Cancer

I think not. The token human should be either Gonzo or Animal.

I'm in the process of hammering together something like a derivative of the Arabian Nights boardgame translated into a role-playing game. If you've never seen, let alone played it -- and it has been hard to come by -- it sort of tries to put the players on a series of adventures, both mundane and fantastical, in something like the Tales of the 1001 Nights in the Arab world while Baghdad was at its peak, sort of AD 1000 +/- 200. The players end up wandering around nearly all the Old World, acquiring and losing statuses (which can be good or bad), wealth, and wondrous items, accumulating Story Points and Fame Points. Once you have enough of those latter two things, and are clear of disqualifying statuses (and getting rid of some of those is nigh-on impossible), you try to get back to Baghdad, overcome a final encounter there, and win. Because I am also strongly interested in maritime history and technology development, and I've been reading a remarkably good book that includes much more about merchant trade in Asia (going between the Near East and China by sea, necessarily including the territory between both) than I had previously known, I'll be setting my players as merchants with a small ship loaded with trade goods setting out from a port in the Persian Gulf and heading out on the northeast monsoon (December through March) down into a port in Indonesia. They'll stay there for several months, trying to make maximally profitable trades with other merchants from everywhere from Korea through China, southeast Asia, India and Ceylon and all coasts inbetween, plus the immense Indonesian archipelago. (Also the east coast of Africa is in scope for this.) Then, once it comes, ride the southwest monsoon (June through September) back to their home port. The historical context is a bit before 800AD. Now, as usual I've gone off the deep end and researched way too many things, from maritime tech, money (the relative values of gold, silver, and copper varied across the area), trade goods and where they came from and what locales demanded what, climatology in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific north of the Equator, the politics of the era and as much about the legal aspects of commerce as I can find for the realms in this region ... I've been an academic all my life, it's what I do. So far I've got two 8-page documents for introducing the setting and the game partly hammered out. I've also researched the calendars, and I'll be keeping both a western solar calendar and an Islamic lunar calendar as correctly as I can; I'm coding that up now so I can barf out blank calendars a decade at a time. All that said, I will not be restricting myself to real-world events (there will be some low-grade magical stuff of appropriate flavor that the PCs will deal with), and the historical record is hopelessly incomplete in any case, so I am free to make up interesting things that tickle my fancy. Because this was inspired by a boardgame that has very little "crunch" in its mechanics and is much more in the lines of structured, prompted storytelling, and that flavor is something I am looking to retain, I'm going to try this in a "soft" system; right now I'm looking hard at Fate Core since I have it on the top layer of stuff here in my basement. Then I'll run it past the gaming group and see if they'll give me a timeslice to run it.

I have found (in battling my own depression induced by my wife's illness) that occasional participation in the Zoom meetings of a weekly support group explicitly for caregivers of cancer patients (facilitated by someone with the hospital where she's being treated) helps me substantially. That doesn't seem to be your particular issue, of course, but thinking about why it helps me, I think the keys are (1) that the group is very tightly focused in terms of its purpose and its target population, and (2) the facilitator is really very good. (It also is free of monetary cost; it's just that the rigid weekly meeting time tends to collide with other things I do.) It brings forward a mutual aid mentality, because nearly everyone has something of value to contribute, and everyone recognizes the daunting, terrifying situation common to the participants. It "meets" weekly, people are welcome to connect in as they feel the need or desire, so I get there every three weeks or so. I was dubious when I first was able to participate (which wasn't until July; it conflicted with my teaching schedule before I retired), and they were perfectly willing to let me listen and nod and not talk very much initially. If you can identify the problems that have you down (and that may not be easy) and find a similarly focused and facilitated group, it can help relieve the lowest lows and give you a gentle, period nudge out of the funk. I don't know how one would try to find such a group (mine is so specific, and explicitly and directly connected to the clinic, that the information was more or less pushed onto me from day one), but if you've talked with practitioners before they may be able to point you to something.

Black Friday, obviously.

The title cut of Dixie Dregs's Night of the Living Dregs, which I had listened to on a friends recommendation and liked.

Yeah, but the Lego(TM) Warp Core doesn't work as well as one would hope.

That's good coaching, making use of a team's strengths!

I have said before somewhere on these boards: If you find yourself accused of bizarre and heinous things that would never occur to you, all too often those things are what the accuser would do if they were in your position.

It might be, but I fled halfway across the state moved not long after that job.

Heck, I did that almost 40 years ago....

This seems appropriate here:

Heh. On one of my last baby-sitting gigs ever, I was baby-sitting a 3-year-old girl who had a stack of those hardbound pre-reader story books that was nearly as tall as she was. After reading a few of those to her, I showed her how to set them up slightly opened, making chains so that she could play Book Dominoes. I don't think her parents were all that happy with me when she showed them this the next day....

For those with a miniatures addiction

"I couldn't find anywhere on the web that thing you mentioned." "I didn't say to look for it on the web. I said to look for it in the wabe."

Really random (and unusual) astronomical (i.e., irrelevant for just about everyone) event coming up in a few days: Asteroid Leona will occult Betelgeuse the night of 11/12 December for a very brief time (up to 12 seconds) on a very narrow track from extreme south Florida, across the Atlantic, southern Spain, Sardinia, Italy, Greece, northern Turkey, and then into central Asia. You don't have to be a pro to see it, but I suspect it is very likely to be subtle enough and brief enough that naked-eye observers, especially inexperienced ones, could see it and not notice anything. You might hear about it after it happens, though, and there's some stray mentions in the popular media of the coming event. For a very brief interval, Betelgeuse will appear to get dimmer as the asteroid passes in front of it. It will NOT "go out", because the angular size of the asteroid is smaller than that of the star! This is an event best recorded with a high speed movie camera + telescope; you prefer the telescope not because it's faint but because the event is brief, and the telescope makes for a small field of view so you have less confusing stuff in your view. Also, if you aren't spang on the center of the real track (which, truth be told, we don't know precisely where that will be, not least because Betelgeuse as seen from Earth is NOT a simple circular disk!), the degree of dimming may be too small to perceive with the unaided eye. That first link above is the most recent information about where the track is likely to be, but it's really terse and doesn't give much background information. A more complete set of info is at https://iota-es.de/JOA/JOA2023_4.pdf ... the most likely track for the occultation has been adjusted since that was published, but it is MUCH more informative about the phenomenon and what's to be expected for those who aren't a pro or semipro astronomer.

Running hard towards what used to be Losing ground in changes, sliding endlessly Reaching out for mirrors hidden in the web Painting lines upon your face inside instead Sounds so bad, the music's flat on every line Songs of blackened lace, know you're dying all the time Sounds so bad, you let the music take your soul Slipping through the day, lose the only way you know Running hard towards what used to be Losing ground in changes, sliding endlessly Reaching out for things you want to see Find reflections of insane reality Running hard towards what used to be Losing ground in changes, sliding endlessly Reaching out for shadows passing through See the dark around is coming down on you

Burl Ives

Eighty-two years later....

... and nearly everyone overlooks the implications of the critical words "at least one".

Boo! Hiss! Why not Cheech & Chong?

Frankly, I think it'd be funniest if the purchaser was male, and was directed by his spouse to get the Midol. And he thought it appropriate to get some other stuff as well....

Funny is that the Midol didn't get an annotation.

Violating thread rule, but validating the above.....