Joe Walsh

I am really hoping it gets the Titans treatment and S1 appears on TNT this year.

I'm going to potentially open up a can of worms here, but I'm going to suggest that you go ahead and learn the rules yourself and then port your players' characters into your setting so they don't have to learn all the character creation stuff. It's potentially overwhelming (many threads, some of them started by me, cover this subject ad nauseum). If you give them their characters with whom they are already familiar and then teach them how the combat and skill resolution works it will make the transition much easier. In the end it all comes down to 3d6, roll under, which is so utterly simple they won't believe it. This way you avoid the wall of text/barrier to entry/information overload problems that people always complain about.
 
Once they learn that they can create their own magic, etc. etc., they'll dig into the creation rules on their own and at their own pace. And THEN you have 'em hooked. . . 

Australia hasn't even hit 200k cases yet after successfully holding off covid until three months ago.
 
Conversely it is pushing 20m vaccinated (about 75%).  That's a difference of two orders of magnitude.

Not that Mr. Asimov is wrong, but it goes deeper than that.  There is a certain kind of ignorant person that fears and distrusts the intellectual, assuming that the intellectual would use their greater intellect to hoodwink the ignorant--because that's what they'd do if the roles were reversed.  In fact, hoodwinking and fraud are seen as marks of high intellect among such people, as if swindling the innocent proved that they were smarter than their victims.  Not only are such people not rare, they seem to be especially commonplace in corporate, financial, and political circles.

Said the intellectual.
 
In my experience Americans have always had a mean anti-intellectual streak. What’s different now is that it’s been weaponized by corporate media with an agenda. It’s not going to get better until something stops the propaganda. In other words, it’s not going to get better. 

Just to be clear, I know Sanders is yesterday. But I'm sure there's an alternate universe where he ran and won in 2016, and I can still wish I was there. 😔
 
But the Democrats aren't hitting as hard as they can and they need to. As a party they've been playing it safe, trying to be moderate, for years and years, and it doesn't sell.

I'm still inclined to believe that if the Democrats had put up Bernie Sanders as their candidate in 2016, we wouldn't be in the position we are now. Sanders presented an impassioned message of hope and compassion, the diametric opposite to Trump's message of fear and hatred.
 
 
The Dems need to go balls to the wall. They have to push and advertise that they're pushing, policies that will measurably help the common folk, policies that most Americans like. If the Pubs block them the Dems have to shout from the rooftops that this help isn't getting to people because the Pubs won't allow it. Make them face consequences for obstructionism.

I believe there's a lot of validity to the article, but I suspect it may be missing the mark in implying that for most right-wingers rejecting rationality for the sake of power is a deliberate choice. The author of the article quotes Umberto Eco as writing, "Thinking is a form of emasculation" for fascists. Certainly the leading politicians and media figures in the movement understand what they're doing and why, but I believe most of the ground roots Republicans are reacting out of emotion and instinct. They feel powerful by participating in this movement, and against that feeling thought is not only powerless, it's irrelevant.

Shorter paragraph captures the most important point to me:

 
 

Again, I have to thank everyone for their interest in and purchase of Western Hero.  I am honestly shocked about how many units are selling around the world.  I know its not D&D levels big time but its huge for me, and fits my thought that there was a lot of interest in an old west game setting.
 
Honestly it almost brings me to tears.  I have been working as hard as I can for years and it is so nice to see at least something sell really well for a while to make it seem as if I'm not just wasting my time.  Thank you all, everywhere.

We Knew Bolsonaro Was Guilty. Now We Have 1,288 Pages of Proof.
 

Sorry; i just realized that I hadn't answered that.  I got distracted trying to figure out which word was the big offensive one.
 
But to the answer:
 
The Enterprise, ostensibly an explore and colonize ship (sorry; never made it past the first season- no; that's a lie,  I never made it _through_ the first season.  I tried, but I just couldn't.
 
Anyway, ostensibly explore and maybe colonize, and definitely fight: there was even a special "battle bridge" for when the big disk was _cast aside on impulse power_ while the rest of the ship flew away into fiery combat.
 
There was a big deal made more than once about how the ship carried entire families, and could even serve to train young cadets, there were schools, etc.
 
All this for exploration with a definite expectation of military action up to and  including combat.  Combat with their families and children  on board, or cast adrift in the sublight-powered saucer.
 
 
Anyway, some years later I would catch a rerun or two, trying to give it the best chance I could.  Unfortunately, the first rerun i caught involved "Q," bored and peurile space god; it didnt help raise my opinion any.
 
Then I caught a rerun of something from the NG era- dont really remember what it was, but it featured mention of an Ambassador ship,
 
Ambassadors, who are going perhaps into the uncertain, but not the unknown.  Who arrive as the result of invite or treaty-  way safer than "explore the unknown and prepare to get shot at."
 
Yet it was too dangerous to take their spouse or favored pet.
 
A grunt's entire family was welcome to die of who knows what out on the unexplored edge of illuminated space-
 
But not a politician's family; no,  that just doesn't make sense.
 
Thats what rankled me.

This is the one year anniversary of my COVID diagnosis, right after a now ex-friend revealed herself to be toxic and abusive and I didn't have a place of safety when it happened.

The week of March 22nd, 2020, I was on a business trip. We were all monitoring the news. Ohio shut down, there was talk of other states shutting down. Then I got home and stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things and....the parking lot was completely full mid-afternoon on a Friday. People were coming out with their carts loaded with canned goods, paper products...anything they could get their hands on. I went in to see how bad it was, and the place had just about been emptied out. Desperate people were zooming from aisle to aisle, looking for things to buy. Arguments and fights were breaking out over who would get the last whatever.
 
That's when I knew it was going to be a long, hard, terrible slog.
 

The week of March 22nd, 2020, I was on a business trip. We were all monitoring the news. Ohio shut down, there was talk of other states shutting down. Then I got home and stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things and....the parking lot was completely full mid-afternoon on a Friday. People were coming out with their carts loaded with canned goods, paper products...anything they could get their hands on. I went in to see how bad it was, and the place had just about been emptied out. Desperate people were zooming from aisle to aisle, looking for things to buy. Arguments and fights were breaking out over who would get the last whatever.
 
That's when I knew it was going to be a long, hard, terrible slog.
 

In retrospect, casting RDJ as Tony stark was brilliant. I mean, in comics Tony is a womanizing alcoholic multimillionaire. Outside of Charlie Sheen, who would have been more qualified?
 
I'll admit that I had my doubts when I first heard about Chris Evans as Cap. I mean, FF wasn't a great film, and Evans (and everyone else) was overshadowed by Michael Chiklis, as far as I'm concerned. I was personally rooting for Ryan McPartlin (Devin Woodcomb a/k/a Captain Awesome from Chuck).
 
Overall, I think Marvel's casting has been brilliant. Way, way too many example to list, but one recent one that sticks out: Who in their right mind pairs  Tom Hiddleston's Loki with Owen Wilson? But it was brilliant. And I'll never read a story with Black Panther without hearing Chadwick Boseman's voice. 

And...as I said...this partial measure will be presented as a Democrat failure by the Reps and the Right in general and used as talking point to flip seats in Congress in 2024 and beyond. If it all gets rolled back in 2024 then all of the effort was for nothing. And it is open to debate that progressives are "demanding too much". Health care for example...most Americans want some sort of universal health care. So when progressives are advocating for that, it's what the populace wants. As far as the infrastructure bill, anyone with a lick of common sense knows that the country's infrastructure needs far most invested in it than even what was initially presented in the bill. So again, not seeing where this "progressives are too demanding" narrative is coming from. It's literally the opposite, reactionaries are demanding way too much on their end...against the will of Americans...the majority of whom support this bill. And the perception that the Dems aren't going to "deliver" as you say is exactly why they shouldn't settle for anything less than the full bill. Anything less will be seen as a failure....as I already said initially. Progressives are the majority in this country. We shouldn't be making all the compromises. The reactionaries sure as hell didn't give any concessions to progressives when they were in control.

So this infrastructure bill has been cut back so much that I don't even see why they're freaking bothering with it anymore. The reduced bill will be inadequate and will just be used as evidence of failure in the mid terms and the next presidential election. As usual, progressives compromise while the Right gives up....nothing. It'd be nice if sanity, justice, and progress won once in a while. Sigh....I'm so tired of being disappointed in America.

I hope that panel is in hiding...

Influenza lineage extinction during the COVID-19 pandemic
 
It's almost like masks and social distancing actually work.

I like the idea of doing a base adventure setting, then having lots of small adventures that can be run in it like you guys have been talking about with Stronghold.  Like, Escape from Stronghold has the prison, then an adventure in it... and then we could release several like 99 cent or 2 buck short adventures, 1-2 run bits to use in Stronghold.

Looking over the Champions adventures in order of release, the first three are
 
The Island of Dr Destroyer
Escape from Stronghold
Deathstroke
 
And while the first two are very simple and even incomplete in some ways, Dinapoli really knocked it out of the park with Deathstroke.  Its a complete multi-part adventure with some clever adversaries, several different kinds of encounters and events, and a great climax that doesn't go the way anyone plans.  I could write an update and tweak it some, but honestly it doesn't really need any changes.  So while I want to reboot Escape from Stronghold (with actual escapes!) I think that's all that I want to tackle in terms of reboots.
 
Someone else is supposedly working on Justice Inc and Danger International the two other books I might have considered rebuilding, so that's great.  If I can get Stronghold rebuilt and released, then I think from then on I'll be focused on new content.  I wanted to get Stronghold out this year, but the Champions Begins project intervened and that took most of the year to get through.  Champions Begins is a bit of a risk business wise, since its going to be given away for free, but its my fantasy that people find out about it, try it at their game store or with their gaming group and decide Hero is their slice of cheese and buy more books.

I have now submitted 2 large collections of Hero Designer files to Jason, these will end up being for sale at some point, one is assorted ground vehicles, the other is assorted air vehicles and spacecraft... a water vehicles collection
will follow shortly. if theres interest in more. I can follow up with more stuff later