unclevlad

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming...Niners 24-16..... <holds a lightsaber behind his back to cut off the hands of any of you liars out there.....>

Yeah, you never apologize for a win, but by the same token, the Pats are really getting hit by the coronavirus. 3 players out, no practice time to speak of for a while. They had 1 drive, for the TD, and pulled off a couple trick plays, but otehrwise the offense just wasn't there. Jets...wow. So bad that Rich Cimini at ESPN commented they weren't tanking for Trevor Lawrence perhaps as for Adam Gase...to get him fired. And he dropped a truly amazing stat: There's no game on the schedule that looks all that good for them; ok, the Chargers are 1-4, but they're a combined -15. So they've been in every game. Otherwise, it's Bills, Chiefs, Pats (well, this could be winnable if they're still getting clobbered by the coronavirus, but ya figure they'll turn that around), Chargers, Dolphins, Raiders, Seahawks, Rams, Browns, Pats. Now, one possibility is a major house cleaning...out with Gase, possibly out with Williams. (If Gase is out and Williams becomes HC, I have a nasty suspicion things will get WORSE, if that's possible. Could be I just loath Gregg Williams as a coach, of course.) And Joe Flacco is continuing to make John Elway look utterly incompetent...again.

Sweet day for second guessing. Washington is down 20-13; they grind out a 75 yard drive to score with about 30 seconds left. They go for 2...and miss. Not surprisingly, the onside fails. Houston is surprising the HECK out of Tennessee, especially after spotting them a big lead. At 30-29, they take the ball after an interception, and move nicely...6 minutes off the clock, touchdown, inside the 2 minute warning. Textbook, right? They elect to go for 2...and miss. Tennessee shreds a tired Houston defense, first to tie in regulation (borderline touchdown at the end but the replay about whether the receiver got the left toe down wasn't definitive) then take the OT kickoff and slam it into the end zone. Washington's move was tactically unsound, IMO, based on the opponent. The Giants were HORRIBLE on offense; there was no reason to think you had to go for the do-or-die play. Granted, WFT threw this game away, as bad teams do...TOs and penalties. And they're not a fundamentally solid offensive football team anyway. Houston's case is more interesting to me. Rich Gannon was lambasting them for it..."the analytics say kick it!!!!" Get the 8 point lead. I don't think I agree. Go for 2, you get a 9 point lead, less than 2 minutes. The game should be over; there shouldn't be enough time to score twice. Make the kick, it's 8...fine, you force them to go for 2, but it's still 1 score. Let's assume it's 50-50 to make a 2 point conversion, 95% to make the kick. Go for 2: Make it: you win, I'd guess, at least 99% of the time, so you win 50%. Miss it: the opponents still have to score the touchdown, and if they go for the kick and make it, it's still, call it 50% you can win in OT. So you still get 25% or so to win the game *even assuming you give up the touchdown.* Go for 1, and assume you make it. They have to go for 2, and you're still in the OT situation. So again assuming you give up the TD, you get 25%.. If you miss (5%), they get the 95% to make their kick, plus the 50% in OT. So this is like a 3% chance. So going for 2 should mean about a 75% chance to win; going for 1...30%. Analytics is easily misused if you don't respect all the applicable conditions.

I think the Dodgers also have a couple more consistent hitters; they're not so dominated by power alone, with its inherent inconsistency.

About to go back to read for a while before crashing. By the time I get up...the worldwide total number of cases will exceed.... 40,000,000. And the average number of new cases per day is about 350,000....so in about 4 weeks, it'll be 50,000,000, if the latest round of containment measures don't help.

Let's see.... For this purpose there is no difference between green and blue similarities; each gives a 1 point cost reduction. Red only and standalone give no break. For definiteness, I'm gonna go with Completely Fluent, unless the full Idiomatic works out better...it will in the orange similarities. Also, Linguist is a given here. There are 16 red-only or no-similarity...Armenian, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, Mongol, Basque, Georgian, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, Berber, Hausa, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Telugu. (I'm skipping Ancient Mayan and the Native languages for now.) 2 points each, so 32 points. There are 9 simple blue-green only combos. Picking the top-most language of each: Latvian, Gaelic, Hindustani, Byelorussian, Italian, Persian, Mandarin, Burmese, and Malayalam. They cover 36 languages, so the price would be 9 * 2 + 27 * 1, or 41 points. The Scandinavians: one costs 3 points for Idiomatic; the other 2 get Comp Fluency for 0. The Romance group: Spanish gets Idiomatic, giving Catalan and Portuguese at CF for 0. French gets CF for 1, which means Latin gets CF for 1. So that's 5 points. The Germanics: Let's put English as native. We want German and Dutch at Idiomatic, that'll be 2 each. Then Yiddish and Afrikaans at CF will be 0. 4 points. Estonian: Idiomatic, 3 points. Finnish gets CF for 0, Hungarian gets it for 1. 4 points. Similarly, 5 points for Indonesian (idiom), Malay, Javanese, and Sundanese (CF). So a total of 94 points. Note that if you go with Fluent Conversation for all the no-similarity and blue-green, you save 52 points. You can take French, Latin, Hungarian, Javanese, and Sundanese to FC to save another 5. So if you mostly just want fluent conversation, with actually a pretty darn good assortment of idiomatic (7) and CF (8 very closely related), it's 37 points. EDIT: OOPS!!! Not 37...40. Forgot the 3 points for Linguist.

It might be in APG, but pretty sure there's an explicit statement that UT isn't intended to be a surrogate for "I know every language there is." If you go by HD, the problem is there's something over *600* separate languages. There are, I think, a couple dozen Native American and Eskimo languages; I'm not sure what their similarities are. Probably a similar number of African languages; I've never had a character concept that connected with them, tho, so I'm not sure. Heck, there are 70 languages shown in the similarity chart on 6E1 81. If you went fluent conversation, tho, and with Linguist...it actually wouldn't be terribly expensive. It's a little awkward to work out, tho, because the of the different similarity groups, and the rules are...let's say, finicky, with some of em, particularly orange-box. For an orange-box group, where you get 1/2 similarity, you want one language at idiomatic. The blue and green groups, it's "pick one" for full cost, the rest would be at -1. HD makes this a bit tricky, in that it's order-dependent, so you don't get the price break on all the languages in any given box.

Well, hey, you can't argue with *2* game 7s....and major comebacks. Dodgers outfield has been incredible, with the catches they've made throughout this series. ARod gets the stat of the night. How good a defensive player is Mookie Betts? He leads the majors in defensive runs saved by a right fielder (just to keep things directly comparable) since 2016, with 104. Second best...56. Even if you're not particularly fond of these synthetic measures, *that large* a discrepancy is huge. So the Dodgers have come back from 3-1 down to force game 7; time to see if the Rays can avoid the CHOKE!!!! label. Up 3-0...now it's game 7.

That's pretty good, but I don't know if it makes the top 20. The list of contenders here is strong and deep. But I'll still go with his whole rant about John McCain because he got caught. It shows so many levels of utter thoughtlessness.

Yeah, Bloomberg had a story earlier this week that local coffee houses aren't surviving...and the Evil Scum of the Water of Life, aka Starbucks, is getting further entrenched. Have to figure that's gonna happen with book stores (if you even have a local book store) and restaurants. It's already happened here, WRT package liquor...because the county has a set, VERY limited number of liquor licenses. So, Wal Mart has 4; Walgreens has 2 or 3; Albertson's has 3; Pic Quik (gas and quickie mart) has several. That was separate; the big stores just consistently offered too much for the small, local guys to say no. There is *1* standalone, independent liquor store left. So it's related: the little guys don't have the resources to cope with the pressure. When we pull out of this, it is very likely to be that much more corporate-dominated, altho several of those will be gone or greatly reduced too. For the last 8-10 years, I'd say...the only really interesting local businesses have been the VERY good Mexican restaurants. I haven't been up to our local (pretty lousy) mall in a long time...I should go up there, just to see how many vacancies there are. It's not like it's been terribly close to full up very much of the time in the last...decade.

The president of Brazil? Or at that point, are we asking the difference between the number of angels that can dance on the head of a straight pin versus a safety pin?

Nothing here changes anything. You're overcomplicating this in your head by bringing in details that don't matter. Spell research is not a game mechanic, it's a campaign mechanic. If someone's got an exceptionally high Spellcraft skill, fine; he'd do really well here. If his roll is better than the implied skill roll we're suggesting, use it. Who cares why he's got a 20-? All that matters is, that's what he's got...unless you're splitting the notions of casting and crafting/understanding into 2 different skills. The notion of "prowess" is simply meaningless. Does it mean "can cast more powerful spells" or "can cast spells with greater facility" or "can cast spells for longer before being tapped out" or "knows more spells"? Or some convex combination? As such, it doesn't have a place in a purely mechanical discussion. There are some other things you can do that have more discrete steps. This might be called a Slippery Magic zone; the energy is simply harder to control. There might be: Sparse Magic: Every spell has a casting time. In these areas, the energy is harder to find and gather, so the casting time (AND all the other limitations like Concentration, ouch) is moved up the time chart by, let's say, 1-3 steps. 3 steps is probably the max; half phase is going to delayed, then full, then extra phase. After that you're into full turn...well, maybe that might still be ok if SPDs are low. But step 5 would be 1 minute. And note that an apprentice whose spells are already full phase, is going to feel the pinch ALL the time. Laborious Magic: as above, but now it's relating to END. The chart would be 0 END, 1/2 END, normal END, 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. Yeah, technically, the value shift is different; eek. This is simple to work with, and that's way more valuable to me than keeping a wooden consistency with the END advantage/limitation specifics. Entropic Magic: this disrupts Constant and Persistent spells, and spells doing damage over time. For Constant and Persistent, it acts like Laborious Magic...but on the ongoing END cost rather than the casting END cost. This one could be super-nasty if it's allowed to affect magical *items*...thinking about that, perhaps it's a cumulative Suppress. The dice rolled acts as a suppression against the active points of *every* item. When the points suppressed >= the item's active points...it shuts down. The points do not return as long as the item(s) remain in the entropic magic area; they return at the rate of 5 per turn after exiting the area. Erratic Magic: in these areas, magic is much harder to target. The caster's OCV (or OMCV) takes a penalty, regardless of the spell. For these purposes, "self" and even someone helpless, are DCV 3. This one in particular affects ALL magic...including magical items. It wouldn't affect Constant items activated outside the area, but it would affect, let's say, using a wand of blasting. The notion here is that the efect makes it difficult to "complete the path" from origin to target. Hoooo boy, this might be EXTRA nasty on spells with Indirect. So what do all these cost? I have no clue right now. There's wrinkles to iron out on several, I'm sure. Personally I don't think it's worth all the trouble, but you seem to want crazy-complex magic, so...there ya go.

As the article notes, our surge mighta started a bit later, but it darn sure is here now. The data day is mostly over; I think there's some processing lag, and/or a window to allow for reporting lag, so the WorldOMeters day is basically done, if not closed out just yet...at over 71,000 cases today. Makes it, I think, only the 7th time the US has passed the 70,000 case mark. What's almost equally concerning is that the daily deaths never dropped all that much. Granted that deaths is not the only Very Bad Outcome, but it's the one Very Bad Outcome we can track readily. It's beginning to look like it's heading back up. And figure: 8.3 million cases, 220,000 deaths. Over 2%. So...70,000 new cases probably means 1400 more deaths. (One of these days I still need to grab the raw data and compare total cases to total deaths 30 days later, and similar analyses.) And it seems a practical certainty that politics will dominate the news for the next 3 weeks, so this surge may not garner that much attention. No attention? No corrective steps. No corrective steps, case numbers gonna skyrocket.

Trump doesn't talk down either. He shouts down.

And Hugh and I gave a mechanic for adapting NSR to RSR *when it matters for this*. All "doesn't require a skill roll" means is, I'm so bloody good at it that I'll ALWAYS make the skill roll, so we won't bother with em. It doesn't mean that the notion of the skill itself isn't there. I will grant that there could be issues if some spells are RSR and some are NSR, but that should be manageable. A spell that has NSR, still has the "implicit skill roll" based on its active points. So use that, OR the caster's skill roll, whichever is higher. If they're actually tied....caster has 20- skill roll, but some of his 20 point spells are NSR, then add 1 to show the additional mastery for that spell, so here he'd be treated as having a 21- skill roll before the spell's active point cost and the suppression field.

Ohhhh man.... A touch over 66,000 new cases today by WorldOMeters. Worst since the numbers just started dropping from the July peak.

What's the problem? That's no more than a 2d6 Transform, right?

All it takes is a mediocre team playing badly...or a matchup against one of the other bottom feeders. So I wouldn't want to place a bet on "first to 6." I would probably be willing to bet on first to 7. Oh, and on the NFL Least.... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfc-east-is-historically-bad-how-much-worse-can-it-get/ Man, this is a week of UGLY!!! games. It's a Triple Ti-D-Bowl week, which of course means it's a major week for draft positioning! WFT vs Giants, Falcons vs. Vikes...each matchup is a combined 1-9. The trifecta is completed by the Lions and Jags...2-7 combined. And in the "oh good gosh it's gonna be a slaughter" we have the Titans hosting the Texans, and the Ravens heading into Philly. Oh lordy...CBS has to be crowing, and Fox crying. Fox has the doubleheader. The late game is nice...Rodgers vs. Brady. But their 2 early games are....yes...the aforementioned, utterly putrid WFT-Giants and Falcons-Vikes...while CBS gets the Browns vs. the Steelers, an early, important game for playoff considerations. So CBS should have some sweet ratings.

OH yeah. Took my sweet time, checked and double checked all those little things. It's scary but I have to agree with one thing Fox News is saying...this is the most important election in US history. Of course, what THEY mean by it, and what I mean...is completely different.

Just completed the absentee ballot, taking extra, extra care to fill in the circles properly, and letting it FULLY dry now. Gel inks, ya know. I definitely do not want to give them a reason to DQ this ballot.

Similarly, the first US outbreak was Washington. We freaked out at their situation back then...but their current rate has been a bit higher. Of course, massively increased testing has to be a part of that. They're actually still doing fairly well compared to most of the US.

Got mine a few days ago; I need to do much the same thing, but I gotta admit that the way the Republicans have thrown ethics to the wind prejudices me against them at ANY level right now.

If you want to impose a penalty, then how about... If my spellcasting does not require a skill roll, then it's at 18- *regardless* of active points...or, if you prefer, my skill rating is such that my net skill roll is 18- even when using my largest active point cost spell. So if that's, say, 75 points, my skill roll is 25-. That becomes a common basis for a CE imposing skill roll penalties, and lets me cast a 40 point spell despite fairly heavy interference that might shut down a 70 point spell. The apprentice is gonna be SOL.

Mmmmm....probably. But Eagles' 6-9-1 might beat out a 6-10 Cowboys. But it's close, if only because the Eagles and Cowboys still have 3 games against the Giants and Washington...altho Philly has already lost theirs...and 2 games against each other. Say each goes 4-1...they win the games against the bottom feeders and split against each other...that's 5 wins for the Eagles, 6 for the 'boys. 'boys have Bengals and a very depleted Niners. Of course, saying they'll both go 4-1 is a reach on its own.

OK, but for all intents and purposes the Charges is still giving him a price break because now he can take Costs END as a limitation, when he wasn't going to be able to get that before. If this is on, say, a Blast, he can get 12 charges, costs END, and that's -1/2. Pretty good chance that's going to greatly simplify the problem of filling out the whole -1. Other things to consider...would you allow clips? 8 clips of 4 charges that cost END is 32 charges total, and still -1/2. How long does it take to adjust a spell? That's a big aspect here. One very specific limitation that comes into play is Limited Power. "Only versus demons." Well cuz you expect to face demons. Well when their ghoul minions suddenly swarm, if it takes little time to switch the spell to "only vs. undead" then it's hardly limiting.