DShomshak

Falls under "True Believer." Dean Shomshak

David Gerrold (writer of The Trouble with Tribbles) set out this bit of clarity: Action-adventure is, "Kirk must overcome a problem." Drama is, "Kirk must make a decision." Like in City on the Edge of Forever: Save the woman he loves, or save the future? Or The Immunity Syndrome: Which of his friends, Spock or McCoy, does he send on a suicide mission? (Into the giant space amoeba, if you don't remember that one.) The Trouble with Tribbles is the first ST episode I say, which made me a Trekkie when I was young and led to my interest in SF, so it holds a special place in my heart. I still have the tribble I made when I was, hm, 10? I'll nominate The Corbomite Maneuver as the best version of the "Super-alien tests humanity" story the show did several times. Not just because Balok was so menacing, and Kirk so clever in response, and Balok so surprising when his true(?) form is revealed. First, Balok wasn't so annoyingly preachy, like the Metrons or Organians. MOre than a little trickster here! Second, we had drama in showing Kirk dealing with other crew members, not just with the threat of Balok. And third -- something I only realized when I re-watched the episode recently -- Kirk never fooled Balok for a second. He played Kirk brilliantly, without making Kirk look stupid, changing strategies to maneuver Kirk intoa situation that would reveal true character. Dean Shomshak

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/08/888906337/unholy-examines-the-alliance-between-white-evangelicals-and-trump Heard July 8 on Fresh Air: Interview with journalist Sarah Posner on her new book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Short answer: He doesn't speak Evangelical Christian, but boy howdy, he sure knows how to speak White Grievance. And White Evangelicals have cultural and political grievances oceans deep. And Posner insists her calling their attitude 'worship' is not hyperbolic: Her subjects believe, as a new tenet of faith, that Donald Trump is the anointed servant of God, no matter how unlikely he appears. (Personal additon: I have seen The Trump Gospel, whose author claims Jesus appeared to him and revealed Trump's divine role in returning America to Christian purity. I cannot guess whether the author is a true believer, a cynical grifter exploiting of the faithful and gullible, or a sincere grifter who thinks he's telling a noble lie to further the cause. All three are horrible in their way.) Dean Shomshak

Heard him on the radio. He's still claiming persecution. Hoax, Witch Hunt, no president has ever had to endure this but he's always won, the usual. He even brought up the Mueller investigation. The man speaks in macros. I've seen more creative language from an ELIZA program. But apparently his base thinks in macros, too. Dean Shomshak

See posts about swine flu and bubonic plague... And I hate my computer, which may have reported Cancer's post on Australian underwater archaeology when I was trying to forward the link to a friend. Dean Shomshak

I'll also recommend this Atlantic article, linked to the one above: Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit. I heard the author discussing her article on the radio. In brief, how people become collaborators with an occupying foreign power. She finds Trump administration officials making the same excuses that were used in Vichy France and in other tyrannies. No, she's not saying Trump is Hitler or Stalin. The point is how people who know better, or should, come to betray their country and their ideals. Dean Shomshak

Squib in my morning paper: Two dead, eight wounded in South Carolina nightclub shooting. See, our great leader Donald Trump is right: America is getting back to normal!!! 😢 Dean Shomshak

I thought of making a snide joke about heroes wo pose as villains to infiltrate the criminal underworld, but that's a cheap laugh. Being at least semi-serious, the big problems are 1) the media scrutiny (and opposition research) you may receive, and the amount of time you hav e to spend hustling for campaign cash. OTOH you get a research staff with the job! And whatever bizarre information you ask them to collect, you just say it's background for legislation you plan to propose. Dean Shomshak

Pencil and paper (with a calculator for the arithmetic), because me big tech dummy. Dean Shomshak

The world really needs more cold-blooded economic thinking. Because from such a perspective, a chance to acquire a few million hardworking, educated and business-savvy Hong Kongers is an opportunity only a fool would pass up. Dean Shomshak

With my slow connection, I can't warch videos. Someone summarize,please? Dean Shomshak

New York, as mentioned, in NYC. Washington, around Seattle. California, IIRC, in Los Angeles. Coastal states with big cities that recieve lots of international travelers. Of course the virus appears there first.And since the liberal/conservative divide is also largely an urban/rural divide, Clinton won those states. Which then means the lockdowns necessary to slow the spread instantly get associated with liberal statism, and conservatives feel obliged to trumpet that they will never accept such limits on their freedom. And here we are. Dean Shomshak

I'm sure that Ken Hite outlined a Victorian/steampunk superhero setting in one of his Suppressed Transmissions columns for Pyramid magazine. After all, he pulled off an Elizabethan "Diamond Age" cyberpunk setting with nanites conjured by Dr. John Dee; compared to that, steampunk supers is easy. Dean Shomshak

Someone who's trying to whip up and exploit white grievance? Dean Shomshak

Incidentally, 5th ed Monster Manual has gone back to calling demons and devils called demons and devils. I'm not sure the made-up names are even mentioned anymore. Dean Shomshak

Edit to remove double-post

My PC Steel Phoenix practiced the Metal substyle of Five Element Kung Fu (which I invented so he could practice it). Also a brief PC called Diamond Tiger. Dean Shomshak

Oh, fer--- Darn double-post again.

Artifice is also appropriate, as superbeings tend to become, hm, performance artists acting out roles and personifying tropes and images. And the more radically they pare away their messy human complexity to incarnate a single idea, the more powerful it seems they become. Look at all those monomaniac villains, especially those with themes, such as King Cobra, Takofanes or the Big D himself, Doctor Destroyer. Supers become living stories. (Because that's hat we make them to be. We are their cosmic entities. Those poor bastards...) Dean Shomshak

No, "Bozon" is the elementary particle that carries stupidity. Dean Shomshak

Chaos is good for an Avatar of Origins: not just for "breaking the natural law" but because supers gain strong passions with their powers. They aren't reasonable -- unless their rationality itself becomes a great and terrible passion. Dean Shomshak

Well, it's part of Mysticism 101 that mortal concepts such as "personal identity" get fuzzy when you try applying them to abstract pan-dimensional conceptual entities. You'd probably need to be a sufficiently powerful and experienced mystic to reach the Brialic planes in order to meet the Avatars on their home ground in order to understand them. And then you'd find mortal language completely inadequate to explain what you learned. (Which makes it easy for us GMs. We hint, but we don't need to nail these things down in order to run adventures.) Dean Shomshak

When I wrote The Mystic World, I barely hinted at the range of cosmic entities. GMs are supposed to invent new ones, and an Avatar of Magic sounds like a good one to do. Go for it! And the Heartstone could certainly be connected to such an entity. (If a cosmic Avatar of Magic has been added to the CU since The Mystic World, I'm sure someone will mention it.) As for the "origin" angle, Marvel Comics actually had a cosmic entity of super-origins called, natch, Origin. Writer Mark Gruenwald introduced her in Quasar. She manifested as a little old lady (she wanted to keep a low profile, I guess). But having the Avatar of Origins look like great comics creators really tickles my fancy. "Excelsior!" might be a good name for it to use. (And yes, the exclamation point is part of the name!) Dean Shomshak

"Is this group evil?" is also a complex question, in that it assumes a definition of what constitutes evil. That is not a simple thing. In my Fantasy, as with my superhero games, I ask what makes the villains villainous, and why they act that way. Some creatures "intrinsically evil" in that they cannot coexist with other intelligent creatures. They may have minds so alien that they don't perceive other creatures as people, or they must harm other intelligent creatures to survive. Aberrations generally fall in this category. Like, mind flayers *have to* eat brains. Most undead in my setting are also morally unfree -- they are damaged creatures, the power of the soul melted down into something physically and metaphysically destructive, often an insane exaggeration of some passion from life. The murder victim who comes back and attacks anyone even vaguely reminiscent of their killer. The plaguevictim who was abandoned and died alone, coming back to reclaim its family... by making them undead too. (Etc.) Some creatures were created to embody other peoples' notions of evil, whether as agents or scapegoats. The fiends of my setting fill this role. If Hell didn't exist, people would have to invent it -- so they did. Some creatures have temperaments that are, hm, difficult for other people to work with. For instance, hobgoblins are disciplined, obedient, pitiless. Near-perfect soldiers for another's will. It's not a nice point of view. If the commander tells a group of hobgoblins to massacre a village, they do it, no hesitation or guilt. Order them to defend the village, and they'll fight to the death to do that, too. Or, trolls are rather stupid and accustomed to levels of violence that would self-exterminate any other people who lived that way, because they heal darn near anything in seconds. But they can think and act beyond their temperament, sometimes, if they must. And some cultures are just horrible because people can do very bad things if they are trained to it. The Savaxi ruling class of the Macrine Empire are a tribe of cattle-herding human barbarian nomads who conquered an empire and have a monstrous superiority complex. The multi-species people of the Holy Empire are ruled by a fanatical cult determined to conquer or kill anyone who does not worship the sun god Sorath exactly the same way they do, because perfect virtue cannot compromise. The drow... Well, how they ended up ruled by the demon Lolth is by now forgotten. (Or suppressed.) Their culture of ambition, cruelty and deceit barely keeps from self-destructing. But people, who are actually people, have as much difficulty being Evil all the time as they have being Good. The couple that affects to scorn and scheme against each other holds hands when they think nobody's looking. Dean Shomshak

As yet, all I have to go on is that one paragraph quoted in the article. I think it's a creative reading of the text to say that WotC has embraced "moral relativism." The passage only says they are trying to move away from the notion that an entire species or ethnic group can be born evil, with no choice in the matter. Is that "Political Correctness"? Well, maybe. Is that a bad thing? Maybe if you think the morals of the past are sacrosanct. I don't. Here in the 21st century, we know more about medicine than Galen and more about celestial mechanics than Ptolemy. I have no trouble believing we also know more about ethics than did people of the past. Or should. "It's okay to kill <fill in the blank> because they're born evil" is a common and authentic belief of some of the past cultures that inspire our Fantasy, but I do not feel obligated to preserve it if a game isn't specifically an attempt to portray a particular past culture. (Actually, I suspect the more common belief was, "It's okay to kill anyone not in your tribe/city-state/whatever if they get in your way.") Dean Shomshak