archer

If you hit your head hard enough that you can keep your eye on your neck, perhaps you should have gone to the emergency room? If you hit your head hard enough that you can keep your eye on your neck, perhaps you should have gone to the emergency room? If you hit your head hard enough that you can keep your eye on your neck, perhaps you should have gone to the emergency room? And by any chance are you also having double vision?

The Rio Olympics made $1.2 billion just in ticket sales (if you believe the numbers often quoted in the media which they're getting directly from the IOC books). I'd I expect that the host city made a hefty cut on the on-site concession sales on top of that. In contrast, Comcast/NBC has been paying just over $1 billion per Olympics for the rights to broadcast in the US. Granted that the US isn't nearly all of the broadcast rights but it is a huge chunk of it. I have no idea what the revenue sharing deal between the IOC and the host city. But I'd expect that the IOC takes a hefty chunk of the broadcast money. And that the host city expects to make their money back in mostly ticket sales and concessions and general tourism spending.

At the same time, CNN Health earlier today is quoting a former health department official that the FDA is expected to give full authorization to the Pfizer vaccine before the end of the month. (The FDA itself doesn't comment on drugs which are under consideration for authorization.)

Well, it's research that you can do without the resources of a library, without having to travel to whatever location might or might not have the information, and without having to negotiate access to the information after you finally get there. And it also gives information even if every knowledgeable source about the topic was burned to a crisp 18 centuries ago. I can't personally say that it's very useful unless your character has a bad reputation and won't be given access to royal libraries. Or if you're traveling to a remote location before you first know that you're going to need the information. But if you made it a lower level spell in D&D, low level players would use it as a crutch and never try to develop contacts or try to stay on the good side of whichever institutions have knowledge in the game world.

"Science station, what do the mass sensors say?" "Sir! Apparently there are no Catholic services within sensor range, sir." "Very well. Communications, notify the crew that Chef will be in charge of the wine and communion wafers again this week. Oh, and that the internal speaker systems are not to be used as confessionals."

Some early news reports said that the assassins claimed that they were DEA agents. The only thing we know from that, unfortunately, is they they weren't DEA agents.

Well, for the purposes of vaccinating the military, you could just change their rules so that they could mandate this particular vaccination under an Emergency Use Authorization rather than having to wait for a full authorization. That way you aren't screwing with the actual FDA process. That's not going to satisfy the anti-vaxers but then nothing will. But at least you aren't helping them throw shade at the FDA.

Wow, tennis is a lot more brutal than I remembered. Back in the day, they just screamed at the judges.

Most of the problem in the US could be fixed in a couple of months. 1) Finalize FDA authorization of the vaccines so the "emergency authorization" is over. That allows you to mandate that each person in the armed forces gets vaccinated. 2) With the "emergency authorization" gone, individual states could include COVID vaccinations in their list of mandatory vaccinations for attending school (for kids who are old enough to qualify for COVID vaccination). 3) Change OSHA regulations to require workers to be vaccinated in order to enter their workplace. Obviously, just urging people to get vaccinated doesn't work. Telling people that getting vaccinated will allow them to be maskless has been a disaster because people who have been the most frustrated with masks are also the people least likely to want to get vaccinated. They'd rather cheat on the "you don't have to wear a mask if vaccinated" than to get vaccinated. Make it mandatory for military, work, and schools. That'll be enough to put the US at herd immunity levels so that we can quit white knuckling every new variant that comes out and instead focus on shipping out vaccines to kill the spread and mutation of the virus overseas.

Extradimensional Movement - Triggered whenever the villain is targeted. He doesn't get to stay around long but at least he doesn't get injured!

Don't forget it was very common to shave coins in medieval times. The reason most modern coins are stamped with ridges on the edges is to keep people from taking a sharp knife to them and shaving silver or gold off of the edges, passing the coins off in trade as full coins, and keeping the shaved off silver or gold for themselves.

Don't forget Pieces of Eight where a society chops up a classic Styx album and use them for currency.

Chris Pratt in The Tomorrow Wart

Half of our outside cats are still so freaked that they haven't shown back up. We've never actually lost one due to July 4th but it's always a concern. The indoor cats didn't notice the extra noise at all.

In all fairness, they tried to give it to Arenado again and then were like, "Oh, wait...."

I don't. There's a hell of a lot of protocols you're supposed to follow in order to do it right. 1) I refuse to do things wrong. 2) I drop things a lot and if your flag touches the ground you're supposed to buy or sew a new one. I don't have the money to buy an endless supply of flags and I'm worse with needles than I am with holding things without dropping them. I consider myself to be very patriotic. For example, I refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance because I refuse to vow to be a servant of the government. We fought a whole Revolutionary War so that the government would serve the people rather than it being the other way around.

Didn't they do a segment together on Space Ghost: Coast to Coast? Or am I thinking of two other people?

Bad enough to be immersed in Van Gogh but now you want me to taste him as well? Just how many body parts did he cut off anyway?

The youngest of my ancient aunts passed away from COVID earlier today. < rant > My mom's side of the family has been heavily into anti-science and faith healing long before our former president and his ilk came along. (Some of them believe it is sinful to go to a doctor or to take medicine but luckily my aunt isn't that extreme.) In any case, most of them bought into the anti-mask and anti-vax misinformation because it matched their beliefs. And they also bought into the "the state can't tell us not to have church services in person" and into comparing it to people in previous centuries who'd been martyred for practicing their faith. So they've gone through the whole pandemic not really buying into social distancing or why you shouldn't go to your nephew's birthday party with the rest of the family and the people in the neighborhood. In any case, my aunt finally came down with it. They think she caught it at church because there's been fifty people in her church congregation of less than 200 adults & teens who've gotten COVID in the last couple of weeks. (Mini-rant: they're charismatics so they do a lot of running around the auditorium, singing/chanting in each other's faces, and crowding around each other laying hands and praying over each other during services. You can lay the hands of an amazing number of people on one individual if everyone is determined enough to give it a try. Last time I visited the church, I was tempted to see if there was a listing in Guinness for the largest number of people to be simultaneously touching a single person. And I don't have a problem with believers giving faith healing a go if that's their cup of tea, but as they were practicing it, at least some of the people getting the benefit from the laying on of hands weren't sick in any shape, form, or fashion. You can find out a lot if you're nosy enough to actually ask.) So in any case, my aunt was sick with COVID and in the hospital. The hospital let the family come in to see her if they wore a gown, mask, and gloves. 1) These are completely unvaccinated people. 2) They don't believe in protective gear so there's no reason to suspect that they'll treat the process of wearing it and taking it off seriously. 3) Since when can family come and go out of the room of someone with COVID? 4) The hospital is associated with the Mayo Clinic (but maybe the people who work there think that means mayonnaise?) My wife is angry. She's angry at the family for the totally preventable death. She's angry at that church. She's angry at the hospital but to a lesser extent (at least until one of the visitors come down with COVID). She's angry that the aunt who died was my mom's little sister who my mom made sure got fed as a child by giving up her own food. This isn't the first church-related outbreak for my family. On my dad's side, I nearly lost an aunt and uncle back in November. They'd had their kids take them on a trip out of state to attend a family funeral. They were late getting back in state so they decided to stay overnight with the kids and attend church with them the next day (one of the kids is a pastor). So they go to church along with most of the family who'd gone to the funeral. Almost every adult there that day came down with COVID. In my family, everyone came down with COVID, children included, except for one of a set of twins. My aunt and uncle came very close to death. My uncle got that same shot of whatever it was that Trump got when he was ill (the name of the drug escapes me at the moment). They're not as anti-science/anti-doctor as my mom's side of the family. But as a group they're Trumpy and were before Trump came along (maybe in some ways less Trumpy since Trump came along). But it's still deeply frustrating to deal with during a pandemic. I told my dad before they made the trip that making the trip was a mistake. He patiently listened as I explained to him why from a medical point of view that it was a bad idea (listening patiently was a breakthrough at the time for him). The travelers wanted to stop off at his house for a visit while they were in-state and I begged him not to allow it. I feel very fortunate that the caravan got infected after they left my parent's house rather than before. I am so tired of people dying unnecessarily. < /rant >

So you're saying that you'd advise people to take wooden nickels?

I made it clear that I wished to discuss a theoretical. You've made it crystal clear that you have no intention of discussing anything. That's an odd position for a discussion forum, but it's not like I can force you into having a discussion which you're adamantly opposed to having.

I thought it was fine. I expect very little out of Hollywood movies which try to mix fighting modern armies with alien invaders or future tech. It was a lot better than I had any right to expect based on previous experiences. It failed at some predictable points but also at many points that were just downright odd. major and minor spoilers Predictable points The bad guys can smell blood a literal mile away. And that's somehow still useful in an urban landscape where at least thousands have been recently butchered. The good guys, knowing the scientists are their only hope to pull out a win, decide to bomb and destroy the last remaining enclave of scientists in the world because there's some bad guys in the area. The rest of the movie has a lot of shots made from a helicopter showing that there's a lot of bad guys on the ground whether you're looking at beachfront, city, or jungle. No explanation was made over why there was a rush to bomb the scientists...though the movie took pains to explain that the aliens had no use for or understanding of human technology. No one in the past thought to investigate the landing site or thought to try to prepare defenses despite knowing when and where the invaders would show up. The future people don't send back any data on the invaders so that a world full of scientists could be working to try to find solutions to defeating them. There was no future tech at all in the future except for the time machine itself. The good guys assume the movie is over and don't look at the dead body of the invader queen despite the fact the movie tells us that no one ever figured out how they reproduced. I mean the world is majorly screwed if the alien reproduces by budding or has an internal egg sac which wasn't destroyed. downright odd They good guys recruit "soldiers" but don't train them and don't even explain the enemy they'll be facing. You know you could recruit everybody you might ever need and start training them. Use the ones you need to when you need to but keep training the rest. The first ones you use will be untrained. But as the weeks and months pass, you'll be using troops who've had more and more training. They recruit scientists who are led to believe that they'll be thrown into the meat grinder like everyone else when the good guys already know the scientists are never intended to see combat and likely immediate death. That's not only needlessly cruel but would drive a lot of real-world types into catatonia. Or at least drive them to make every possible effort to avoid the draft rather than join up. Even after all hope seems lost and humanity will be wiped out, the future people still don't make any attempts to send back information about the aliens or even send back information on scientific breakthroughs which might bootstrap the world forward a couple of decades in technological capabilities. Why would you have a cruise boat under way when there was literally no place for it to travel to because it was completely enclosed by a wall?

I was going to suggest this. Gold coins the size of a dime are much more manageable for both PC's and GM's. Keep in mind that gold weighs roughly twice what silver does. So if you have 200 dime-sized silver coins in a pound, you'd have roughly 100 dime-sized gold coins in the same weight. You can set conversion rates at whatever you want. 2000 silver per gold piece is just as valid as 10 silver per gold piece: it all depends on how rare gold is compared to other metals. For that matter, there's no telling what ancient civilizations valued. They could have carved coins out of bone or printed pictures of their revered leaders on small pieces of paper or have had "money" made out of mediums which the PC's wouldn't even recognize as money if they saw it. .

And interesting way of trying to sabotage Skynet before the singularity....

Thank you, that's exactly the kind of information I was needing. Glad you like the idea so far. I'm struggling through fights with my doctor and pharmacy so haven't gotten back to working on it. Hopefully sometime this weekend.