archer

1) When I think of magic in general, I think of creating small and useful things. Sort of like a sleight of hand but real: bottle of water or liquor food small flame a coil of rope shirt pants hat coin bandages knife bird cat telescope 2) Disappearing similar small objects 3) Small effects on the magic user's person: slightly better running/swimming/STR/DEX/CON/etc. more charming to animals/people momentary levitation cleaning or dirtying his clothes mending his clothes or gear aura of fear/menace/power which deters or impresses others 4) A magic skill for one time powers like you see for some D&D cantrips like Thaumaturgy, Prestidigitation, or Druidcraft. Your voice booms up to three times as loud as normal You cause flames to flicker, brighten, dim, or change color You cause harmless tremors in the ground You create an Instantaneous sound that originates from a point of your choice within range, such as a rumble of thunder, the cry of a raven, or ominous whispers. You instantaneously cause an unlocked door or window to fly open or slam shut. You alter the Appearance of your eyes You create an Instantaneous, harmless sensory Effect, such as a shower of sparks, a puff of wind, faint musical notes, or an odd odor. You instantaneously light or snuff out a Candle, a torch, or a small campfire. You chill, warm, or flavor up to 1 cubic foot of nonliving material You make a color, a small mark, or a Symbol appear on an object or a surface Your moving finger leaves an afterimage so that you can draw very temporary writing or pictures in the air.

The best name I heard proposed was the "Cleveland Wahoos!" They could even put an image of an actual wahoo mackerel on their hats and uniforms. More seriously, Chief Wahoo is something I see as offensive. It's very 1950's Peter Pan style Indians. But the idea that the word "Indians" itself is offensive or is some sort of cultural appropriation, that's a stretch in my book. We have actual states named Iowa, Dakota, and Illinois. It's the denigration of Indians by the team that's been the problem, not the use of the name. The way to make up for that in my opinion would be to spend a few decades showing Indians and Indian culture in a positive light rather than abandoning the name.

I usually only buy a burger when I'm paying, out with my family, and everyone else has ordered something horrendously expensive. I prefer a 1/3rd pound burger, red onion, tomato & lettuce on the side until the burger has cooled a bit, and a lot of pickles on the side. Mustard and mayo. But I usually get whatever their basic burger is. I also like grilled onions but most places don't go through the effort of making those. For a dedicated burger joint, my wife introduced me to the joys of Chapps. And I do mean the joys. Their basic burgers are 1/2 pound with grilled onions and grilled bun. http://chappsburgers.com/

Just one?

‘A tipping point’: Kansas City hospitals are turning away patients due to COVID surge https://news.yahoo.com/tipping-point-kansas-city-hospitals-193117650.html That didn't take long at all....

Just remember to point out that the only reason Brisbane got the Olympics is that the International Olympic Committee literally didn't let any other city submit a bid.

Wow, you plan on giving your stuff to my daughter as well? That's extremely generous of you!

That sounds hella fun. "With my dying breath, I curse you!" and throws a grenade with his dying breath. Next phase On second thought, mayhap I shall as the Americans say 'fill you full of lead', and he drags his gun from his holster and autofires as the last drops of blood fall from his chest. Next phase Come to think of it, this may be the time for bloody knife work. Next phase His spleen plops to the ground. He glances down, "That, my good man, is a sign that the gloves must come off. And my brass knuckles go on!"

I had a couple of supervillain individuals who essentially made enough money to get a Wealth perk then retired their costumed identities and reemerged as part-time heroes. Honestly on Marvel Earth, you can't throw a coffee mug without hitting some hero who's a multimillionaire. And since most of their villains seem to be motivated by money, I've often thought the best way to handle their supervillain problem would be to hire them as heroes. Not as a prank or a long-term scheme of some sort. Just a simple exchange of money for "go punch that bad guy when we tell you to". I also had one character who was essentially a Daxamite/Kryptonian hero. He got tired of being the focus of world-beating supervillains and nearly losing his life. So he announced he was leaving the planet to fight an alien invasion elsewhere (touchy natives, very hush hush location...and OOC it also helped move the PC's to a more prominent position). He disappeared himself, obliterated his costume, and moved to a different large city on Earth. He didn't have anything against being a hero. He just didn't realize the enormity of it all until buildings started hitting him in the face. We've sort of gotten used to the Superman or DC Captain Marvel characters who with greater power comes an ever-increasing sense of responsibility. But I don't think that's very realistic. Power is fine. Heroing is fine. But there's a lot of potential heroes who I think wouldn't go all in just because of an awesome power set and I wanted to show something like that. So he reinvented himself as a street level crimefighter with some gadgets. He wins because he's just fast enough and just strong enough and his armored costume of course is amazingly tough. The gadgets and armored costume are real enough but just for show so really tough bad guys figure out who he is and don't start showing up pounding him again. A couple of times he's come out of retirement in his original costumed identity explaining that he was escorting a fleet of refugees in the general area and though he'd check in (or some other excuse for being here but needing to leave again). And what do you know, his return just in the nick of time....

I'm a bit more than semi-retired but my adult daughter says she'd love to have it all.

Moral certainty aside, I didn't like the idea of psionics. It was kind of like tacking on something absurd like "wild magic" which doesn't follow any of the established rules for using magic onto the existing rules: it could be done but it wouldn't have been an improvement for the tone the game rules were trying to establish for the setting.

With all the emphasis on "learning being a process of discovery" rather than a rote memorization of dry facts, I could see some people thinking that teaching about the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, terrorizing people, burning people out of their homes, intimidating them from voting, beating people, etc. and thinking "this would be the perfect opportunity for kids to draw a correct conclusion rather than blatantly telling them that the Ku Klux Klan is morally wrong". However, I could also see hundreds of thousands of kids being taught all of that and still not be able to draw the correct conclusion that the Ku Klux Klan is morally wrong.

Well, you know, they're not mathematically eliminated from contention yet. If the Rockies get that one piece they need and every player on each of the other teams comes down with COVID for the rest of the season, I'd say the Rockies have maybe as much as a 45% chance of making the playoffs.

And inadvertently ticks off a lot of his employees and customers by thanking them for financing his junket into space....

All this recent unrest in the area started a couple of months ago when rockets were shot out of Gaza at Israel's nuclear power plant. (What they thought they'd accomplish if they actually hit the power plant, we'll probably never know.) But that got the Israeli public stirred up enough that they've been OK with the government taking some pretty extreme actions against the Palestinians. (And I can understand that because if someone shot rockets at one of our nuclear power plants, there'd be a significant fraction of the public who'd want the "bad guys", liberally interpreted, to be obliterated. Then obliterated again, just to be sure.)

A second athlete has tested positive inside the Olympic Village. One of the IOC officials who has come to the games has tested positive. The coach of South Africa's rugby team has tested positive. The team is already in-country doing training in Kagoshima but hasn't yet travelled to the Olympics site. https://apnews.com/article/sports-2020-tokyo-olympics-health-coronavirus-pandemic-8cef15127de660b161807f1a9fd60ecd

On the bright side, Motie Prime would still look like a Mote.

First COVID case actually inside the Olympic Village. 44 Olympians, coaches, and staff so far have tested positive after reaching Japan. The Olympics start in six days. International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, this week promised that there is “zero” risk that the virus would spread through the Olympic Village or beyond, citing the fact that everyone who arrives in Japan is tested for it. https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/olympics/first-case-of-coronavirus-infection-inside-olympic-village-confirmed-six-days-before-opening-ceremony/ar-AAMfNa4 Well, as long as we have the personal assurance of some official, there really must be zero risk that an highly infectious disease will spread inside a confined area. Because, Lord knows we've yet to find any official anywhere who has been willing to say that a highly infectious disease won't spread. Chalk up another first for the world....

It'd be a funnier statement if Jupiter had only 69 moons....

Three of the fully vaccinated TX House Democrats who fled to Washington DC have tested positive for COVID. This is more worrisome than normal because they've been spending a substantial portion of each day lobbying Senators, Senate staffers, and administration officials. Not to mention being cooped up together with other TX House Democrats in a bus to and from an airport, on the airplane to DC, and repeated daily strategy sessions with other TX House Democrats. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/17/politics/texas-house-democrats-covid-positive/index.html

Here it is. The story was listed under regional California news. https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-charged-blow-democratic

I think I trained most of these people. My department used to provisionally hire the most dubious people possible and put them through training. The trainees, usually hired one at a time, would fail training in the most spectacular fashion. And not just on occasion but one after the other. At the end of training when they were supposed to decide whether to keep the trainee or not, they always decided to keep on the trainee regardless of what happened during training. Some of the winners included 1) the guy who used to go to sleep for hours at a time, every day, in full view of one of the supervisors 2) a lady who couldn't remember how to do any aspect of the job 3) and a lady who we got multiple complaints from customers (who had no possible relation to each other) describe her interactions with them as her using "Gestapo tactics".

The Yankees this week lost three pitchers to COVID and had several others whose test results hadn't come back yet when the article I was reading was written. We might have a race to the bottom....

Personally, I would like to see this challenge: Ask the chief high-profile COVID/vaccine deniers who are willing to sign a legal document (with steep associated financial penalties) that they haven't been vaccinated to "voluntarily get injected with COVID". Video and broadcast their response in real time to getting "a cold" or "the flu" including all medical care which they might choose to receive. Give them unedited rebroadcast rights in order to convince their followers that COVID isn't dangerous. Sure, you're going to get a lot of them be unwilling. But keep going down the list of various people who've made themselves famous as deniers until you get 100 people in the challenge. Make fun of the people who were unwilling to be part of the challenge (and try to track down the record of their vaccination). Broadcast the participants' experience right up to their death rattle.

I don't see any end to the spike in sight. What stopped the spike last time was people being compelled to wear masks and social distance while they were being scared by the constant pounding of the pandemic news. This time you've got no masks among the people who aren't taking the virus seriously, no social distancing, and comparatively little news coverage to scare people. If people aren't watching their local news or visiting a hospital, they're likely completely unaware that anything is going on: even right in the middle of the worst-hit areas. For example, Springfield, Missouri is in the national news as the worst-hit area in the country and with very low vaccination rates. Within convenient driving distance is Kansas City, MO which has even lower vaccination rates and a metro area with over five times the population. The governor of Missouri is a Republican who doesn't want to fight the virus. And he's publicly blamed the overwhelming of the Springfield hospitals with record numbers of COVID patients on the hospitals themselves (I guess as if the hospital buildings were supposed to magically grow in number of available rooms and increase in the numbers of trained doctors and nurses to staff them overnight).