L. Marcus

Everything with alcohol is yukky.

Turkey’s Erdogan dealt major election blow as opposition party wins big cities

Unnecessarily redundant at that level of wealth.

Yesterday marked six years of me never having to pretend to be a guy again, and today, like every March 31st, is International Transgender Day of Visibility, so it's a double celebration for me.
 
Being visible as a trans person is important to me for two main reasons. For one, to remind non LGBTQ+ folks that people like me exist and are real people who are part of their communities. The other reason is to help older trans people who think that they're too old to transition know that it's never too late. I started my transition at fifty-two and it's still the best thing I've ever done for myself.
 
So, like the title says, happy Trans Day of Visibility.

It's the staffs of all the Five Wizards, actually.

"Is that the Horn of Gondor in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What?

Here's a scenario with terrain I hope to use in my games sometime. The (slightly modified) miniature and the pedestal (actually a base for a different miniature) are from Reaper. I built the shrine with wood and cardboard.

Interesting suggestion that T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) may undergo outburst sometime in the coming 5  - 6 months.  It is a recurrent nova (similar outbursts having been seen in 1866 and 1946) and there is a report that it has undergone its foreshadowing "dip" that was seen prior to the 1946 outburst (see the light curve in the linked Wikipedia article).  If the suggestion is right, then it will go from about 10th magnitude (rather below naked eye brightness) up to 2nd magnitude or so (comparable to the stars in the Big Dipper).  Cor Bor itself doesn't stand out (it has only one 2nd magnitude star) but is quite convenient for observation from the US and Europe.  Once it undergoes outburst it will fade fairly quickly -- a few days -- back below the naked-eye threshold.

Then they won't plot against you. 

Short of creating a large, scattershot table of wildly different "unintended effects" and having the player dice off it blindly, I don't know how to game with that sort of randomness.  I can't do it as a GM; I can make up stuff on the fly, but it's way too correlated with what I've been doing or thinking about for the last few minutes/hours/days.  And, it's inevitably filtered through my own preconceptions about what is appropriate to do to characters in my game.
 
The problem with really unknowable of that sort is that it gives the GM carte blanche to do whatever s/he wants with the characters whenever s/he wants, and there are GMs out there who can't resist yanking that chain (or pulling those wings off of those flies) in ways that are to my thinking completely inappropriate.
 
I admit that I am notorious in our group for never allowing my character to be captured.  NEVER.  Doesn't matter how far along in the campaign, it's suicide when that approaches, and (in HERO terms) I pay the cost of that mechanism at character creation so it is present (if, perhaps, unexplained) from Time Zero.  As a player I admit it is irrational and it's there, and it's drawn comment before on these boards in threads that no longer exist.  And it's there because one of my earliest extramural RPG experiences was one where capture inevitably led to the functional equivalent of mind control earworm, and the GM relished abusing people (players, not characters) via that channel.  And no, that SHOULD NOT BE PART OF THE GOALS OF ANY GM'S GAME.  Got something you as a player object to doing in a game, and you express that objection in the session?  It'd happen, guaranteed, in the next session or two, if the GM could fabricate a reason to compel the character to do it.  No, that's not what an RPG should be about, but at least at the time I encountered such a GM, these made a nontrivial fraction of the RPG community.
 
(That experience was part of what led me to absent myself from RPGs for most of a decade, but the bigger part of that was that it coincided with most of grad school and the first couple years after it, when I really needed to focus on Other Stuff.)
 

The fire department has to give a thumbs-up.

We got a new one!
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1300.html

While this is a bit of crankiness, given the subject matter, I'm putting it here.
 
I had to drop off a package at the local post office, and I noticed a little stand on the sidewalk, with a big sign saying, "Defend Trump". I was going to ignore them, but as I was getting back into my car, one of them waved me over. Probably not his best idea. After I asked why are we defending a billionaire, his response was, "well, they're trying to take it away."
To which I responded, "Good. He deserves it." I then gave him a short rundown of how he stiffed a company I worked for ("I don't know the details of that"). So, then I explained to him about how Trump Tower was built using undocumented workers. I finished by saying that he is dangerous, should never be near the presidency again, and that he should be locked up. I then wished them a good day, and left. As I was getting back in my car, the gentleman I had been talking to looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
 
 
 

Hey dudes.

Hey dudes.

"Do you wanna be captain of this ship?"
 
"Yes!"
 
"... Well ... You can't."

Hey dudes.

Since I have been appointed executor for an estate, I have started learning of a whole cesspool ecology of opportunistic bottom-feeders I had not previously imagined.
 
There are outfits who are most easily described as the equivalent of payday loan (sharks), but they go after inheritances rather than paychecks.  "Get your inheritance now!" is the teaser line.  Since wills and estates that become active are public records, they grab those wills off the government sites where they are posted, scrape all the names and addresses out of them, and spam those with their come-hither (not, of course, mentioning any terms or rates).  I know this because I got one of the come-hither papermails also, even though I'm the executor.
 
There are also lots of opportunist solo operators who want to buy your house (for rather less than it's worth) but these aren't really a new discovery.
 
I expect I will continue to learn more varieties of scumbags and ripoff artists as I negotiate this estate thing over the coming months, and I will post descriptions and spread the knowledge as I gain it.