless roasts I get run $16.99-$18.99/pound, and the curry takes 2.5-3.0 pounds.
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I swear, the nonsense kittens get you up to.
As with most cats, the kittens are fascinated by the shower. How do we make this water appear? Why is it hot? And most of all, why do we willingly stand in it? So now in the mornings when I take my shower I have to leave the door ajar because otherwise the M's (Mephisto and Morrigan) will stand outside the bathroom door screaming to be let in, and will wake Impus Minor and GothBard.
So, they come in. They watch the shower intently. Stripey (Morrigan) takes it one step farther: She desperately wants to help, so the moment you step out of the shower she starts trying to groom you to help you dry off.
The morning ritual is now, "Shower with the door open so the kittens can come in. Once you're done, instead of drying off in the tub like you usually do, step out and onto the bathmat while still mostly wet. Endure the little kitten licks on your feet and shins because she purrs like mad the whole time and really really wants to help."
It is a bizarre, stupid ritual. And I'm sure I'm going to keep doing it until she grows out of the need to try to help.
And speaking of kitten shenanigans, Shiro doesn't want to get a cat/cats because there are coyotes on his property, and he doesn't trust his ability to keep the kittens indoors at all times. (Standard Kentucky advice is, "If you see a coyote, shoot 'em. That'll keep the rest off your property," but Shiro's not a bloodthirsty guy, so since they don't bother him, he doesn't shoot them.)
Cue the "pet of the week" at the nearby shelter being a massive maine coon kitten. Of an adult size large enough to eat a coyote or two. (20 lbs for the cat vs. 35 lbs for the coyote. Not a fight any coyote would want to have. A normal-sized house cat who's accustomed to being outdoors and fighting can scare off one coyote. A hunting cat can scare off two or three. A 20-pound cat? Terrifying.)
We are prodding him strongly.
The thing I love about coyotes (and most predators) is their absolute mastery of cost/benefit analysis: "Is this prey worth pursuing, or do I risk injury/exhaustion/capture in this pursuit?"
So cats fall squarely in the, "Go in for a quick back-of-the-neck kill, and if that fails, get the f*** out of there," range of prey for coyotes. Once a cat is aware of a coyote, there's too much risk of losing an eye or taking damage to the nose to continue the pursuit unless you're truly starving to death (which doesn't happen to coyotes around here because we have a massive overabundance of prey). So you go on YouTube and watch dozens of videos of cats chasing off 1-3 coyotes, 'cause no one posts the ones where they misstep.
Reminds me of when I took Impus Minor on an astronomy mission to Yosemite late one night and we got surrounded by a pack of around 8 coyotes. They really wanted to eat Impus Minor. But I was clearly a major threat that would take at least 3-4 of them to distract, and Impus Minor was too large to drag off quickly. So in their brains it was, "Big one might kill one or two of us, we can't kill big one, big one won't let us drag off little one. Time to leave."
And you could practically hear the wheels going around in their brains as they surrounded us, I prepared to fight them, they realized I wasn't going to panic or run, and they slunk back off into the wilderness searching for easier prey.
Interesting creatures to watch in action.
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People video cats fending off coyotes? Must not have been their cat. When the javalina was threatening my puppy, I took immediate and aggressive action to drive it off.
Start of the ad "Hello, humans..."
They don't even try to pretend it's not AI slop anymore?
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Speaking of understanding animal behavior, after 30+ years of decrying the Evil Fellowship of CACL (pronounced "Cackle") (Cats Against Clean Litterboxes), the latest generation of kittens and their fascination with me cleaning the litterboxes finally gave me the epiphany I needed:
The issue: No matter where you are or what time it is or what's going on in the rest of the house, if you clean a litterbox a cat will immediately run over and use it. Hence CACL.
The epiphany: A co-worker who'd never had cats started grilling me on how hard it was to train them to use the litterbox. He couldn't believe it when I said, "You don't. They just do." Then I explained how mother cats would carry their newborns over to the litterbox and then to encourage them to go, quickly teaching them to always go in the litterbox, so humans are never involved...
...except...
...when you adopt a kitten, you're fundamentally trapping it in its juvenile state, replacing its mother and siblings with you and your family. So, "Mama" is going over and swishing around the litterbox sand. You remember this. This means that it's very important to go to the litterbox and excrete whatever you can to prove to "Mama" that you remember.
In short, the fundamental irritation that is CACL is actually your cats trying to prove to you that they remember their litterbox training.
Much harder to be mad about that, all in all.
Start of the ad "Hello, humans..."
They don't even try to pretend it's not AI slop anymore?
All over San Francisco there are billboards that advertise, "Stop hiring humans."
I'm amazed they and the company they represent haven't been burned down yet.
People video cats fending off coyotes? Must not have been their cat. When the javalina was threatening my puppy, I took immediate and aggressive action to drive it off.
It's mostly security footage -- something they saw after the fact. 'Cause yeah, the potential threats in my yard (raccoons, skunks, opossums) all understand that I am a far greater threat and I will absolutely go after them, so even if Nefret gets left out after hours their entire approach is, "Oh, hi Cat That Must Not Be Harmed In Any Way! Just passin' through! Don't mind us!"
50 zloty/kg ==> $6.20/lb. That's surprisingly expensive; if I went to some of the bottom-tier stores in this area I could probably find lamb at that price. "Normal" lamb is $8.99-$9.99/pound, and the high-end boneless roasts I get run $16.99-$18.99/pound, and the curry takes 2.5-3.0 pounds.I paid 30 złoty for about 600 grams (a pound and a third for you silly 'Muricans), while normally I get meat for 20-30 złoty for kilogram or two of meat, and typically spend ca. 100 for groceries for a few days.
With full priced lamb I'd have to spend around 100 for one kilogram...
Lamb is pricey - mutton generally isn't, but finding it is a proper old quest. I suppose it could be ordered online, but mail order meat seems wrong, somehow...
Greetings, human persons.