Zeropoint

That's pretty cool. I don't know who that guy is, but he looks badass. The engineer in me notes that that spear handle looks kind of fragile, if it's just stone.

I would figure that an acceptable Horatio would be about one per sailor.

Oh man, Battle Angel Alita! I loved that series and had a serious crush on Alita. To this day, I'm attracted to petite brunettes.

Speaking of the second amendment, the latest issue of "America's First Freedom", one of the NRA's publications, has a cover that depicts Antifa as the bad guys and calls them "violent radicals". I assume that if the NRA is against anti-fascism, then they must be pro-fascism. Looks like it's finally time to figure out how to resign the life membership I got way back when things are different.

Hmm. Now that you mention it, I have indeed had more duds with .22 LR than with centerfire cartridges.

Yeah, the innards would get all rusty and the ammo would probably get wet and unreliable.

I Believe That A Golem With The Constitution In Its Head Would Be A Vast Improvement Over Some Presidents We Have Had.

My first suggestion would be to ease off on the loyalty and obedience complications, probably for both branches. Yes, military personnel ARE trained to follow orders, but what you've got seems extreme to me. I would probably replace all the complications with Subject to Orders, 20 points. (6e, Vol 1, page 428) Also, your skill packages, to me, look far in excess of what I'd expect to be common to all personnel. Are these package deals supposed to represent the basic starting point for all enlisted personnel? If so, they represent a VERY different type of military than what I'm familiar with. Based on my trip through US Navy boot camp, my version of the basic sailor starting package would look more like this: WF: Small Arms; 2 pts KS: Navy History; 2 pts PS: Damage Control & Firefighting; 2 pts Social Complication: Subject to Orders; -20 pts Total Cost: -14 points. If that seems too little to you, keep in mind that I mean it to be something which is 1) common to ALL Navy personnel, and therefore 2) representative of boot camp training only, excluding anything the sailor would learn at "A" School or afterward. In my case, I had an additional year and a half of training before I got to my ship. Six months of that was basic electronics technician training, very similar to what non-nuclear ETs would get, and the remaining year was broken down into six months each of classroom and hands-on training. None of that training would be given to, say, an Aviation Ordnanceman . . . and likewise, I received no training in explosives handling or any kind of weapon system maintenance. The TL; DR version of all that is that IMO, such hefty skill packages should be rating-specific, not service-wide.

I'm continually grateful that terrorists as a class seem to usually be people of low intelligence and imagination.

We all have to go sometime. Might as well go out gloriously.

For my little-used homebrew fantasy world, I assume that the PCs aren't the only adventurers in the world, and that therefore towns have worked out a way to accommodate the, uh, quirks of the adventuring types. Typically this means that there's a group of businesses outside the city walls, or otherwise outside the town proper, where it's considered perfectly normal to show up at the pub for a beer wearing full plate and carrying a greatsword that has black runes floating off of it. See, adventurers mean trouble, but they also mean money, so it pays to create a space where you can simultaneously take their money and keep them away from the decent folk. You'd probably also find runners there who would happily do errands inside the city walls for a few silver pieces.

I've always felt that if someone wants to park in handicapped zones that badly, the logical thing to do would be to make them qualify for it. I understand kneecaps are easy to damage.

It's visually impressive, and would certainly make a fun toy, but in terms of actually setting things on fire, it doesn't seem to perform very well. An old-fashioned Molotov cocktail would work better (although it might be hard to get it to break on leaf litter and twigs).

Ah, I totally misinterpreted what you were saying. I'm sorry for coming to the wrong conclusion about you. And almost all of those divisions have equally good claims to be the correct interpretation of the religion. Hmm. Don't automatically assume that the people who are "good" by the standards of society are the ones doing the Bible right; the Bible clearly advocates racism, slavery, genocide, and use of public violence to enforce social norms. The Bible records Jesus as saying that he came to bring not peace but a sword, and that he would set families against each other.

Hey, you don't get to judge whether someone is a "Real Christian" or not. If they say they're Christian, there's no reason not to take them at their word. After all, Hitler was a Christian, too, and a member in good standing of the Catholic Church. If you don't like the fact that your co-religionists are obviously evil and horrible people, maybe it's time to take a hard look at why your religion isn't reliably making people better.

Inquiring minds want to know: 1) Is that because it was in Antarctica, or because it was a fruitcake? 2) Are we sure it started out better than "almost edible"?

Yeah, judging by how that guy gets shoved around by the gun, it doesn't look too bad.

I'd expect to see rising drone tech lead to increasingly violent games where no humans actually get injured. In that drone racing video, I saw several crashes but there were no tires flying into the audience, no drivers catching on fire, no risk to any humans at all. You get the dramatic upset of a competitor being violently taken out of the race, and no one gets a scratch! I enjoyed Battlebots for the same reason; we got to see knock-down, drag-out fights to the death, with dismemberment common . . . all with zero harm to any living thing. Edit to clarify: by "drones" in this context I don't just mean quadrotors, but all kinds of remotely piloted machines. No doubt that will eventually include humanoids.

Most religions that survive very long become very careful about avoiding any testable claims about anything.

It would seem that in this timeline, the captain of the Schwaben learned a lesson from the incident with the Titanic about having enough boats on board. Contrary to standard German naval practices, he keeps a large number of boats stashed around his ship. He's able to get away with this because in this cinematic universe, charismatic high-ranking people (like Ludendorf, for instance) get a lot of leeway. One would assume that when he sent the three boats out to look for the downed airplane, he was congratulating himself on being able to send out a force large enough to deal with Trevor (our hypothetical captain being genre-savvy enough to know that a mere dozen mooks against one dashing spy isn't good odds).

More like superVILLAIN yacht, am I right?

Yeah, from the details that I've picked up since I posted, it sounds like the killer was surprisingly fast and accurate with that knife, and like the only things that would have saved someone in that situation would be very good unarmed combat skills, or wearing a gorget. I should add a quick-clot pack to the first aid stuff I carry. It wouldn't have helped in this case, but it could save a life on a less well-placed hit.

Hmm. My initial objection is based on thoroughly modern ideas of common descent and cladistics, and leads me to point out that there may not BE any actual relationship between fantasy "races", thanks to literal acts of special creation by various gods. My second thought is that "taxonomy" is just naming things. In Shadowrun, the various races all get named as subspecies of homo because, well, they explicitly ARE. I can only imagine fierce debates raging among human scholars as to whether "degenerate savages" like the orcs should be labeled as belonging to the same genus as humans. If they did, however, I'd expect that the species name would be an adjective like "robust" or "barbaric" or something, but in Latin.

Two dead, one wounded while defending innocent woman from right-wing white guy. Damn, this really hits close to home. I go to school in Portland. I ride those same commuter trains. I'm writing this post AT my school in Portland, to which I rode the trains today and from which I will ride them when I leave. I oppose racism and bullying. That could have been me, if I've got the courage to stand up for someone like they did. Maybe it's time to get my concealed carry permit . . .