ScottishFox

The Texas re-opening is looking reasonably good after a scary bump upward initially. At least wave 1 of this plague will pass over us without too much destruction. Hopefully wave 2 will be even less awful. I will say that being able to sit at a table of fellow RPG fans (spread way out at the new jumbo sized double table) and have an actual in-person game beat the pants off the Roll20 BS I've been surviving on. It was like moving from a feeding tube to a New York Strip. Still doing the basic precautions (masks, neurotic hand sanitizing, etc.).

My recent ER trip for my presumed ancient arthritic shoulder revealed some fun things. 1- It's not that arthritic despite years of swimming, tennis, and various martial arts. 2- I have a doctor Pimple Popper style cyst that has formed under the rotator cuff muscle and nerve in response to the limited arthritis I do have. 3- The Cyst (capitalized name because it is a proper f*cking super villain) has grown enough to crush the nerve against my rotator cuff muscle. 4- Besides being in the agony of the damned my left arm is all but paralyzed and my surgery is being delayed by the holiday. 5- Today I will run out of pain meds. Tomorrow I will be a the doctors office at 8:01AM begging for surgery and/or a swift death. This thing is a solid 10 of 10 on the pain scale when it flares up. Today I tried to dry myself after a shower and I was so crippled with pain my wife had to help me get dressed. F*ck this Cyst right in ... whatever is important to a cyst!

Once food stops showing up at grocery stores you're going to see some real chaos. Essential work has got to keep moving forward. Doctors and nurses aren't going to be the only superheroes in this mess. The men and women keeping food on the shelves (meat packing plants, truck drivers, auto maintenance, etc., etc.) are also going to have to put on their capes and take some risks. I'm doing what little I can here by continuing to patronize local restaurants and small businesses (like the local comic store) because I don't want them going out of business despite the fact I'm on 50% hours.

Millions of people already take the drug as a prophylactic against malaria and for lupus. The fatal side effect rate has to be pretty damn low. But given the lack of hard evidence that its effective and some that says it is worse than nothing - this seems like a risky route to go. Probably the hardest part of analyzing any of this mess is that the data quality is all over the place and some of it seems intentionally distorted state by state to reflect the narrative that the hometown politicians favor. Multiple states have had to adjust their numbers up or down after getting caught cooking the books. And I'm still pretty PO'd at how the nursing homes were handled by New York (you must take coronavirus infected persons by state mandate into the nursing home.) Great job Cuomo - thousands died because of this. The Department of Health lady in Pennsylvania also mandated this but simultaneously moved her mother out of the nursing home so she wouldn't die. Nice - great leadership - the others can die, but not my mom. I also wonder how many people we've saved with the shutdowns (I assume at least 50-100k) and how that will stack up against the massive upswing in suicide, drug overdoses, domestic violence and the one I just heard about today - a potentially 20% higher death rate for new cancer patients as their initial diagnosis are delayed for months. Still - nobody in my family or my wife's (which is ginormous) has gotten the crud yet and the fatality rate remains very low (3 per 100,000).

And in the "I think people are over it" category we have: Whether it officially over or not this type of activity is going to unleash the full force of the Coronavirus. Buckle up, friends.

Sometimes to be an effective worker you have to manage up the chain of command as well as down. I'll admit that if you're on the Trump-bashy side of the political spectrum this is a VERY SOLID thing to bash him on. Just, wow. Meanwhile in Texas we had a pretty nasty spike up in cases after the re-opening, but it has dropped off substantially the last couple of days. Total body count is about 1/3rd of a bad flu season but I suspect we'll see somewhere between double and triple the current number before it's over. Anecdotally from my gas and food runs - mask wearing from workers is at a pretty good clip though among the customers it's dropped off to nearly none. Not a great call, imo. My family is still sporting our ninja masks. I got to go to the ER this weekend due to a pinched nerve in my neck/shoulder and the hospital is aggressively screening at the ER entrance and mask usage is 100% mandatory for everyone. And you have to use their masks. Don't like it? No service for you. Texas Two Week Trend Tracker powered by COVID-19 free Foxes: Rt has crept up from 0.87 to 0.88

This is true in many ways.

Bruh, come'on, Sigma Xi and the CCP is run by Xi Jinping. In China surnames are first so Xi Sigma is obviously a relative of Xi Jinping's. Then consider that Jinping means soley and sigma means sum. Clearly they are the same! Do you even conspiracy, bro?

What I've found as the DC's and armor escalate over the course of a campaign is that the killing attacks get too stunny. Example: Arden the Witcher is wearing enchanted plate armor that render him nigh invulnerable (12 rPD, 8 PD). He then takes a shot from a heavy long bow (standard 2d6 RKA) that hits him in the stomach for 10 BOD (4x multiplier). He takes no BOD damage, but 20 ((10 x 4) - 20) stun get past his defenses and he is stunned. A similarly damaging normal attack (6d6 Staff attack landing for - let's say... 6,6,6,6,4,3) will result in 0 BOD damage and ((31-20) x 1.5) = 16 stun which is lower, but still quite painful for an attack that is not capable of doing any permanent damage. The more I think about this the more I think the issue is primarily around the lack of scaling of the non-armor PD/ED of the heroes. In a supers campaign the resistant AND non-resistant defenses would both be going up. In a heroic campaign the characters get to 6-8 PD/ED and stop. The armors get better, but their natural defenses don't. This makes the campaign scaled attacks do disproportionately more STUN as attacks and defenses rank up. Maybe the solution will be something along the lines of having enchanted armors provide both rPD and PD. So... Neilson's Gnarly Nettle Coat could be 5 rPD (compared to say 3rPD for non-magical heavy leather) and also provide a +4 bonus to PD/ED. The secondary bonus would have to go up faster since stun escalates faster than BOD. If I use the roughly +4 rPD Plate from earlier than the nigh invulnerable Witcher is taking 12 or 5 stun from the hit instead of 20 or 16. Hmm... Time to tinker!

An attack to the Vitals is a penalty of -8 OCV. You would need 8 PSLs to cover that. Deadly blow is the most direct solution to this problem, imo, and allows the rogue to still be useful against armored targets.

I use hit locations too and they strangely did NOT adjust that when they changed from 1d6-1 (average 2.67) to 1d3 (average 2). Hit locations still crunches out to about 2.8 STUN multiplier for killing attacks and there isn't an obvious, elegant solution.

I've lived far enough out in the country in the past that it wasn't even up for discussion. The police are literally 30 minutes away. You have guns for critters and you have guns for people that are going to do things the police can't help you with for 30 minutes. When I was 10 my parents went to the neighbors house (more than a mile away) and left me with a loaded rifle and instructions to not let anyone in but them while I was in charge of my 6 year old sister. It is VERY different in the country and city rules don't make sense for country people and vice versa.

Yeah, I'm somewhere between cautiously optimistic and I hope we don't all die. So far with the places that have been open for two weeks or longer (Texas, Georgia, Florida) things are looking pretty good. I think Georgia had their lowest hospitalization and respirator rates for the last couple months though in my head having 900 people on respirators seems like a f*cking nightmare. Texas overall is doing good and the area I'm in (suburbia) is doing fantastic. Let's hope it stays that way. Today's outing, again purely anecdotally observed, shows that virtually everyone has given up on masks. They are vanishing quick. I saw one person that wasn't me wearing a mask at the store. Yikes!

They are so cost effective that my players said it felt wrong to be able to pick up 60-70 AP abilities for 3-4 CP. We re-modeled spells in our second campaign to have a cost multiplier of 0.4 and a standard Magic Spell limitation of -1.5. This let them get weaker spells for cheap and stronger spells for 5-7 CP depending on limitations which felt more appropriate. Which makes some level of sense. The warrior has to drop 10 points to rapid fire a bow or multi-attack with his axe effectively, but the mage can pick up a RKA 2.5d6 Fireball and Lightning Bolt for 3pts each... But, you're not wrong. It is a simple way to stack on new spells in a cost effective manner. When we were using Multipowers we did two for the casters. One for instant (mostly offensive) spells and a secondary one for lasting effects (flight, shields, etc.).

And in the "doing it wrong" category we have laid off 1.4 million healthcare workers (121,000 hospital staff among them). That's how you brace for wave 2 apparently. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-revenue-thousands-of-health-care-workers-face-furloughs-layoff

The guys doing the ( https://rt.live/ ) website show the statistical modeling they do to account for the average delay between exposure and testing and it very quickly reminds me that I did 1 year of statistics in college and am not a statistics major. It gets arcane. I saw an article based on CDC numbers which sums up as : According to a recent reportTrusted Source, more than 97 percent of people who contract SARS-CoV-2 show symptoms within 11.5 days of exposure. The average incubation period seems to be around 5 days.

Texas is reaching the two-week open point. We recently moved on to the 2nd stage of re-opening so we may see another spike upward in another 7 to 10 days. So far, not great, but not a disaster either: Texas Rt number: I find it interesting that the Rt was on the way down before the shelter order, but continued to drop for quite awhile once sheltering officially started. I suspect a lot of people started social distancing before it was mandated. I also suspect that the essential workers and mass gatherings at grocery stores and other places prevented the Rt from dropping lower. Fortunately, not a massive swing up after the shelter order ended. Anecdotally I can say about 1/2 the people are wearing masks and 1/2 are not and traffic is about 1/2 way between pre-shutdown and shutdown levels. We're still clocking in at just under 3 deaths per 100,000 in my area so I'm still 15x as likely to be murdered or die in some sort of accident. On a morbid lark I looked up the death rates of dangerous jobs and... they are massively higher than this. The guy who does my yard (who is awesome, btw, graduated college recently and owns his own business now) is 7x more likely to die just doing his job. Police, fire, construction, roofing, farming, transportation and a host of other jobs have death rates in the 15-30 per 100,000 range. And yet, I still wear my ninja mask and treat other people like they have the plague.

I must be missing something here. 1d6 averages to 3.5. 1d3 averages to 2 STUN on average would be 7.

My last couple posts were in response to Old Man's claim that the USA has 1/3rd of all cases on Earth. My point is - No, we don't.

Is it possible the two countries with 8.3x the US population are under-reporting their cases and/or lack the testing resources to test their billion plus person populations? It's one thing to suggest that American misbehavior has resulted in above-average per capita cases and another to just blanketly accept that it is more than 6x the global average. Maybe you just accept at face value that the USA has 16x as many cases as China which has 4x the population and was the source of the outbreak. Seems unlikely - to put it very mildly. Maybe you also believe that the USA has 19x as many cases as India which also has 4x the population and is geographically adjacent to the source of the outbreak. I don't accept that Americans are pulling down 64x or 76x the per capita case-load of these two global giants.

It seems beyond unlikely that we have 5% of the global population and 33% of the cases. We might have 33% of the reported cases, but I feel VERY confident that countries that have the other 95% of the global population have WAY more cases. They just don't have them tested, confirmed and reported.

In an effort to support the local gaming store this week I popped in a bought a dusty old 4th edition hard cover Champions book. Man, I have missed 4th edition. I've had fond, nostalgic feelings about 4th edition for decades, but now that I'm thumbing through this dusty old yellow-paged tome - I still love it! It's not like re-watching some movie from childhood and wondering how you ever liked such garbage. 4th edition stands the test of time. Anyone know if there's a dusty old HERO Designer that supports 4th edition characters?

John Hopkins has us at 1,094 at the moment. We'll really need to see another couple of weeks to see how bad the re-opening is going to impact the case load. I expect it to get worse. I'm open to the idea it might get MUCH worse. However, we're not seeing anything like exponential growth (yet) and several areas outside of Texas have shown a substantial drop-off in cases so an annual rate seems extremely unlikely. The current Texas Two Week Trend analyzed on the Scottish Fox Hyper Net: Louisiana has dropped off a lot: New York is dropping off a lot: Granted Texas seems to be going upward and will probably see double or triple the current numbers before it's over (maybe more). Additionally, I bought the entire family a set of Arctic Cool gaiters (ninja masks basically) so we can look stylish as we walk into stores while I think to myself, "If I wore this shit in here 3 months ago, in Texas, they'd be shooting at me already.".

I have this thing where I buy my wife flowers on days that are NOT special occasions. So yesterday I got her a dozen roses - just because - and I had totally forgotten today was Mother's Day. Yay, me?

Let me be clear. I do believe this plague is much worse than seasonal flu. It appears to be doing real, lasting damage to people that we do not get from the flu. It's also super contagious. However, even in places that did not shutdown AT ALL, the death rate is VERY low. Let's look at South Dakota which shutdown exactly nothing. They are clocking in at 3.76 deaths per 100,000. The homicide rate in relatively safe, affluent, north Dallas is about 6 per 100,000. Death by car accident and other accidents is about 10x higher than Coronavirus (so far, I know it will get worse). Did we shut down the country for homicide or the risk of accidents? No. The global shutdown *might*, per the UN, starve 100 MILLION people to death. I do believe we have extended the shutdown too long and we're doing more damage than good at this point.