unclevlad

The last 5 women to win the French Open, won their first career Grand Slam. To emphasize Old Man's point about not hearing of any of the players on the womens' side...by the semifinals, it was guaranteed that streak would continue. (The semifinalists were the 17 and 31 seeds, and 2 unseeded players. Krejcikova was unseeded...but just outside the seedings.) Krejcikova jumped up to #15 in the world with the win, which in itself is almost as important as the prize money. The win means 2000 ratings points which last until next year's French Open. She should be looking at being ranked at the Slams, for sure, and at many of the WTA Premier events. (IIRC, some seed only the top 8, but I think most seed the top 16.) That's where a player solidifies his/her ranking, with good to very good points earned at many events. Joker-Nadal was intense. Significant ebb and flow. Rafa's time on the throne is looking to come to an end. Not just this result, but there were other events this clay court season where he looked human. Mind, at this point, he's still *among* the best on clay, but the gap to the field has largely disappeared. Of note: the French government chose to suspend the curfew. The first 3 sets were grueling, and finished up about 20 minutes before mandated quarantine time was to kick in (11 PM Paris time.) This'd happened a couple nights before in the quarters, too...the crowd was forced to leave another great, intense match, and no one was particularly happy. Forced a 20 minute break to get them all out, and certainly broke the flow and mood of the match. Mindful of this, and given the significance of the match, the government said "OK, fans, you can stay." That was a quite popular decision. Also, the Zherev-Tsitsipas match was excellent too. Tsitsipas won the first 2 sets; Zhevev came back to even the match, then had triple break point in the first game of the 5th set. Breaking there might've been enough to keep his momentum going, but Tsitsipas held, and carried that shift forward to win the final set. It's his first final, and that means, not terribly surprisingly, it's the first time any Greek player's made a GS final. He's a pretty strong underdog...+250 to +270...but I hope he can pull it off. EDIT: Side thought, since we've also got a time travel discussion going on. Bookies would let you bet on this particular womens' final matchup, I'm sure. Before the tournament started, they were 200-1 and 150-1 to win it. Figure then, 100-1 and 75-1 to make the finals, so maybe 5000-1 to be the matchup?

Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field late in the first half in an Euro League match against Finland. He was treated on the field for 20 minutes before being transported to a hospital. He is now reported as stable and awake, which is wonderful news. Some of us still remember Hank Gathers. EDIT: Match was suspended, of course, while emergency medical treatment was taking place. With Eriksen stabilized and probably out of immediate danger, the game is about to be resumed after a couple hours' delay. EDIT 2: Eriksen's father is at the hospital. His agent relayed that, according to the father, Eriksen is awake and considered no longer in danger.

Nuggets are gonna have to consider some changes. Down 0-2, you can't lose game 3 or it's fundamentally over. And this was the night they celebrated Jokic winning the MVP. But they're laying an egg. The starting guards...ok, well, both their real starting guards are out. The forwards...Aaron Gordon's a support-style power forward but he's not adding enough. Much worse, Michael Porter Jr. is *supposed* to be a scoring option; it's his major talent. Gordon is 2-10. Porter Jr. is 4-12. Jokic has 30 points and 19 rebounds as we hit the 2 minute mark with Denver now down 17...and therefore, game over...the other 4 starters combined have 27 and 11. Suns have 3 straight garbage-time wins...17, 25, and ended at 14 tonight, but it wasn't that close.

They have stopped reporting to JHU, it appears..... I'm wondering if there's a federal lawsuit in the works, but I bet they're exploiting a lack of explicit requirements...

Yeah, in the 90's it would've been Avengers: Baywatch.

Some of you might have noted that India reported an exceptionally high number of coronavirus deaths 2 days ago. I figured it was likely largely a revision/reclassification that accounted for the extra numbers. Finally checked; yep. We've questioned India's numbers for a long time. Then we had the indirect evidence based on excess deaths. Well this time, the Indian high court required one state to review death records. That state's death toll went from 5500 to 9500. Rather a strong piece of supporting evidence that yes, the counts have been seriously low.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/politics/mike-nearman-oregon/index.html Well, some states show sense at times anyway. Vote was 59-1.

Nah, not that early. Not based on the records right now. Rocks are 11 back of the Padres, who have the last playoff spot right now...but also note that the Padres would be leading the NL East or Central, and half game back in the AL West. They're 3rd in the NL West. And the Rocks have played 32 division games, one of the highest numbers in the league at this point. On the downside, 10 of em have been against...the D'backs. But 11 back after 65-ish games, projected forward...that's 22 back at the 130 game mark, which is late-ish August. Should be, what, 27 or so games in September, give or take. Granted...the trade deadline this year is end of July. By that date they'll be irrelevant. (The D'backs will be irrelevant by the All-Star break.) And this just in, the D'backs fired their hitting coach and assistant hitting coach today. One of the problems of the franchise, tho, has been its coaching churn. Torey Lovullo actually has managed the 3rd-most games in franchise history...admittedly not that long, but no manager's lasted more than 4 1/2 years...including 3 who won manager of the year, and Bob Brenly, who won the World Series. But the turnover with managers and GMs (they're on #3 since 2010) has been crazy, and one has to suspect it's been a major factor in their inconsistency...at best.

And you think Colorado is bad? The D'backs lost their 19th straight road game this afternoon at Oakland. OK, the Rockies' road record is worse...how does a team manage to go 4-23 anyway? But they win at home, and the D'backs are 5 under .500 at home. And they've fallen off the planet after a semi-decent start. Below-average offense that's been notably less productive recently, and worst team ERA in MLB. The icing on the cake to me, tho, is when you've got that big, fat, glaring negative stat to point at repeatedly, with the 19-game road losing streak. THAT is why I wouldn't be surprised if the manager's gone before the trade deadline.

Clips are still in, but for how much longer is an open question. The post-season coaching carousel is cranking away strongly, with 1 moving into the front office and now 3 more being canned. And if things continue, there might be 2 more. Budenholzer's been getting sharp criticism for how the Bucks have lost, and for seemingly being unable to move the Bucks forward. Excellent regular seasons, yes, but very poor playoffs. This caught up to Terry Stotts; I haven't heard anything but it wouldn't surprise me that if the Nets sweep the Bucks, Bud's out. They're fallling behind now. The other is Ty Lue with the Clips. You can't drop major bucks on PG and Kahwi and have their playoff track record. Blaming the coach probably isn't fair here, but that hardly matters.

2 problems: 1. Exactly WHICH face is the one on top? 2. A nearly spherical die with 600 facets, will be very close *to* a sphere. So each time you roll it, you'll have to wait a long, long time for it to actually settle. And you'll need a table with a raised edge, or that puppy's gonna roll off *way* too often.

I'm kinda wondering "D616" means an exploding D6 approach. Since this is a corporate tie-in project, I have no expectation to begin with.

The problem will be charting a new balance between theatrical releases and streaming content.

And hey, if there's playtest rules, what's to lose by checking out the basics?

The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson and I rarely double up, but gotta get this one in...the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. Incredible story, albeit not the easiest read ever. Certain characters' personal stores are IMO, BY FAR, the most hosed over, messed up, and tortuous I know of...and yes, that includes Elric, who's pretty majorly hosed by Moorcock regularly. And the characters did absolutely nothing to deserve it. The whole series is seriously interesting, but also in many ways very seriously CREEPY.

They didn't realize that the attack dealt normal, non-magical damage, and the highway needed a +2 or better magical weapon to do damage. So things keep getting worse. Gas shortage from the shut-down pipelines, then beef shortage from a ransomware attack on beef processors, and now this...we face a d6 shortage!!! We'll be overwhelmed by monsters because we can't hit them!!!!

So just to spray a little butane onto the burning newspaper, Aaron Rodgers is expected to skip a mandatory OTA this week. Just what the Packers need. Fine Rodgers and anger him that much more...or don't fine him and potentially anger everyone else. This does nothing to improve the chances that Rodgers will be staying with the Packers...or that even if he is, that relations will be any good.

DD has never tried to be anything but a collection of one-off, individual rules, particularly with the magic system. While there were some broad general rules, each spell largely was a rule unto itself. Same with item effects. But each was 100% explicit. One of the issues in Hero is, that doesn't necessarily hold. The major systemic argument is the balance between Special Effects Matter Most! and Mechanics Matter Most!. We're seeing that a bit here, with the assertion that you can't have a general defense against Teleport UAA because the defense is defined with the power. The other issue is what sorts of advantages/limitations make sense, and how should they be combined? For example, Damage Over Time, and Defense Only Applies Once. And the issue that when the base cost is dirt-cheap, the cost of advantages largely becomes moot. Sometimes it's ill-considered definitions. My pet peeve here is Time Limit. It's "duration override" because the rule says "create an effect that lasts for a defined period of time." And then it overrides any other termination conditions like Nonpersistent. So it doesn't cover cases such as instant-use abilities like STR or an HA, such that the power can be available for use only for a period of time. So that means you can do +10 to any specified Characteristic for 1 hour, and you get a -3/4 limitation. Oh, EXCEPT for STR because STR has a connected END cost *some of the time*. D&D's complexity is that there are few if any large-scale rules; every rule, by and large, is a singleton object. Hero's major complexity is mostly due to what my old boss called Chinese Menu complexity...take one from Column A, one from Column B, 2 picks from Column C, etc. etc. That in itself is complex. That also creates interactions that need to be addressed. And there are others, some of which I've mentioned. Now, granted: Hero's *eminently* playable by avoiding the messiest bits, which isn't that hard to do. And D&D can't be simplified much...and it's always had the problem that since it's a collection of singleton rules, its complexity only increases over time. (3.5 D&D started suffering from the Chinese Menu problem as more and more splatbooks came out, and from the "oh man look at what this combination does!" due to that.)

Probably not. I often put Tennis Channel on, as tennis is often the only daytime sports available, and I don't recognize many of the women players. Part of it is, the women have been MUCH!!!! more prone to surprise upsets, so there are more less-known players in later stages. That's been VERY common for the last couple years; a semi-final lineup might be 3 double-digit seeds and an unseeded, it's happened, IIRC. 7 of the top 17 seeds lost in the first or second round...which means to unseeded players, as the seeds are scheduled to start playing each other in the 3rd round. 4 more lost in the 3rd round, when they should've been favorites. And, no, I'm not counting Osaka; she withdrew. The round of 16 is in progress, with 2 matches finished, so there are 12 players left. Only 2 are in the top 15 in the overall womens' rankings; 3 are ranked in the 60's. And this really hasn't been unusual. Now, this year, the mens' draw's been hammered, especially in the middle of the seeds. 4, 7, and 10 seeds fell 1st or 2nd round; so did the players ranked 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, and 26. That's happened more often since the restart, and IIRC even somewhat in 2019. Serena has, I think, lost a step, and lost some pop. Venus has just been holding on for a while; she had 1 decent event, I think, in 2019, but she's lost far more often in the first round of even nominally secondary events. Her rankings's outside the top 100 at this point. Serena is still competitive, but by and large, a serious long shot to win another Grand Slam. Roger is similar. The level's still high but it's not at the top any more. And then, his body's showing that his 40th is in August. Tennis (singles, anyway) is predominately a young-ish man's game.

Because it is. It tries to let anyone do anything. It can't NOT be complicated.

Damage Negation is "subtract 1 DC from the attack" because damage negation happens at the point of delivery, whereas active cost includes other factors at times, like reduced END or Indirect. With things like UAAs, I'd also rather NOT include the UAA points. MegaScale's cost? Yeah, I can see that. BUT, I think the problem is pretty obvious: what counts, what doesn't? The system already has issues with this, on a few levels. 1. For some powers with extensive options, which if any modify the base power (and therefore the power's range), and which don't (IOW, they act like adders)? One example is Change Environment. 2. The notion of active cost has at least 2 subsidiary aspects: "active cost" for END purposes, and for determining the cost of a full DC for this power. The first is relatively straightforward, in that it's "everything but Reduced END"; the second is much more complex, and might even have multiple answers (for Damage over TIme or Constant damage powers). Very little of this is formalized. It's useful to also look at Dispel. There's a question that Dispel addresses. Dispel is all or nothing; if the Dispel effect rolled doesn't match or exceed the points in the power to be dispelled, then nothing happens. For this application of "effect negation"...is it all or nothing, or scaling? Then...what if the power being negated isn't scaling, like XDM? So there are issues to iron out. Then there's LoneWolf's argument: the defense is defined by the attacker, and therefore the defender has no say. As I said before, I think this can't be completely open-ended. Affects Desolid is an example here. Desolid allows the power to define certain things that will affect it; but the +1/2 level of Affects Desolid says it works against any. Right but that means we don't make it universal, they should be more narrow. And yeah, there is a conflict here, when players can freely min-max aspects like this. One thing to do is, these should be Special Powers...therefore, if you want them, you're paying permanent points, this can't come out of a VPP or a piecemeal multipower. Then, if it's built like, say, 2 points for 1d6 of active point suppression against a narrowly defined effect or possibly class of effects that do NOT do damage...this won't be automatic at all, especially if the suppression aspect is All or Nothing. There's still issues...what does apply, what doesn't? But something like 10" teleport with +1 MegaScale (teleport to my hidden lair elsewhere in the city, HAH!) is 20 points of intensity, and therefore 20 points to suppress. That's 6 dice for a 50-50 shot against THIS UAA Teleport. Plus, the goal here as I see it, is to try to define a power vs. power comparison, when the effect itself is Yes/No.

The subpoena was withdrawn; the person of interest was apprehended by other means. But this means that there's no discussion about the merits of the subpoena in the first place, at least officially.

Oh man..... Jon Rahm is an excellent pro golfer; currently ranked #3 in the world. He's playing at the Memorial, the tournament where Jack Nicklaus was the long-time host, and one of the biggest non-majors on the calendar. As the 3rd round ends, he has a 6 shot lead. 6 shots is HUGE, even with a round to play. Then...and on camera, mind, as he's walking off...Tour officials come up and tell him that he's tested positive for Covid. Both primary and secondary. And he's got to withdraw. Just like that. I wasn't watching the coverage; I'm sure it would've been totally bizarre, as the CBS guys had no idea what was going on for a while. Still...the guy was set to win the tournament...and, gee, over $1.6 MILLION. POOF! The timing had to be gut-wrenching.

First: I'm saying that sometimes, this should NOT be allowed. Sometimes a UAA should always have a defined defense, not simply what the player wants it to be. Second: debatable. 6E1 p. 300 says So it's less than clear, and actually leans to contradictory interpretations. Why does it matter who's grabbed, who's not? Or is the first part saying that the teleporter has to use *2* separate instances of Teleport at the same time...one for himself, one for the grabber? If that's the case, then why isn't this the rule when the teleporter is grabbing someone not willing? Also, in the kidnapping scenario: much of the time, the kidnapping teleporter will want to travel with the victim, to secure them at the destination for example. It feels counter-intuitive that this requires 2 separate activations. Some of this is just that Teleport is phrased very oddly, IMO, with the mass limits, and the mass limit as an adder is brutal. And the structure of Usable On Others is less than clear. To be sure, teleportation is IMO worth a Caution sign, in that it always has problematic implications. (Yeah, just how are you gonna stop the teleporter from popping into the White House and offing the President by bringing in 50 pounds of C4, starting a 10 second timer, then teleporting away? Or if not the White House, how about just blowing up a house, generally.) Teleport is pretty much the Desolid of movement powers in terms of abuse potential. Some of the rules (especially the special costing for fixed locations) seem to me to recognize the issues, to a point. And some of it is, I think, that UOO is written VERY badly.

Power Defense is also scaling. How does the damage scale with a Teleport UAA, is it based purely on the base amount in the teleport? Not necessarily. It can simply be defined as a new defense, that works, PERIOD...that in the campaign, a standard defense against an undesired teleport is this one. There may be others, but this is a given. You're basically asserting that the definition in the UAA is the only thing that matters. What this also comes down to is, how much freedom should be allowed in powers design? It's too easy for the player to try to exploit this by naming something too weird. That said...yes, N-B, what you're saying is that Power Defense IS the defense, so I can simply buy my 10-15 points of Power Def and skip the limitation. Buying some Power Def isn't automatic, but it's also useful enough to consider for most characters. If Power Def with a limitation can work as the defense, then Power Def with no limitation automatically does. Is that what you want?