Duke Bushido

If it's just curiosity, you kind of can via the store on this site. They don't have all the third-party stuff (most of which was via magazine articles and inserts), but off the top of my head, I can't think of anything published by any version of HERO GAMES that they don't have. Wait-- was the Shadow World stuff-- no; that was straight-up Iron Crown, wasn't it? At any rate, you can get an eyefull of almost everything through the store. You and me both. There's Traveller HERO, and that helps considerably, but (and I think this was part of the requirement to get the license, but I don't know. Shadowcat can probably tell you for certain when he comes around) there's not really a lot of useful setting information. As I recall someone involved with the project mentioning that the licensing required that anyone buying Traveller HERO still had to buy setting stuff from whoever-had-the-Traveller-rights, but it's been a long time ago, and I could be foggy. Actually, I guess Traveller HERO isn't complete, either, if you aren't already familiar with any version of the Imperium. At least one of the people responsible for Traveller HERO has a Trek HERO fan build floating around the net; it covers TOS and NG. I'm not familiar enough with NG to tell you how "right" it is, but the TOS portion carries good flavor. I'd much prefer to see a volume / size / mass sort of "how to build a starship," if I had to pick one feature, but I've been doing it myself for long enough that it doesn't matter anymore. I'd like to see a couple of options on Starship Combat: one "realistic" featuring drift, momentum, etc-- akin to the very first edition of Traveller (though the revamp wasn't bad, and was a bit easier to teach), and then something a bit more cinematic for those stories featuring 'fighters v capital ships' type combats-- you know: swerving. Problematically, it results in two completely different build methodologies.

As someone who has no idea who any of these people are, I need a little help with this. Thanks.

Possible duplicate here; eyes are too tired to read well on this phone, but I tried. Ive seen this used in a campaign I was in a couple decades back for a wood-themed brick: some Growth, Density Increase, some Stretching, and a couple of extra limbs. Timber Like those characters that turn to living metal, he turned to dense wood-like tissue, etc. Had a twin brother (on and off rivalry) without stretching and extra limbs, but more Growth and DI; GM named him Oak. Oak was later given to a new player as a pregen (later campaign). Player changed his look a bit and called him Ebony. Seriously: there are some cool names in this thread, but sometimes a conceptually-solid simple name keeps a reputation around a long time.

Haven't followed a lot of gearhead blogs, have you?

Okay, preface: You guys know I don't read this thread. I know it's technically safe for anything that might be remotely considered political. I don't know if this is political, and I really have to get it off my chest, and just in case it is (I really feel it's more a social issue, but too many people can't tell the difference, so why take the chance?), I'm going to say it here. The thing I can't shake: You know I've been grounded from both jobs because my wife has the -itis. I have had precious little to do (outside of caring for her; kids are with family) except stay abreast of the fallout from the 1/6 "thing." I say "thing" because we can't seem to decide if this act of terrorism is actually terrorism, organized crime, or a big misunderstanding. (I mean; we _can_; we just can't get anyone in charge of putting together a case to decide it). After a nearly two weeks of following the news, I am ready to lead a crowd-funding drive to go ahead and make the Jewish Space Laser a reality and just _give it_ to them. Let them have fun with it. It couldn't possibly end worse than this is going right now. Thanks, folks.

Not so much. It makes them work harder to "be the good guy." It's not common, but I have run into more than one person booted from the union. I've even hired a couple (briefly: if you can't keep work in the union, it's really unlikely you can keep it without the union. The problem seems to be... Well, that's an obvious one, I guess). I haven't seen that in a "join a union or you can't have a job" state, though.

I'm in a will-to-work state. Unions work better here, because they have to.

It's weird, isnt it? Every other union seems to know what to do with "bad apples." The police union just promotes them.

Dodge Beater. Any chance it was a truck or performance car not under the Chrysler umbrella? Dodge in recent years has been creeping up performance. Not uncommon for gearheads with a favorite brand to boast on their rides.

around here we call it the Day to see if where are going to have winter.

Not only is there no offense taken, there is considerable appreciation: I do the same thing, and encourage other people to do so, and most importantly, I _stress_ that I am _not_ educated in this beyond what I have had to learn either for various jobs or for my own curiosity: I cannot stress highly enough that I am _not_ the guy you want to hang your investments on, at least outside of commodities (advice there? Short-term only, and not too much in any one place. As it's not the stock market, and regulated differently, manipulation is rampant)

For the most part, yes, but honestly, I haven't dug into their entire portfolio: I just stared digging into their silver holdings when someone who knows more than me about the actual stock market (the commodities market is _related_, but different) when I started hearing rumors that Melvin "leaked" the rumor that they were short on silver-- and of course,the rumor itself made no sense, since it's really, really difficult to explain a shortage of raw materials in the current commodities market. There are a lot of people who know more than me, but most of those companies have to register their holdings, and make at least part of their profile public to attract investors. That's how I found that they are quite long on silver; my instinct, based on the dipstickery going on in the lumber market right now, and supported by-- and I can't stress this enough-- people who know more than the damned-little that I know about the stock market suggests that they trying to goad a bidding war on a limited number of stocks, then "discover" more as the price moves up-- a false short of sorts, intended to net them the money they need to get out from under their Gamestop fiasco. The laddering has been going on 24/7, and someone seems to have poked out the SEC's eyeballs. Or covered them with blindfolds made of money; I can't say which.

The short version is: my job is two jobs. Ironically, the economy being what it is, I also have a second job. My primary job: I work at a plant that builds portable buildings. I am a part time equipment operator because, owing to my background, I am the best heavy-equipment operator they have on staff. It gets weirder that all found that out by accident: it's not the job I applied for; it's something I offered to help with when I had slow spots in my day and they had a couple of operators out at the same time. Don't sweat it: I get additional compensation for that, and I rather enjoy doing it, as it's "brain calming" work. The other part of my job is inventory management, to include commodities buying. The guy I work for owns more than business-- well, lots of them actually, but let's focus on the ones that use commodities. Commodities being things like wood, oil, metals, PCV, and other high-volume brand-doesn't-really-matter, distilled from raw materials (except PVC: no idea how that falls into "commodities") and hundreds of other things. Obviously, I don't by them all; just the ones needed for the owner's companies to use. I have to track the commodities market, constantly shop for new vendors, vet them, negotiate contracts (yes: I am a professional shopper. My wife is a bit jealous, until I remind her what I'm shopping for. ) This is a gross over-simplification, as it omits the yelling, screaming, firing, and other personnel management. (as an aside: I don't relish the firing, except during this whole "stop the steal" crap: that brought at lot of previously-unnoticed racism to start simmering, and led to mass terminations that, no lie, I enjoyed the hell out of. Morale hasn't been higher since before Corona). If I may make one more aside, related to negotiating contracts: My immediate boss is the Heir Apparent- the owner's son-- and I swear, not only is he a third my age, he's the most intelligent kid I've met in years, and he's a damned good, upstanding guy. His father is the same way, and these guys are, in total honesty, the only reason I actually considered taking this job when my now-boss first approached me with the offer. Negotiating contracts / resolving vendor issues-- mostly holding them responsible for their mistakes. One of our metal vendors is... well, for lack of a better term, he's a.. partial vendor...? The owner also owns an interest in this particular company (long story), so he likes to use them for a lot of our finish work, at least until we can get our own coil finishing plant up and running (a long dream that is slowly getting closer to realization). So I buy the metal,-- oh, sorry, TP: The short answer is "I pick up the phone and order it." The longer answer is tracking the metal market, the distribution, the pricing as it moves from refinement (I really don't want to learn and don't need to know anything before that; let the miners and the refiners worry about that) onto the market, see what different selling groups have been been getting, check quality reports and feedback (the internet is _filled_ with specialty forums, after all), and see what different importers have been getting-- I try to focus on the earliest sales, as these are typically lower: supply is high, and demand is usually just a bit low while buyers wait to see what the market will be "set" at by those first few sales and how long they take to start moving. From there, it's a matter of seeing _who_ bought the stuff I need, and following it down to people who produces the products I need (seriously: lumber is way easier than metal, but that market is just _wrecked_ right now; the official story is Covid, but a few months ago everyone was caught with huge stockpiles all the while decrying shortages to keep the price inflated. Dicks. ). Once I have that information, I can start contacting and negotiating. Granted, I don't _have_ to track it back that far, but there is a reason that I do: I am in a _much_ better negotiating position when I can straight-up tell them to within a dollar or two a ton just what they paid for the material. I won't lie: I actually sort of enjoy the abrupt stop in conversation when I'm dealing with someone I haven't dealt with before. The of course is arranging trucking, etc, for those companies that do not have trucks or provide shipping, but that's like anyone else shopping for shipping deals. Yes; it's a _lot_ of time (I think I mentioned my day job can run easily seventy hours a week and more? Now you know why), and it's tedious as hell, but it's not complicated. Well, the keeping all this information straight and current; that's actually it's own special aggravation. That's the part you're getting paid for when you buy commodities, I think, and I don't think you can ever really be paid enough for that monster headache. To be fair, after the first couple of years, you sort of have a flow chart and spreadsheets, which makes drilling down to routinely profitable sources easy enough, and you really only have to check with "everyone" quarterly, just to see if anything has shifted. Sometimes it does, and you scoop up what you can, but eventually your "regulars" will catch the adjustment and you spend a month or two dealing with them again. Anyway, that's the really simple answer as to how it's done. Back to the digression: The finishing company that we throw most of our coil stamping and cutting at-- for the siding; we use other companies for steel studs, hat channel, boxes, etc-- They have a _horrible_ material handling team, and it _shows_. Every time a truck is unloaded (which I prefer to do myself, if only because-- well, it's not bragging; really it's not, but I am verifiably better on the lift trucks and tractors than the guys that actually do it, and once the steel (or aluminum) is finished into stacks of siding, it's insane: it's insanely easy to damage it, and it's insanely difficult to handle at our current plant (we have another one built; the guys are training on the equipment on fridays): nothing like taking a two-ton stack of thirty-foot wide siding down a sixteen-foot wide dirt lane between two buildings to get the heart pumping; I assure you. ) At any rate, I also do something that the previous unloaders have apparently never actually done: I _check_ the material, particularly damageable material. This particular company has _never_ shipped anything to us that wasn't, to varying degrees, damaged during the loading processes. I will climb the truck, cane and all, on occasion, and inspect the material before getting the left equipment anywhere near it. Lots of pictures of damage _and_ any obvious causes of the damage. Then unload, then more pictures, close-ups, etc. At any rate, I am a real stickler with these guys because they are using _our coils_! Coils that I have spent a month sourcing and shipping to them, for them to finish (Yes: I can consistently buy coils cheaper than they can because their owner has hired a purchasing team who is content to keep making the same calls to the same guys without actually researching the market and seeing what else is out there. Sad, ain't it? For the record, it's this kind of sloppiness that I think kept the guy I work for from buying deeper into this company.) When there is damage, I do three things: First, I demonstrate the damage, the cause, and detail suggestions on how to prevent it going forward. I do that for every company; the only thing special about these guys are just how frequent and pervasive the damage is, and the fact that they do nothing to change it. On that subject-- After about six months of this (we get two, sometimes three trucks a week from these guys) I got an e-mail from the "head material handler" of this company. In summation, it said "my name is X, and I am the head of material handling. More importantly, I am in charge of the guys who load your truck, and I always make sure to load your trucks personally." I understand that: I make a point to unload his trucks personally, just because of all the "damage material" that no one before me could get to the bottom of: when the guys went to use it, it was damaged, and that was that. Problematically, since we have a sign out front with a little clown holding a stick that says "you must be at least this stupid to hand metal siding," they'd use it anyway, meaning an eventual tear-down and rebuild of the whole stupid thing-- that's a _lot_ of money being set on fire. He continued: "I am a professional, and I take my job very seriously. I make sure that there are no mistakes, and that everything is undamaged, stacked correctly, and matches your order perfectly. In fact, I have just finished loading your truck, and it is leaving first thing tomorrow. I want you to know that I don't know where this damage is coming from, or why you insist that it is because the material is stacked badly or loaded on the wrong pallets--" Uhm, because both of those are true, and as a former truck driver, I can tell you that the wild claims you make about what happens to your material on a strapped load 'because of the truck drivers' is a complete fantasy "but I don't make mistakes. I triple check everything. Also, I can see from here two pallets that have your name on them. They must have gotten left off the truck somehow. I don't know how." You folks don't know me. You _think_ you know me, and some of you might know _enough_ of me to know that it took me a long, long, _long_ time to stop laughing-- out loud; literally out loud, to the point that the two sales ladies up front came back to ask me what was wrong with me. I showed them the e-mail, and their jaws dropped. So yeah; no doubt about it. I forwarded it to every single contact I had within that company. It was a sheer joy. I was polite though: I gave it a tl;dr prologue: "This is your guy saying 'I am such a perfectionist that only I will load your trucks. Also, I am a moron.'" The _next day_ we have a "Vice-President-by-Marriage" (nothing like marrying the owner's daughter, especially if you've failed out of every job you've ever had before ) from that company sitting in my boss's (the Heir Apparent) office. I came in from the plant entrance, so neither of them have seen me. I head to my desk, but VPbM is loud and obnoxious (part of his employment retainment problem, no doubt) and I hear bits of the conversation-- they're discussing my heavy pushback on damage-- and I hear "...and I don't _care_ who this Duke guy is, but he's going to wreck the relationship we have had for nearly forty years! He's an @ssh@le! He's a straight-up @ssh@le! You need to do something about him!" "I did. I hired him." Long pause. "Dad has been nice, patient, understanding with you people for nearly forty years. I've been doing it since I was a teenager. It's not working. The problems don't get fixed. I hired an @ssh@le. We needed an @ssh@le to help deal with the other @ssh@les. I have a weaponized, professional @ssh@le, and if he only has one job at this place, it's to fix my problems with you, or find me someone else who can do what you guys are supposed to be doing." I knew at that moment that this is the job I will work until I die. I had cards printed: Duke Oliver Company X Inventory Phone 1 Purchasing Phone 2 Professional @ssh@le Cell Fax I give them out to vendors who stop by to try to bully us into worse positions. Anyway, the other two things I do when the metal siding comes in damage from these guys: Demand free reforming. They are using _our_ coil, after all, and have no problems beating the crap out of it. I also track the footage of the damage, do a little math to get the total weight of damage of the various coils (different sizes have different costs), and send them a bill for the damaged portions of material that we can cut down and still use the remaining sections. Well, that went off the rails rather quickly. Sorry, I've been doing a lot of this from home the past few days, and I really needed a de-stress exercise.

"most cops" are employed in other countries. We need to keep on mind that other than- potentiallyb lunatics- the US doesnt have a majority,of anything, globally-speaking. I am,not trying to back your argument into a corner or push a sure on it: I had already noted this: US police officers receive roughly 21 weeks of training; many smaller or rural areas, and most Sheriffs and Deputies- recieve less: Sheriffa are elected or appointed, depending on the area, and they hire who they want. In the rest of the first World, law enforcement recieves a minimum of two years, with additional training for certain special skill sets and recurring periodic training (like we do with our medical personnel here in the US). I will have to look the stats back fir specific numbers (unless anyone knows where they might already be compiled), but the example I hold as most extreme is officer-caused deaths. Since 2000, the US has had roughly 8 thousand people killed by law enforcement. In that same period, most other counties have had 200 or less. Finland, if I remember correctly, jas had _one_ in the entire history of its police force. The one thing they all have in common that the outlier 8000 kill count country doesnt have is actual training. You need more than 21 weeks training in the US for medical coding and billing, dor Pete's sake. You need six months (unless you qualify for that Citibank loophole from a few years back)to sell insurance! Niether one of these allows carryng a gun or making on the spot decisions about how to apply violence on a 10 year old child. And yes; videos can be faked. Doesnt alter the fact that the kid was cuffed and in the back seat when the officer backed up, drew his pepper spray, and delivered a face full. Do I want police do away? No. Do I think all police are horrible? No; whan I was driving truck a lifetime ago, I encountered a Texas Trooper who was extremely professional, calming-alert, but non-threatening: solid guy, in my limited interaction with him. What I _want_, and what I think the country _needs_ is police that have had enough training to know what they are doing, period. It cant that hard for two adults to calm or even restrain a child without pushing them down, cuffing them, putting them in the car, then attacking the kid's face. It just can't. Of course, it cant be that hard for five officers to not kill a guy with a prolonged blood flow stoppage as the suspect begs for his life. I suppose the other thing I think we need is repeated psych evals: something routine, that comes,up _before_ the killing.

I couldn't get the link above to work, but I believe that this is the story: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/01/us/rochester-police-pepper-spray-child/index.html Please note that not only did the handcuff the child, they addressed _none_ of the issues for which they claim to have been called, then pepper sprayed her. NO! I did _not_ say "_and_ pepper sprayer her." After these two trained adult men subdued her by pushing her to the ground and handcuffing her (any other first world countries have handcuffs for nine year olds? I'm just curious. Sure: they click tighter and tighter, but if they're not pretty small to start with, they ellipse pretty quickly). So _after_ taking her down, and _then_ handcuffing her, and _then_ putting her in the car-- _after_ all that, they take a moment-- almost an afterthought-- to shoot her a face full of pepper spray. Twenty-one weeks of training, right there. Every other first world nation requires two or more _years_. We require 1/4 of them. Reminds me of a tweet thread posted to a friend's social media (he forwarded me the screen caps): S: It's funny how McDonald's employees are better at de-escalating a situation than the police are. R: That's because if we can't do it, we get fired.

Tell them to skip Starbucks and avocado toast. If they skip two-hundred millions Starbucks and a hundred forty-eight million avocado toasts, they should be billionaires in no time. Or they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Or they can learn fiscal responsibility and make sound investments. And don't eat out so much-- that once-a-month sub sandwich is just much for the fiscally-minded All of these things _must_ work, because it's what they've been telling the rest of us for generations. Back on track though: Melvin Capital has a way out, and it might work: The rumor they started a few days ago seems to be working: The began panic spreading a rumor that they were short on silver and that there is a silver shortage (there may actually be one coming, but right now, there isn't. Seriously: I'm a metal buyer, for Pete's sake, and right now it's harder to get steel than it is to get silver. No; not a joke). Lots of people who think along the lines of "silver is always a good investment (and right now, steel is likely the better one, at least short term, but I'm not the guy you want to take advice from)" are starting to buy silver in droves. Worse, those well-meaning folks who want to help put the bind on Melvin Capital, upon hearing the rumors that Melvin is also shorting silver (seriously-- you can't even _do_ that, because we haven't dug it all up yet!), and being unable to buy GME are instead trying to buy up silver in a hurry. If you check the portfolio, Melvin is _long_ on silver, having been long before all this started, and having done some dealings to increase their holdings on that even as they started the rumor. So again: I am _not_ the guy to take advice from, but it's not too terribly difficult to learn how to read some of the reports: if you want in on putting a choke hold on Wall Street Plunderers, don't jump at every rumor you hear: verify it. Remember: every time a billionaire cries, a child gets a meal.

The media has been saying all day that the crunch is over, or the worst part has past, and even that the GME stock problem has been closed out. I'd like to say that they are being fed this misinformation, but honestly: they _know_ how to double-check. For what it's worth, none of those things are true.

Dude, chitterlings smell worse than limburger. I have no idea what durians are, though, and based on the results of my last "google this food" experiment, I am going to remain happily ignorant.

Oh, I also found this: I have no desire to investigate further.

You're going to make us Google that, aren't you? So I did just that. I learned this: Doesn't help much, never having eaten a herring of any kind. The "fermented" part spooked me, until I remembered that I like kimchi. Then I though "fermented meat?!" Then I remembered what vinegar marinade is.... So: I'm just going to accept that L Marcus doesn't like it, and most people do, and it's made of fish.

Well _obviously_ we need to hear those!

One- and only one- super-brief answer, followed by a second equally-brief one. I want to keep them super brief, because just like the "foods you don't" like thread, I want ir to be perfectly clear that I am not trying to insult or denigrate those who _do_ like comics: 1) four-hundred, eighty-seven thousand and sixteen continuities. Or so it seems from the outside. Dead people who arent dead anymore; people who have been thirty for eighty years, familial relationships where none existed before, and vice-versa. Guys, this is the exact same reason (well, some of them, but those are in comics, too) that I cant stand soap operas. 2) the fandom. Not the fans as individuals, mind you: most of my adult players, even in the non-supers groups, read comics, and obviously I love these guys, or I wouldnt keep playing with them. The fandom is ridiculous though: all those continuities? All those dead/surprise! It was a hoax /oops! Dead again! Nonsense? "No, Duke; it all has to make sense, because its all canon! Even the retcons that undid it; those are canon, too, buy all the stufd that they "undid" are also cannon. Oh, and the reboots? Those are canon, too, even if the characters are completely reinvented / depowered / gender swapped / zombies. All canon, and just because its a complete reboot doesnt mean that all the undone characters aren't going to just show up, because theyre just too cool not too use, so they will exist again. Canon. All of it" And the most infuriating thing about the fandom: "who would win...?" Well, its a book. The answer is always going to be "whoever the author needs to win," amd no; it doesnt (and won't) ever have to make sense. Now why cant you just sit back and roll with it? Though to be fair, I have that issue with pretry much _any_ fandom, to the point that just hearing the word "canon" makes me want to fill a T-shirt bazooka with grapefruits and have at them. Again: the individual people are, for the most part, awesome. The fandoms are just.... Less awesome...?

Out of rep, but I love it. It's not really accurate, though: the guy who first pointed out the problem and who rounded up the info for the rest of us to see was, in fact, a professional investor, _and_ started it off by buying something on the order of a half million bucks or so. Also, I am not blind: there is no doubt in my mind that he will, at some point,bail out at least some of that stock (if he hasn't already) and break even _at the worst_, even if he decides to let the rest of it ride into the ground. I also suspect that he's going to pull out more than enough to make a profit: he's a professional, and let's face it: manipulation of pricing is exactly how they make the money. For all I know, he's just found a novel way to do it. The thing is, at this point-- if everyone else involved holds, it can still work. I'd like to think that he's going to ride it down, too, but Dude-- how much money must you already have if you can afford to toss a half mill on the fire? I think it blew up bigger than he expected (which is going to be _great_ for him, if he does pull out and sell), with the upshot that it has become big enough that it doesn't need him anymore.

I agree completely. Gamestop was doomed. I pointed out both that I would love to see it saved, but it was just too late. I also pointed out that this entire movement, despite how so many people are trying to make the general public interpret it, was never about saving Gamestop. The GameStop stock just happened to be in the right position to use as the tool. IT could just as easily have been RIM (nearly was, and may still be).

I believe the party is currently on a quest to find the rest of her pixels.