unclevlad

Well, falsifying evidence and/or lying under oath is a serious sin, so...yes, I can believe they found mountains of damning evidence.

Well THAT was the craziest game in....ages!!! I felt the Browns needed to win, to show they belonged...but coming back like that...is impressive.

Or as Billy Joel said, I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun. Only the good die young!!!!

And the entire election-fraud farce has fracture lines running through the entire Party structure. So Trump may yet cause the Party to collapse.

Just because the alligator's dead, it doesn't necessarily realize it...and its jaws and tail are still very dangerous for a while longer....

California is probably relishing the role of drama queen of the electoral college. All states except CA, HI, and OR are finished, with the current count at 240-232. So HI and OR can't decide it...it's all Cali. How very Hollywood.

I have to disagree. The province of hucksters and shysters is to convince you of the truth of one, generally narrow, thing that any critical thought would reject..."bleach cures coronavirus" is hucksterizing. Getting someone to replace their entire thought processes with theirs is the province of messianic cult leaders. I'd say it also has been seen at this breadth, if not level of success: Joe McCarthy.

Today is actually the day I worried the most about potential violence, so closing the Michigan state house is understandable. Haven't seen any reports so far; I'm quite happy to be wrong if it stays that way.

The National Film Registry added 25 new films, 3 of which are, I think, worth mention here: A Clockwork Orange The Blues Brothers Batman: The Dark Knight

The Electoral College votes are being cast right now. Each state has its own schedule so they're not all done yet. Of note, tho, PA, AZ, and GA have finished, all votes going to Biden. That leaves only Michigan as a potential disruptor, and it wouldn't be enough by itself to shift the overall tally to Trump. So that's one more milestone passed. I still won't say it's absolutely, positively OVER and Trump is GONE!!! until after Biden takes the oath of office, but this should, I think, make any challenge by Trump almost impossible, and any overt action even more explicitly a coup attempt under the law. What remains to be seen is how many, or perhaps which, Republicans acknowledge Biden's win.

Half a million doses left the Pfizer plant today!!!!! I hadn't thought about it but...they were escorted by US Marshals. Yeah, I can see that.... projected to ship 2 million doses by the end of the week. It's a start!!!!

So just how real are the Bills this year? OK, I can maybe argue the Steelers are still suffering a bit from the schedule, but still, impressive win. Division is almost in the bag, and now the #2 seed is plausible. 5 AFC teams have been eliminated already, despite the 7th team making the playoffs. By contrast, the only NFC team eliminated is the Falcons, because the 7 spot is currently a tie between the Vikes and Bears at 6-7. (And, of course, the NFC East.)

I do my complexity in different ways than what you were setting up. This is something I'm starting to develop for grins...the cornerstone is a conceit of mine to keep a character's mass normal, even if you do some crazy other stuff, and figure out how to interpret that. So, this one is based on combining "Growth" and APG's alternate desolid, which is essentially Density Decrease. 3 levels of that --> 1/8 mass, whereas the Growth --> 8x mass. Net? Normal mass. 69 Plasma form: (Total: 87 Active Cost, 69 Real Cost) (7 END to activate) --Desolidification (APG, 3 levels), Costs Endurance Only To Activate (+1/4); Cannot Pass Through Solid Objects, Does not improve defenses (-1/4)* --+2 to opponents' sight perception (-6 Active Points); Linked (Desolidification) (Real Cost: -4) + --Reach +1m (1 Active Points)+ --Energy Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% (30 Active Points); Costs END (Only Costs END to Activate; -1/4) --Physical Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% (30 Active Points); Costs END (Only Costs END to Activate; -1/4) --LS (Safe in High Pressure; Safe in Low Pressure/Vacuum; Self-Contained Breathing) (Real Cost: 13) * Alternate Desolid only gives +1 PD/ED per level, so not improving the defenses is far less significant than standard desolid. + The Reach is the only thing that remains. Most of the Growth benefits don't make sense here; many of the disadvantages get cancelled too. So what remains is, much easier to see due to size, and the reach. OH, and the Running; I'll include that later. Work in progress. Extra Leap too; fits with the lower density. 47 Blast 11d6 (vs. ED), Variable SFX (Limited Group of SFX; +1/4), Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4) (82 Active Points); Linked (Plasma form; -1/2), Variable Limitations (requires -1/2 worth of Limitations; -1/4) - END=3 And this is one way to build a complex Blast. The variable limitations will typically be from Beam, Limited Range, and Reduced Penetration; the limited group of SFX is TBD yet, but it'd be clarified. And then there's this, as I mentioned in another thread: VPP: 5 Real, 6 Active. No skill roll, 0 Phase to change; HAs and HKAs ONLY (-1/2 to be conservative). 11 points. What does it mean? A 1 pip HA is 2 points; 6 active means you can put anything from 0 to +2 advantages, you can make it Red Pen if you want. The HKA can't have advantages and it'll cost END, but you get a DC out of it. Either can be any SFX you can talk your GM into within the scope of the power. So I should qualify...not necessarily simple. Just particular types of complex.

Nahhh. There's always a hundred ways to interpret simple statements like this. Diamonds chip very easily; there's at least one plane where they have perfect cleavage. They're also brittle; they're easy to pulverize. They're only hard to scratch in reality. That wouldn't translate terribly well. I use junk like "lattice deformations cause color in diamonds" as justification for complete foo.

Apropos of this, the Raiders have just canned their DC. Obviously Chuckie was as impressed as you were.

I read something that would make this potentially fun. In most gemstones...sapphire, beryl, tourmaline...color comes from impurities. Add this element or elements, get this kind of color. In diamonds it doesn't entirely work that way. OK, blue diamonds are the result of boron. But yellow, brown, and the VERY rare red, are caused by pressure-induced lattice distortions. So you can use similar visuals; the power flows cause localized, rippling disruptions and color shifts. Not sure I'd go with plain "Diamond" per se but something along those lines. Especially if the character has a sight Flash attack to go with the Blast. And a diamond-like body could be EXTREMELY scary as an HTH build.

But the problem is that frequency now becomes a bone of contention. Mind, I agree that you *don't* want to use SFX to drive damage shifts very often *at all* IMO. And some of this is just the wildly variable effectiveness involved, when you construct the power like this. Because the tack-ons are as large as the base. So the character ranges from OMG!! to Why do we bother keeping you around, you're useless!! when the extra damage doesn't kick in. One of the things this creates is that the GM has to adapt disproportionately to this one character. Situational limits can too easily become the daywalker vampire problem. The classical vampire problem is, yeah, the vampire PC totally kicks ass at night, but he's literally only available half the time. The daywalker variant is, the vampire can walk around, but loses a LOT of his powers doing so. So he goes from supers level to talented normal level at best. Again, some of this is connecting SO much damage to the conditions, so a construction problem, but it's going to exist. Now, if things are clear-cut, that can be OK, but may have to be monitored. Say it's Increased END: The player always uses it on the opening 12...knowing he's got an immediate Recovery that'll offset the entire END cost? Dubious, because he's using an artificial constraint in the rules to make the limitation meaningless too much of the time. Or if the extra damage has to come from an END reserve, or charges. BTW: valuing these limitations is also a huge issue. What's the value of any defense...absorption, Def, Negation, Reduction...only versus one energy type? Typically -1/2 unless it's rather uncommon. That's 6E1 167 speaking. Or on 6E1 383, many of the Limited Powers are very narrow. Only in Daylight is -1/4. Doesn't work in darkness is -1/2. So what IS the value of that "not versus grounded targets"? Probably NOT!!! -1. OH, and BTW, as a GM, do you require the player to state how much of that blast is being used? If the target *is* grounded in ways the character didn't expect...oh well, blow off those extra dice. But not the END expenditure.

Well OK, but you do realize that NFL Backup QB is on the list of acceptable professions for the federal witness protection program, right?

As bad as Covid-19 has been, consider this. If it had waited a year...if the first reports were, let us say, just starting in now...where would we be a year from now? With Trump likely having been re-elected.

Could be worse. My home market is El Paso, which means Fox is showing a Ti-D-Bowl game, Cowboys-Bengals. FiveThrirtyEight has em as 29th and 32nd in the league. Upside is, CBS is showing Chiefs-Fins, which has been insane. Mahomes ran backwards into a 30 yard sack, slightly overthrew a receiver so the ball went off his hands into a tip-pick, AND tried to throw a covered screen pass that turned into another tip-pick. So it's been a strange game. But hey, what's the NFL without its head scratchers...like the Bears have 23 points in the first half??? Trubisky is 15-17 for 143, 2 TDs and no picks? Sayyyy WHAT? 15 first downs. It's not even halftime. Methinks the Texans have pretty much given up.

Well, you have to allow for the possibility that the gerrymandering made sure to ensure 25% Democrats, so a neighboring district that might be only 60% Republican isn't put at risk.

How much ya wanna bet his district is 80%+ Republican? So there's basically no chance he'd be voted out of office.

Took me a while to calm down after watching it. So...yeah, I obviously understand; I absolutely meant that caution.

But that's pretty much a given, isn't it? If they've been backing Trump, how can they not continue? There's both mob pressure and peer pressure that seems to be at work here. Mob pressure from the perception of abandonment by the Trump supporters come the 2022 primary; peer pressure from the other representatives having signed.

I'm leaning to a cool visual effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_treating Name would be Tempered Steel. Side effect of powers...scroll down about halfway above, there's a cool image of the colors steel can take at different tempering temperatures. Both offensive and defensive, I might add, altho any uniform/costume might largely hide most impacts. Yes, I draw inspiration from bizarre places.......