ScottishFox

You're welcome.  The article has a ton of great photos in it and I think the AP did a pretty bang on job of covering it.
 
The "inside the courthouse" side of the article stood out for me as I've seen the DHS propaganda, but I hadn't seen a press perspective on it.  What the reporter detailed were serious injuries that in most cases would justify lethal force.
 
And kudos to the reporter for getting in there and taking the ride.  Sounded very scary.
 
Honestly, I'm so tired of watching say CNN and then Fox and then trying to Frankenstein it together to get an actual story instead of a political opinion.  This AP story was award worthy.

Meanwhile at the federal courthouse protests in Portland the AP has done some brilliant journalism.  They put a reporter in the crowd AND one in the building so they could get both perspectives on what is happening.
 
Seriously great work.
 
The article:  https://apnews.com/1dd1bb39093a3691f4e78093787ab877
 
Some thoughts from the AP reporter inside the courthouse:
 
 

 
At the rate this is escalating I wouldn't be surprised to see live ammo fired at the protesters soon. 
They are doing real - in some cases permanent - damage to the federal officers who are inside the structure.
 
Honestly, I can't believe the level of restraint that has been shown so far.  This attack on the courthouse has been going on for weeks.

Meanwhile at the federal courthouse protests in Portland the AP has done some brilliant journalism.  They put a reporter in the crowd AND one in the building so they could get both perspectives on what is happening.
 
Seriously great work.
 
The article:  https://apnews.com/1dd1bb39093a3691f4e78093787ab877
 
Some thoughts from the AP reporter inside the courthouse:
 
 

 
At the rate this is escalating I wouldn't be surprised to see live ammo fired at the protesters soon. 
They are doing real - in some cases permanent - damage to the federal officers who are inside the structure.
 
Honestly, I can't believe the level of restraint that has been shown so far.  This attack on the courthouse has been going on for weeks.

The Algernon Files character write-ups are often inflated in points even by Fifth Edition DOJ standards. But they frequently include lots of Skills, Perks, and Talents, including things like Followers and Bases that CU high-enders often hand-waive. But Serpent Queen's human form (which has most of her magical abilities) includes a 360-point Multipower, with several 20D6 AOE attacks at 0 END.
 
I'm afraid I don't know where you could view this for free, at least not legally.

You're welcome.  The article has a ton of great photos in it and I think the AP did a pretty bang on job of covering it.
 
The "inside the courthouse" side of the article stood out for me as I've seen the DHS propaganda, but I hadn't seen a press perspective on it.  What the reporter detailed were serious injuries that in most cases would justify lethal force.
 
And kudos to the reporter for getting in there and taking the ride.  Sounded very scary.
 
Honestly, I'm so tired of watching say CNN and then Fox and then trying to Frankenstein it together to get an actual story instead of a political opinion.  This AP story was award worthy.

Thank you for being impartial by also including the perspective of the protestors.
 
  
 
They're scared to death of losing their power. This is nothing more than a beast letting the moonlight glint off its claws.

I'm guessing you haven't traveled much?

So because there are  other supers in the world and there are threats that may be above the players' power level, the PCs are inherently not important?

Looks like things are about to settle down.  We may have seen the peak.  The deaths will continue to climb for another couple of weeks, but this last week is showing a hopeful trend.
 
I cannot wait for this !@#$ to be over.  The stress this has been putting on my immuno-compromised wife has been non-trivial.
 
 

Remember the original CDC guidelines from back in May, which the Trump administration squashed before they were published, had a flow chart. On it, the first item was (paraphrasing), "Is there significant community spread in your community so that the community is having to take some sort of mitigation efforts?" If the answer to that is "yes" then you weren't supposed to open. The Associated Press did a series of articles showing the changes between the CDC-written guidelines vs what went out to the public. There's very few places in the US which could meet that original standard.
 
As far as this latest "CDC" publication, CNN showed the head of the CDC today clarifying that publication (which said a key considerations for school administrators is COVID-19 transmission rates in the immediate community and in the communities in which students, teachers, and staff live).
 
The head of the CDC said that having a 5% positive testing rate (and 95% not positive rate) in a community is too much for schools to be opened. CNN went on to note that California, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Arizona, and most other states don't meet that standard. And the expert which CNN was talking to as I was watching stated that the nationwide positive testing rate is 8.8%
 
So even with the, twice now, watered-down standards for opening schools, we apparently still don't meet the standards nationwide.
 
Everyone who is shocked, raise your hand.

There is a LOT to Hero Designer.  Especially if you get into making custom export templates.
 
That being said.  If you're playing HERO and making HERO characters it is flat out amazing.  Once you get comfortable with it you can knock out new characters, villains and equipment VERY quickly.

It's reasonably easy to remove or replace the firing pin on most modern weapons. It does not require a gunsmith or special tools (or, frequently, any tools). I suspect that the condition of the gun would be ruled inadmissable, because there is no way to confirm that it hadn't been changed between the incident and when it was turned over to the police.

This seems like classic pretrial stuff. The DA's office says that the pistol was "substantially" capable of being fired. Obviously, if the pin was in wrong, it wasn't able to fire, but otherwise, it was fine. Hence, "substantially." The defence says that the "substantially" is doing a lot of work, tainting the jury pool with the idea that the pistol was capable of being fired. 
 
So is the prosecutor exploiting the baffling power of legalese to weight the scales of justice, or is the defence using this as a rationale to plant the idea the gun was disable when it maybe wasn't? Sounds like this is going to be one of those fun juries. 

It is a quality piece of software and definitely (more than) worth its $25 asking price IMO if you are either a GM or the type of player who likes just making characters for fun. 
 
It has what I consider to be a very mild learning curve (but I'm probably not the best gauge for that). It is a literal tabula rasa when first opened with no character selected...
 

 
You get started by either selecting an existing character sheet from disk (if you have downloaded one, for instance) or by making a new character selected from the types of characters HD has the character creation rules for...such as 6e standard superheroic or heroic, or a vehicle, base, etc...
 

 
Once you've picked the type of character, you are presented with a tabbed interface and you basically go from tab to tab filling in the parts of your character...
 
Note: I changed my preferences to have the tabs go down the right side, so your UI would look slightly different out of the box (if i recall correctly they default to run across the top), but it should be equally as obvious what the tabs are regardless.
 

 
ProTip: I would recommend saving your progress frequently as you go (Ctrl+S), as you should for any long form content development.
 
When you want to see a character sheet for the character, using the "Current Character" menu option select an Export Template and Preview the character sheet.

 
There are lots of export templates, targeting different options such as html (viewed / printed using your browser of choice), plain text, rtf, etc. Some come w/ HD and a lot more are available in the downloads section of this site, catering to different levels of verbosity, style preferences, and so on. When you are getting started, I would recommend a default HTML template and you can get more discerning later when you have a better idea of what you want. 
 
Personally, I use custom html templates nearly exclusively, but do sometimes output other formats when i have a particular reason to.
 
After you have the basics down (make a standard character), HD offers a plethora of other features if you want or need to get fancier. You can turn a "character" into a template from which you can make future characters...for instance imagine you made a "Goblin" character representing a baseline gobbo for your setting...you could make it into a template from which you could later create a new specific named goblin and add on to the baseline...you could go further and have layers of templates that stack one upon the next, such as a baseline gobbo template, a gobbo champion template built on top of that, and a gobbo chief template built on top of that, layering up the abilities from one to the next. I think the utility of this is fairly obvious in settings where you have lots of stock characters which are mostly defined by what they are plus some individualization, such as most fantasy settings. 
 
You can also make or use prefabs, the term used by the app for lists of pre-made abilities, gear, etc, which can be loaded up and used conveniently within the tabs for skills, talents, powers, equipment to quickly whip up characters without having to copy and paste common effects (such as your campaign's definition of a long sword or basic fireball spell, etc) from one to next.
 
Pro Tip: heavy use of prefabs can put memory pressure on the app, so I suggest loading up the ones you need when you need them.
 

 
One of my favorite features is the ability to define and reuse custom campaign settings that can be applied to all characters in a given campaign. This is hugely convenient and offers a lot of flexibility and is worth checking out if you get that far. I use this feature very heavily; one of the first things I do when setting up a new campaign is go into HD and make a campaign ruleset and then bang out a few baseline characters for that campaign (such as average person, average PC, average "thug" opposition, etc) as part of the dialing in process.
 

 
And so on...the summary is HD is basically an industrial grade power tool for Hero System character creation and management (an aspect of HD that doesn't get talked about as much but which is in my opinion its most significant value add), and like many power tools it does have its sharp edges and beginners traps, but it richly rewards time spent learning its nuances.
 
 
-----------------------
My user preferences menu:
 

 
I no longer remember what the defaults are, but I recommend upping the max RAM allowed to the app using the conveniently provided slider if you are in the habit of keeping a bunch of characters open (such as all of the PC's of your campaign and the current crop of NPC's / bad guys) and have them auto-load on HD start.
 
 
 
 

Hero System has been my favorite pastime for several decades, just to put the following into context. That said, I consider Hero Designer to be the best $25. I have ever spent in my life. No exageration.

The people didn't break into their property.  They broke into the property of the gated community in which they lived, but not into their personal property.

You're not wrong.
 
Still, I'm far more concerned about the prosecution manufacturing evidence so they can push charges.  That has ramifications for the entire community.  Mr.  and Mrs. BadWithGuns are only a threat to people breaking into their property.  That's a much smaller group of people.
 
Corrupt prosecution teams are the same kind of super-evil that dirty cops are.  They are charged with enforcing justice and are instead working to destroy it.  A jumpy old couple that got scared and went for their firearms before earning national fame as the worst gun handlers in recent history are not a threat to society.

Texas has been getting hammered these last few weeks.
 
Dotted line is the national average.  Even here in suburbia the death rate has climbed.
 
It's good to see the hospitalization rate flatten out.  Hopefully the death rate won't lag too far behind.
 
School starts in 26 days.  😐
 
 

PR spin.

Celebration of genocide?

Update: my wife tested negative for COVID. The doctor doesn't have confidence in that result so he's going to do at least two more tests over the next few days. She still can't breathe well so they're not sending her home but they moved her out of the COVID section of the hospital. They can now give her nebulizer treatments (inhaled medicines), they don't give those treatments in the COVID area because it tends to make the virus airborne.
 
They also think they've detected a heart murmur so they're checking that out. Her cardiologist and her other fairly recent stays in the hospital over the last couple of years haven't detected anything like that but, who knows?
 
She's a lot less stressed after testing negative for COVID. Now it's just like any other stay in the hospital because she can't breathe except that family can't stay with her..

Joining in with everyone else in sending best wishes your way.  

Maybe coronavirus will kill off all the neckties....

One of my adult kid's in isolation at my home with covid. Another of my adult kids had it, in my home, back in April. I think I had it from Christmas until the end of February but they didn't have a test for it back then.
 
My wife was admitted to the hospital a few minutes ago. She has very severe breathing problems anyway and what she's experiencing now isn't any worse than she gets every couple of months. But they're keeping her because they want her close in case she dips suddenly or they get the covid test results back (no sooner than 2 days).
 
If she has covid, they're going to immediately give her plasma from someone who's already recovered in hopes that their antibodies will help her.
 
Very frustrating, on top of the anxiety, since we tried to take every precaution after we were pretty sure it would reach the US (masks, showers immediately upon coming home, clothes immediately in the laundry, no unnecessary contact with anyone at all). I'm one of those freaks who had a large box of masks in the back of my medicine cabinet just in case there might happen to be a pandemic someday and we took every reasonable (and some "unreasonable" precautions even before the experts said that they really were reasonable). 
 
I am looking forward to February since I'm sure that winter month will provide some relief.