Let me tell you about one of my high school friends’ old Dungeons and Dragons PCs.
Olaf Olafson was your pretty straightforward Northman Barbarian type. Huge, strong, pale, red-haired and with a tremendous beard. What made Olaf special was the little things.
Despite living in a world with clerical magic, demons, and other powerful alignment-based Outsiders, Olaf was an atheist. This was because his people believed the last world had already ended and the gods went with it (basically post-Ragnarok). All that was left were ‘spirits’. Powerful spirits. Who could grant deific magic. But they weren’t gods, and you didn’t have to worship them- in fact you shouldn’t, because it would just inflate their already swollen egos.
Despite being an enormous, frightening, powerful man with dubious hygeine and a propensity for going literally berserk in combat, Olaf was a gentle fellow in towns and villages, had a deep fondness for small fluffy animals and children, and was a generous tipper.
Olaf liked to drink. Not mead, but wine. He liked to sip it. It made him feel ‘civilized’. He never drank it quickly enough to get drunk. His meals almost invariably consisted of “Wine. Meat. Cheese.” Which was what he would order in literally every tavern. They’d ask him to clarify, what sort of wine? What sort of meat? What sort of- Olaf would raise a hand and repeat, slowly, as if to a fool: “Wine. Meat. Cheese.”
Olaf spoke broken common, more or less Hulk-speak, referred to himself in the third person almost exclusively, all that fun stuff. Then we had a story arc where I sent them up to Olaf’s homeland, where everyone spoke ‘Northman’ or whatever the hell I called it. While up there, he was incredibly fluent. Even poetic. “My brothers! I have returned from the decadent lands of the south, bearing riches and glory, and tales of great deeds!” The other players caught on and talked like a pack of movie Frankensteins, barely able to communicate in the foreign tongue.
For a long time, Olaf was the most financially stable member of the party. Because he bought a tavern in their home-base-town, hired the senior barmaid/waitress lady to be the manager, and funneled the profits back into the business. He kept his adventuring money and his tavern money separate, except when he would sometimes spend adventuring money to expand the tavern.
There’s not a lot to do in 3rd edition with skill ranks when you’re a barbarian, so eventually Olaf sank a point into Healing on a lark. A few sessions later, they captured an important enemy NPC, but he’d lost an arm in the fighting and was about to die. Their cleric had been captured and their NPC paladin wasn’t around, either. There was no magical healing available, and no one else had any ranks in healing. The dude was about to die, and take with him the knowledge of where their friends had been taken. Olaf- with a single rank in Healing I remind you -offered to save his life in exchange for the location, and the guy agreed. Olaf then stuck a sword in the fire, said “Olaf see this once,” and cauterized the wound.
It worked, of course. I didn’t even make him roll. I was too busy trying not to piss myself laughing. “Olaf see this once.” Jesus Christ.
While I feel like this is one of those insipid uses of research time (because chemtrail conspiracy theorists are TOTALLY going to listen to mainstream climate scientists /sarcasm) I was thinking the other day that perhaps the government should plot to manipulate the atmosphere using condensation trails. After all, there's significant evidence that the 3-day hiatus of flights after 9/11 had dramatic affects on temperature (see: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html?_s=PM:TECH). Obviously one would have to strike a balance between the CO2 production from the aircraft engines and the albedo-effects of the contrails but I feel like that's math you could readily figure out...
No evidence exists, say researchers, of a clandestine government plot to manipulate the atmosphere.
After nine years in the making, a brand new, free-to-play Pokémon RPG launched this month called Pokémon Uranium.
It features 150 custom-made Pokémon you’ve never seen before—including a new species called Nuclear—and it lets you play as a male, female, or gender-neutral protagonist. Most unusual of all: It was made by a fan.
Uranium invites you to capture and train a wide variety of never seen before Pokémon. It also offers online trading and battling, which could sate your appetite while you wait for Niantic to add the same to Pokémon Go.
Why would you skydive without a parachute with only a 100ft x 100ft net to catch you? And why would you film it and broadcast it? And why would there be a live audience waiting for the guy to go SPLAT?!?
It still bugs me that Skylab never went anywhere. Like if we had turned the Skylab/Saturn V into the basis of a multi-module space station we could've had an ISS in like five launches (three for the internal volume and two to send up the truss/solar panels).
July 28, 1973 – Close-up views of the Skylab space station as seen from the Skylab 3 mission’s command module during station-keeping maneuvers before docking. (NASA)
So the coup appears to be winding down or at least transitioning phases. Erdogan is (currently) on the ground in Turkey, a large number of people have taken to the streets, and it appears the coup is collapsing (though may hold Ankara; who knows?).
There are bits I don't 100% agree with, but a lot of the stuff about how women and men are treated differently (especially on their "voice") definitely rings true. I mean David Axelrod said last night that one of the reasons he liked her speech is because she wasn't "yelling" — yet withheld any criticism of Sanders for his speech performances that are basically multiple minutes of just that.
Just two weeks ago, many Democrats were anticipating a harmonious end to their party’s unexpectedly prolonged presidential primary. They envisioned a scenario in which the forces of division within the party, which had recently intensified, might collapse under the weight of enormous historical forces.
Back then, though Hillary Clinton’s lead in California primary polls was an imposing 10 percent, her head-to-head lead in general election polls over Donald Trump had vanished. Trump had consolidated Republican support more rapidly than seemed possible after clinching his party’s nomination, and the notion that Democrats needed to put their primary behind them before Trump claimed the lead had taken on new urgency.
A resounding Clinton victory in the country’s most populous blue state, on the same night that she was projected to eclipse the number of delegates required to win the nomination, seemed like just the jolt the party would need to form a consensus behind her candidacy, against a surging Trump. With the nomination out of reach, Bernie Sanders might even concede defeat, while declaring a moral victory for a rising progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
It was never going to be quite so smooth. Around the same time, I argued that as a matter of political horse-trading, Democrats were going to have a harder time unifying their party after Clinton finally vanquished Sanders than they did in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated her. Unlike Clinton and Obama, Clinton and Sanders have substantial ideological differences, and substantially different theories of how the political system responds to public sentiment. When Obama beat Clinton, Democrats were desperate for a path out of the political wilderness; eight years after the George W. Bush presidency ended, it stands to reason that some of them have become frustrated by the Democratic establishment’s many inadequacies.
The events of the last two weeks have made unity more challenging still.The way the Clinton-Sanders race came to an end, amid signs that Trump’s general-election campaign will be a convulsive disaster, will only amplify the forces keeping the party divided. And the longer it remains divided between Clinton and Sanders supporters, the more marginalized and alienated Sanders’s supporters will grow, and the more attenuated Sanders’ influence—and the left’s—within Democratic politics will become.
It would thus behoove him, for the sake of his own movement’s viability, to suspend his campaign quickly, with a smile, and begin the work of drawing his supporters into the Democratic fold well before the party’s convention next month. Some progressives will grieve or protest, but ultimately their cause will be better served.
As if to foil the best laid-plans of both campaigns, the Associated Press declared Clinton’s victoryon Monday night. AP had been tracking the private and public commitments of Democratic superdelegates for months, and those commitments were enough to put Clinton over the top after her overwhelming victory in Puerto Rico on Saturday. Other major media outlets quickly confirmed AP’s tally.
This electoral peculiarity, based on private testimonials rather than public statements or votes, robbed Tuesday night’s elections of suspense, and infuriated Sanders supporters, many of whom saw it as further evidence of a nominating system rigged in Clinton’s favor.
Amid this week’s Trumpenfreude, at this moment of much anticipated closure, progressives are going to feel as if the Democratic Party rejected an opportunity to swing in a meaningfully more liberal direction, on the basis of an electability argument that at the moment seems clearly wrong.
Most importantly, though, all of this transpired against the backdrop of a massive Republican civil war over Trump’s latest act of racist incitement against the federal judge overseeing fraud allegations against Trump University.
Normally, it’s great news for Democrats when Republicans are engulfed in chaos, and in important senses, it was: Clinton was able to eviscerate Trump in a speech about his erratic foreign policy pronouncements a week ago, contrasting her steady hand to his small-but-flailing one, and many Republicans seem ever more resigned to losing the presidential election in November.
But for the purposes of holding the Democratic Party together, Trump’s latest debacle was poorly timed. His lethal flaws—his racism, the division that his candidacy has sown in his own party, his inability to build a functional campaign—undermines the argument (made forcefully by Clinton supporters, if not Clinton herself) that Sanders would be unelectable. That the country would never elect a 74-year-old, self-identified socialist.
Amid this week’s Trumpenfreude, at this moment of much-anticipated closure, progressives are going to feel as if the Democratic Party rejected an opportunity to swing in a meaningfully more liberal direction in 2016, on the basis of an electability argument that at the moment seems clearly wrong. While the histrionic laments of Bernie-or-Bust Sanders supporters who say Sanders’s defeat is somehow “undemocratic” is false—she’s won a clear majority of Democratic votes, delegates, states, and super delegates—this remorse, which could easily turn to bitterness, is understandable. It is harder than ever, given the catastrophic start of Trump’s general-election campaign, to argue that Sanders wouldn’t win in November.
In truth, Clinton has been the Democratic Party favorite for years. Her political connections, fundraising prowess, and base of support pushed most potential competitors out of the race before they ever considered running. But the party was simultaneously relieved to have someone dependable on hand, prepared to take up Obama’s mantle, defend it against a reinvigorated Republican Party, and cement his accomplishments as the 45th president. These party actors and donors weren’t bullied into joining the Clinton juggernaut—they did it willingly. If Democrats coronated Clinton, they made that decision largely out of aversion to risk. Nobody knew Trump would run, or what his candidacy would really mean.
To Sanders’s supporters, this now reads like an error born of overcautiousness—or, more conspiratorially, like an intentional effort to freeze out the left before it ever had a chance to make a case for a more progressive candidate.
There are still many powerful forces pushing in the other direction, toward unity. Obama remains exceedingly popular among all Democrats, and his legacy will suffer if the country doesn’t elect a Democratic successor. Clinton’s candidacy is a matter of genuine historic import, and Trump is a walking obscenity.
Multiple reports have indicated that Obama is preparing to endorse Clinton—if not this week, then very soon.If Sanders remains serious about taking his campaign all the way to the convention—a pledge he again made in Los Angeles in his way-past-primetime speech last night—this means he will soon be running against the most popular Democrat in the country, and in the process, turning his supporters against Obama, deepening their animosity toward the Democratic Party, and sacrificing an immense amount of the goodwill he’s earned over the past year.
Bowing out gracefully, and soon, would solve both the Democrats’ problems and his own. The news flash late on Tuesday that Sanders will meet with the president on Thursday, reportedly at the senator’s request, could be a signal that he has begun to move in that direction. For the sake of the party, and for the good of the left wing he’s championed, he should move swiftly.
So now that a British vacation is 10% cheaper than it was yesterday, who's up for visiting the United Kingdom before it becomes a collection of different countries again?
We’re not sure how to feel about Burger King’s recently revealed Mac N’ Cheetos, which are deep-fried sticks of macaroni and cheese covered in officially licensed Cheetos powder. One the one hand, they seem like a crime against nature, but on the other, Cheetos and deep-fried macaroni and cheese sounds like an awesome combination. News of this horrible/delicious thing comes from Bloomberg, which says some Burger King locations have already started rolling out the Mac N’ Cheetos on a trial basis. That trial is presumably going well, because anyone who thinks an item like this wouldn’t sell in the United States probably lives in some kind of paradise like those small villages in Italy where everyone lives to 150.
Interestingly, Chris Murphy said in his closing speech during the firearm filibuster that there is "no silver linings" to events like Orlando or Newtown. I get what Sanders is trying to say here but he's about as inartful as Donald Trump's own statements regarding the Orlando shootings.
I mean he did better than, say, Jeb Bush but considering how much he outspent Hillary in a bunch of states (especially New York) he's run a very inefficient campaign.
“If anything, Sanders proved that outraging and outspending your opponent doesn’t mean you’ll actually beat them.”
I have to say getting the tools and know-how to fix my macbook's hardware on my own has been really great.
Also: fan RPM went from 4K to 2K. It's sooooooo quiet!!
So…the last two days my computer has been operating at ridiculous temperatures. And that was affecting performance like Safari (and especially Tumblr) would lag. Playing a game (even Hearthstone) was like watching a slideshow.
I checked the temp sensor and it was saying like 80-90 degrees C, which is way above what it should be. And first I was tracking down all sorts of nonsense to see what software problems it could be…and then I realized my fans sound funny.
And so I open up my macbook…and find 2-3mm of solid dust and detritus blocking both of my fans. I remove it and any other bits of dust I can find. Turn it back on and run the temp sensor again? 60.6 degrees.
Do you guys listen to The West Wing Weekly? It's a fun podcast about an episode of the West Wing each week. Joshua Malina (actor who played Will Bailey on the show for a few years) is one of the co-hosts and they've brought on some guests who also either worked on the show or in the real White House.
Richard Schiff: ...I got my 1927, no, my 1961 New York Yankee, little statue of all the guys—
Joshua Malina: Booooooo
Schiff: —Berra, Mickey Mantles.
Malina: Let's go Mets!
Schiff: The Mets didn't exist in '61.
Malina: Neither did I!
...
Schiff: That's F***ed up.
Also how weird is the menu's design? Like why is it "LARGE Order Fries" or why are the flavors of SHAKES in all caps subscript when nothing else has that font choice?
And why is it organized so weird? I really think milk, coffee, hot chocolate, and hot apple pie are in the wrong place. Or...how much does a small order fries cost? Or if there are no small fries, why is there a "LARGE" qualifier at all?
Sort of? I think the McDonald’s menu is one of those things that (at least for certain items) has dropped in relative value. For instance, you can get two cheeseburgers for $2.56 today (in California), whereas the 1972 equivalent is about $3.88. I think the more striking thing for me is how ‘simple’ the menu looks compared to today.
The one that always gets me is the price of gas in the movie Die Hard. 74.9¢/gal at (I think) a Shell station in 1988. That’s like $1.56 today!
Seriously. How subversive would it be to have a Spider-Man movie told from the perspective of his love interest in which neither Spider-Man nor Peter Parker show up all that much? Nor is it 'revealed' that Peter and Spider-Man are the same person?
When in Vietnam, I picked up a new game too! Thanks to Marilyn for teaching me this traditional Chinese games so next time in CNY I can Pong Pong Pong and 🀄️🀄️🀄️
And we definitely have the best group of people to play with
#flatlays #handsinframe #mahjongnight #pong #onthebed (at Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam)
