unclevlad

My original points were: a) I do expect some benefits, at times b) I don't know for sure what form they'll take yet. Defining a specific effect limits what this can do, to that effect. That's backwards from what I'm trying to do.

I'll start by agreeing with Simon's last point. Most things are obvious, but there's armors, for example, that are metal-reinforced leather. Slightly oddball, but ceramics are metal oxides...aluminum oxide (sapphire in crystal form) and zirconium oxide are fairly common. Quite a few varieties of stone have high metallic element content. Cement, according to Wikipedia Calcium is an alkaline metal; silicon is a metalloid; aluminum and iron are traditional metals. On top of that, of course, there's often steel rebar included. If Crusher wears steel gauntlets, but mostly punches...ok, if the gauntlets are defined as +2d6 HA, you don't take those...but you should take the rest of the punch. But that's getting to the limitation on the Desolid, which is separate. The alternatives to Affects Physical World are in APG: 1. Selective Desolid: + 1 1/2 advantage on desolid. This might actually work out, because "to metals only" is a potentially big limitation. 2. Alternate Desolid. The power writeup was an attempt to define a scaling form; Desolid is a pricey all-or-nothing. Or you can build it. How about a combination of Damage Negation and a Passwall power? Tunneling is preconceived to be digging-related; the book actually advises NOT using it as a basis for this. So, build something sane. Something like Pass Through Metals: 10 points to pass through 5 PD (that's minimum for metal) at 1" per phase. +2 points for +1 PD, or +1". Costs END. Doesn't leave a mark. Note that a safe door or submarine have 10 PD. A major combat ship is probably 12-13; a vault's listed as 16, but that's probably not that practical for most vehicles. (6E2 171 for the object table.) NOT sold on that pricing, but it's got a very narrow definition. You can't go through the walls of a house, for example. Damage Negation...you're only buying the PD, and "metal only"...maybe -1/2? As you're trying to define it....ick....I'm about to get lunch going. Turkey enchis. Simple assembly, cover with aluminum foil, bake.........oh. Cover with aluminum foil......surprise...... Lots of baking pans are metal, too, altho you can use ceramic or glass too. For that matter, a great deal of low-end tableware is just stamped metal. Making this always on has some...interesting everyday drawbacks.

You can model from effect, if you want a narrow effect...but you can also define a capability as part of the power, and use that and the situation to determine what it gives, in that context. That's the flexible approach...IF it's possible in the first place.

Reds...hits, 162. Runs allowed, 166. Wow. NOTE:: edited, typo earlier. Gave em 20 more hits. Fixed. Lots of teams aren't hitting. Everyone's right around 25 games today, as it turns out. 19 of them are under 200 hits, or 8 per game. The TOTAL disaster is their pitching. 5 worst team ERAs... Rockies, 4.56 Royals, 4.57 Pirates, 4.67 Nats, 5.03 and then the Reds. At 6.86. Almost 2 runs a game worse. And almost all earned runs....160. Staff leads MLB in walks, hit batters, and HRs allowed...that's not the triple crown you want to win. And here's the cherry on top, as to how BAD the pitching has been. The Reds have played 25 games. That means, nominally, 225 innings. They've played 17 road games, going 2-15. The staff has pitched a total of 210 innings. Conclusion? In every road loss, the home team hasn't needed the 9th. BUT, they've given up the most runs (by about 1.5 runs per game) while dodging around a full game's worth of pitching. Their 8.4 innings pitched per game is the lowest by a fair margin...obviously, this stat has a pretty narrow range. There's an article in FiveThirtyEight from a couple days ago, comparing the Reds to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders...the absolute, no doubt, worst "major league" baseball team EVER. 20-134. The quotes are because the team was quite literally, intentionally gutted...because the owners bought a second team and shipped every decent player from Cleveland to the new team. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/could-the-2022-cincinnati-reds-be-as-bad-as-the-1899-cleveland-spiders/ SOME of this is, it's still just the start of the season. The D'backs had a stretch like this, that started a bit later. They only ended up with a bad record, not a complete train wreck. That said: they're close to being, for me, statistically eliminated already. They've got 137 left. Win 2 out of 3 the rest of the way, that'd be 91 more, so 94 total. That gets them in, no doubt....but 2 of 3 for 100+ games is RARE. When they drop under that...this far out...that's when they're statistically eliminated for me. Granted, for all practical purposes the season's dead already.

I don't see a problem. Remember that the NFL has a running clock when a play goes out of bounds. One qualification: it could matter at the end of the quarters, due to flipping directions/ends of the field. Otherwise, there's no impact on the players, save to make for probably somewhat fewer plays per game. What matters to them is the play clock, and if the USFL is operating similarly to the NFL, that restarts fairly quickly.

I saw that story of the body. Powell may soon be so low that it' *can't* generate electricity. We're talking...maybe a year, maybe somewhat less. Yeah, the story I posted talked about it. A great deal of the grassy areas are like that, apparently, because, as you say, they weren't used for anything. Not even walking, by and large. But golf courses *have* to consider this as major warning shot. Particularly public courses. Private courses might argue deprivation of livelihood, and a form of property seizure. The public courses can't in themselves do that; the employees are losing their jobs, but it's no different from the course simply closing for them.

Postgame host jinx of epic proportions... Mets are playing Phillies; MLB Network is carrying the Philly (home team) broadcast. Phillies are cruising, up 7-1 after 7. Nola has a great outing with 1 bad pitch, but hey, a solo homer is gonna happen from time to time. So they cut to the postgame hosts, who are all smiling and jovial, and practically bouncing. One of em makes a comment of the "yeah, we'll have a good time recapping this one" style. One of the others goes, hey now, don't say that, it's not over. Still 7-1 through 8. Mets score 7 in the top of the 9th. Including 4 with 2 outs. Time machine game...as in, I want a time machine so I can place a $10 bet on the Mets to win, after the top of the 8th. And the Met closer comes in, 1-2-3 boom. Phillies lose.

First, but almost certainly not last....headline and lead from NYT. Whether this will really do that much, remains to be seen. But, I very seriously doubt they'll stand alone in a ban like this for very long. Many have probably seen shots like the Lake Mead water level; down here we've been down again...2.5 to 3 inches a year below normal. Since long-term average is only 10 inches...that's also 25-30% down. Wildfires have also been kicking off already too. The 2nd largest fire in New Mexico history is devastating the northern mesa area; the governor's asked the feds for a disaster declaration. From DisasterPhilanthropy.org: EDIT: BTW, according to WeatherBug, the forecast high for every day in the 10 day forecast, including today: 90+, with the highest being 95. No rain in sight.

Cripes, dude, NO. You aren't barking up the wrong tree here, you're in the wrong freaking forest. Especially when you absolutely show you have no idea of the issue.

Granted it was early...but 2 days before this, the Reds were still .500 at 2-2. They're 1-20 since. Dead last *in all MLB* by 5 1/2. 11 1/2 out of the WC...the 7th place Cards. And we haven't hit Mother's Day. Ownerships deserves this. SERIOUS question if the team has given up on ownership. Fans don't. Complete boycott and lawsuit by season ticket holders time.

Oh my. NM Attorney General Democratic primary is getting seriously, seriously ugly. They're not slinging mud, even if it's soft and brown. Postgame on TNT Inside the NBA...where Barkley made a seriously ill-timed unintentional pun that had everyone face-palming, but ya hadda see it... There's 2 candidates. Ads for each of em ran within a few minutes. One has what might be a spliced podcast recording, the candidate purportedly pushing defunding the police. The other one blasts the other candidate's record as a prosecutor...asserting incompetence, favoritism, and the like. The first ads I saw from both...Brian Colon is the one accused of supporting defunding the police. His initial ads were really bad efforts to garner support. Bad sob story, horrible presentation, ridiculous conclusion IMO. He lost me real fast. Raul Torrez started by pointing out he's the only one with courtroom experience, and doing something like the job of the AG. This is round 2, and they went straight to the napalm....

The purity of that oxymoron is dazzling.

I mostly agree, unless the whole plot is to prevent whatever the hook is, from happening. But you don't write up the whole thing; you write up ways to damp it, or slow it down...then finally shut it down altogether. I will qualify that a bit more: you can write up elements, for the purpose of defining interference points for the PCs to disrupt things. But both of those are really more writing up the adventure aspects.

Plus, ethically, permission can be withdrawn. Legally, this may create a reasonable doubt situation. Bauer is being punished under the domestic violence policy. They can enforce that without ground for a criminal conviction; the standards are quite different. And this happened not long ago. Story is that MadBum and the HPO were...not on the same page. But the umpire here, is the first base umpire. My take: the umpire seriously overreacts. MadBum was walking away, looks like the ump had to get the last word in...and it blew up. The umpire, Dan Bellino, doesn't appear to have a hair trigger most of the time; he only issued one ejection last year. (I saw at least 3 umpires who had 4. One was Angel Hernandez, so...it may not reflect a hair trigger alone. Incompetence would clearly create more situations leading to ejections.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/politics-july-dec04-third_parties So there's a serious cap to how large any 3rd party can grow. That's a situation both major parties have striven for, too.

Skills are actually trivial to incorporate, because you can freely change the display name of any existing skill once you've selected it. For me, I often change Persuasion or Oratory to Leadership. I use APG's defensive attack...one way to do that is to relabel Rapid Attack. Eventually, I changed the template, so I have a Multiple Attack Skills that has all 4 options as individual adders. I don't believe that required a change to the source code, but I may have, in a couple minor spots.

On the point of changing the number of Justices...thinking that will help at all is, IMO, naive. The problem isn't the number of Justices; it's that the Republicans have utterly politicized the confirmation process. They're so far beyond hypocritical there, that it's hard to comprehend. They don't care. They're playing to win...within whatever definition of winning you think applies. The Democrats don't. So...fine, if you stack to, let's say, 15...try to do it now, and the Republicans will stall and stall and refuse to move...until THEY have the WH and Senate again. The Republicans play tackle football; the Democrats play flag football. IMO it's pretty much as simple as that. And it's that great a mismatch. Right now, I see no road forward, or at least not one that will last. Partly because, it's not just the US; the French election was another warning shot, with Le Pen getting a very worrisome number of votes. The conservative leadership has a seemingly completely unshakeable base in many places like Texas and Florida, and they're doing much too good a job wrapping around the contested states like Michigan. They have the courts to back...or at least, not impede...them. They'll make deals with devils without batting an eye; they might loathe Trump, but they refuse to repudiate him. OTOH, Democrats have factional divides that cripple them...not just Sinema and Manchin, but also the younger, more progressive wing like AOC, that've made life in the House more difficult. So anything the Democrats MAY get done...won't last more than a few years.

Don't think you won't be hit by the shrapnel up there. And I'm hoping desperately that it's ONLY the tracks that get blown up. Anyone else here read Marc Stiegler's Brain Trust series of near-future sci fi?

I couldn't laugh.....because it's too often true....... Logan: Food Network became unwatchable for me years ago. Too many ridiculous pseudo-reality shows. It wasn't worth searching for anything that might be worth my time. Of course, food on TV is generally handled......really, really badly. TBS has a new "cooking" show called Rat in the Kitchen, which is supposed to be a competition...but the goal of one of the contestants is to secretly wreck all the others. Well, we know what we can expect from anything Turner...absolute dreck. I can't *stand* Gordon Ramsay.

Just dropped in my inbox, this little bomb from NYT: We had some hope, I suppose, they wouldn't...but I don't think many are particularly surprised. This is 2022, not 1922. But the way laws in many states are going...1822 might be closer.

Haven't there been similar revelations in the past?

Of course not. They don't need to try. Not like Israel would be their buds regardless, for that matter.

I'm not into country music at all...but that means, if I recognize the name, the person hadda be pretty big. Naomi Judd died Saturday. COD was not disclosed. Yeah...that's a pretty big name, all right...

Only 8 episodes. Quite possible most are in the bag. Plus, Netflix announced 2 spinoffs...IC Mexico and IC Brazil. Those will be interesting; how often do we get exposed to legit foreign cuisine?

Not food per se, but related. Netflix is rebooting Iron Chef, apparently in the original format. (So, presumably, no insipid surprise ingredient, for example.) 8, 45 minute episodes. Alton Brown and Kristen Kesh (who won Top Chef, apparently) are floor commentators, Mark Dacasos returns as The Chairman. That actually makes me think it'll have less foolishness than the later seasons on Food Network devolved to. June 15th, Netflix.