ScottishFox

Make sure to spend a few hours researching each one so you know what you're voting for. Now repeat this for each candidate for each role in the election. It's not shocking why people resort to party-line voting - awful as that is.

I barely considered myself STR 15 at the peak of my martial arts days where I was hitting the gym 6 days a week and could rep the 600 lb calf raise machine with one leg. STR 15 came and went fairly quickly. Maybe I held it for a hot 3 years. In real life you lay off the fitness routine and your STR will drop 3-5 points in a matter of months. I know in our Fantasty HERO days we used a rough estimate of full weight on the STR chart for dead lift, 1/2 for military press and 3/4 for bench press. Not terribly realistic, but it gave us a rough benchmark. STR 15 would be 440lb dead lifts (reps, not single max), 220 military press and 330 bench. That is VERY strong.

As long as the one way is using Change Environment and not Images...

You're not wrong, but its easy to see how a conservative would perceive that as tit for tat. You investigated me so now I'm investigating you.

I'm not conservative, but my conservative friends are much more worked up about what they see as a completely illegal investigation of a political opponent by having the Obama FBI investigating then candidate Trump. Regardless if you believe that has any merit or not - that is a major grief point among conservatives. Using intelligence agencies to undermine or outright remove political opponents before they're even in office would certainly fall in the despotic side of this conversation. Again, not saying I believe that's what happened, but I'm in Texas and my conservative friends are all over it.

Firstly, thank you. Secondly, we added a CON roll with a penalty of STUN Damage / 5 rounded up to maintain the spell so it was not a guaranteed interrupt by any stretch. It worked out OK. Honestly, just tracking the timing of spells going off was the big issue. I wouldn't do it again in a Pen & Paper setting, but for PC games - love it. Even in the LOTR example - the heroes turn around and all attack simultaneously and Gandalf is all, "I was holding my phase, guys!" and proceeds to defeat all 3 of them at once.

I recently ran a Pillars of Eternity inspired campaign and we used spell casting times to allow for spell interruption and some selectivity when picking spells at each "level". Spells with a cast time of 3 segments or 4 segments were more powerful, but left you vulnerable to getting interrupted. Quicker spells (1/2 phase) could not be interrupted unless someone had a held action ready to deal with you. Sounded great, turned out to be a time tracking hassle in actual game play. The idea that you could go later in a segment or on a different segment than someone channeling a powerful long cast spell and interrupt them with a quick cast spell played out pretty well. I suppose one simple option would be to allow Dispel to be used with an Aborted action. If you can find a simple enough implementation it is a great thematically appropriate option. It feels right in a fantasy setting to try to interrupt a priest or wizard before they can finish their spell. Aragorn- "Do not let him speak, he will put a spell on us... We must be quick."

And in the Why Would We Need Good Data category today: Nothing like inflating positive rates by 10x. It's not like life altering decisions are being made on this data. This kind of thing is the bane of people who work with data. So frustrating.

Very well said. The strain between the compassionate and competitive is very necessary. Both sides have critically important points to make and the conversation and compromise have to continue. Without that we'll rapidly drift towards violence.

No, but Unclevlad did and that's who (whom?) I was responding to.

We'll disagree here. This and hospitalizations are the best metrics as they avoid artificial inflation caused by massively more available testing for non-hospitalized public. I know one difference between some of the states is whether or not they include possible/probable cases or only include confirmed cases. The former probably raises the numbers above reality and the latter probably lowers it below reality. Assuming that Texas is lying about their numbers and that other states are not is a pretty big leap of faith. Also, if Texas is lying about the numbers they are doing a terrible job. Texas 90 day trend below: Your points about long term issues after being critically ill are valid. Points about Texas culture - Accurate. The number of people wearing masks - too low.

I like pointing to extremes to show where we don't want to go. Keeping things in a moderate middle area is important. The extremes on both sides of the issue are very bad places that we do not want to go to. Defund all police? This will result in anarchy, death and mass destruction. Support police no matter what they do? This results in tyranny and a justice system that destroys lives and lacks justice. As it relates to the current BLM protests. Pushing for police reform and justice system reform is very good. They cannot get rid of no-knock warrants fast enough. I was all on-board with the early cases. Charging the cop in the Rayshard Brooks situation with murder for following the Atlanta PD guidelines for force was a brake-pumper for me. Was there cause for concern? Yes. Could it have gone better? Yes. But a murder charge? Too much. This last one? I can't support this one at all and if you're somehow supportive of protests against police shooting someone who is shooting at them while they arrest a triple-homicide suspect then we'll just have to agree to disagree. And I want progress. I want a more Norwegian style of incarceration and I want dirty cops to enjoy real justice.

And in the going too far section of the news today: Hakim Littleton. Police pull up to execute a warrant on a guy wanted for THREE homicides. As they are arresting the man, Hakim decides to pull out a pistol and take a head shot at the nearest cop. He misses and the cops, not liking being shot at, shoot him. This results in a protest! It's so bad the police end up releasing video of the incident (dash and badge cams) and the protesters don't care!? Remember when George Floyd and Breona Taylor kicked this whole thing off and we were looking at like 99% buy in from the public? Almost universal agreement that George Floyd was murdered and that no-knock warrants are intolerable. Now they're protesting because a wannabe cop killer died while shooting at cops. Insane. This kind of thing will derail broad public support and eventually lead to nothing changing. https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/crowd-gathers-at-scene-where-man-was-shot-and-killed-by-police-on-detroits-west-side https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/detroit-police-release-graphic-videos-of-man-firing-on-officers-before-being-fatally-shot

It sure is. In some states there are broader laws against abusing the 911 call line (like Texas). My wife used to be a 911 operator and has some stories to tell. One of them involved a guy calling 911 over and over because he had called the police and didn't like the police that showed up and wanted DIFFERENT cops to come. When he got told "no" he kept calling until they told him he was about to get charged with 911 abuse. Because alcohol is very helpful in decision making he kept calling again and again and ended up going to jail. PSA: Don't get stupid drunk and then call the cops over some triviality and then verbally abuse the 911 operators and the police you called to your own damn house.

That's just not so. We had the mortality rate down by about 75% for a bit. From the middle of April to mid June we cut the number of hospitalizations in half. Sure, we've borked it recently with a lot of the 30 and under crowd getting sick by way of ignoring the rules, but we absolutely did flatten the curve for awhile. The area in Texas I'm in is seeing an increase, but here you're more likely to be murdered than die of Coronavirus. However, we are likely to pass our average flu-season numbers in the next few weeks - 3,200 deaths and climbing. The worst recent flu season in Texas (2017-2018) took 11,000 lives according to the Texas DHS. We're way below that - so far.

Best of luck, Grailknight. Get plenty of rest.

If they were legit colliding with each other and getting injured - that would be fine. It's the theatrics of taking a fake dive to try to draw a penalty that look so bad.

Respectfully, these guys couldn't even be a warm-up act for Honolulu PD.

Well, that would make a pretty big difference. According to the NY times article I read the lawyers were still working through the possible ramifications to taxation, environmental rules and adoptions. If the only impact is prosecution of Native Americans then it's going to be relatively small overall. If it ends up interfering with taxation, House of Representatives seats, etc. then it's going to be a much bigger deal.

Great article - thanks. We'll see how it pans out in the long run. I suspect both sides of the aisle will be hyperbolic until we see how it all shakes out. One side wails, "Disaster and ruin!" The other says, "No big deal at all." and the truth will probably end up somewhere in the middle. It's possible that Oklahoma just lost about 1/2 of it's state and local tax base with this decision. As a potential precedent this could be very messy for whichever party wins the 2020 elections. How many other states failed to properly terminate their many poorly worded treaties (which both sides violated on a regular basis). One book I cannot recommend enough for a (in my opinion) really well balanced and historically contextualized look at the struggles between Native Americans and the growing country of America is Empire of the Summer Moon. They cover the treaties in pretty good detail here and there and my takeaway was that both sides violated the treaties whenever they felt like it. Often the treaties were agreed to by chieftains that didn't even have authority over the groups they were representing while signing the treaties. The cultural differences and incompatible value systems are really something in that book. Both sides have their heroes and their villains. And I've just talked myself into a second listening. https://www.amazon.com/Empire-of-Summer-Moon-audiobook/dp/B01KBD4IOE/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=summer+of+the+autumn+moon&qid=1594559593&sr=8-1

My brother-in-law and wife have both worked in law enforcement for quite awhile while my father was a judge and defense attorney at different parts of his career. I could NOT agree with this man more. Don't say a MF'ing thing, ever, for any reason. Hand them the card to your lawyer and get out of there. The only direction the situation can go is worse.

It's one of the very few sports where the men go to great lengths to show what fragile babies they are. Ooh, ooh, the man almost made contact with me. I shall throw myself to the ground with great enthusiasm and thrash in the throws of unbearable agony.

And, in the 2020 is Year of Endless Chaos category, The Supreme Court just gave half of Oklahoma back to the Muskogee nation. That includes Tulsa and a very large part of Oklahoma. Nearly two thousand convicted criminals will potentially be released as they were illegally (now) convicted by the State of Oklahoma on land they did not have jurisdiction on. Everything in Orange goes bye-bye and is no longer Oklahoma because the treaty wasn't terminated properly. Gorsuch was in favor of the 5-4 ruling. Another proof he's going by what he believes the law says and not what Trump wants.

If you're left-leaning I feel you have to be pleasantly surprised with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. They have not turned out to be the blindly right-voting Trump-favoring justices many were concerned they would be.

A patron that is morally flexible can cause some angst and drama for the heroes. Get some slam dunk heroes vs. evil missions out of the way and then start to drive them into morally dicey endeavors. Something along the lines of secure funding for the orphanage by planting contraband on a political rival to make sure the patron's paying customers wins their election.