RDU Neil

RE: Venom...
 
bleh

Highly recommended. Best straight up superhero show that manages to tread the gritty street crime feel and the truly superheroic wonderfully well. On top of that it actually has great writing and acting.

He's misunderstood the Australian visa application process.

I thought the show was going to take a turn toward the stupid about halfway through, but it turned out it just got better. I'd recommend it.

California is one of 14 states that sends more money to the federal government than it gets back in benefits (link).  So, I'm really not sure what mistakes it is that the family thinks they are being asked to clean up.  It is certainly not financial help that they are giving us.

*curses*  *reloads asteroid gun*

A recent NOVA episode gave quite a thorough explanation for it all, accessible to non-scientists. (Including a recreation of the 1840 experiment that showed that CO2 absorbs infrared.).
EDIT: The title was, "Decoding the Climate Machine." Or maybe "Decoding the Weather Machine." I watched it again, and both titles appeared on screen.
 
Short version is that any "skepticism" about humans causing climate change requires several areas of very well established science to be wrong, in ways that could be detected in a community college science lab. Plus a conspiracy so vast and baroque that it dwarfs the Illuminati, Trilateralists, Freemasons and Antarctic Space Nazis put together.
 
ADDENDUM: "But how do we know the CO2 comes from fossil fuels?" Cancer addressed this, but the only other known phenomenon -- at least, the only one I've heard of -- that might pump that much CO2 into the atmosphere that quickly is a flood basalt event, like the ones that created the Deccan Traps or the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington. And I think we'd notice a few million square miles of fresh, glowing lava.
 
SECOND ADDENDUM: Also, note what Cancer said before: The magnetic field is weakening on a timescale of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Climate change is, measurably, happening on a scale of decades to centuries -- a thousand times faster.
 
Dean Shomshak
 
 

Agreed... Peaky Blinders is one of the best things on TV in the past five years.

Binge watched the final season of Bosch on HBO. If you enjoy top quality acting, drama, excellent plotting, and great character development, I recommend it. A very excellent police procedural.
 
I'm also more than half way through Swiss Family Robinson, as something going on in the background while I clean the house and do laundry, etc. It is basically the kind of show that would have been must see family TV in some earlier era, so while more diverse and better special effects, the writing feels like something from the late '70s.
 
Isle of Dogs was both genius, and tone deaf in some ways. Really enjoyed it, absolutely beautiful craftsmanship, but in this day and age, you got to wonder about the cultural representation bit.
 
And Quantum of Solace is my second favorite Bond, after Casino Royale, in that it is basically the second half of that movie. It has the most brutal killing by Bond ever portrayed on film, and manages the exotic, remote set-piece final battle in a way that felt almost believable. What it lacked was any real interpersonal connections whatsoever, being a highly internal revenge flick that only makes sense, emotionally, if you have just watched Casino Royale. The villain basically being a faceless organization of the super-rich, also kept them from being emotionally engaging... with the cathartic moment at the end being again tied to events in Casino. Watch them back to back, and it is an excellent, bleak, violent revenge chapter.

I know I am probably very late to the party on this one but I recently binge-watched Peaky Blinders series 1 through 4.   Utterly brilliant.   Compelling storytelling and a superb soundtrack, with cinematography that I swear was so good you could freezeframe at any point and talk about just why everything in the shot was perfectly composed. 
 
For those not in the know - it's a drama series about a family of illegal bookmakers and their rise through the underworld set immediately after World War I, and it is tremendous.

That was odd.
 
Anyway, re: non-supers - an interesting thing for me is the suspension of disbelief that arises concerning any comic book character that is physically a 'normal human'.  The idea that (for all his supreme skills and intellect) Batman's 'normal human' tendons, bones and spinal chord could survive more than a minute during any super-powered battle is something often overlooked IMO.

It appears that, when Michael Cohen appeared on CNN immediately after his office and apartment were raided by the FBI, he may have waived his right to plead the 5th. 

Honestly, I'd just as soon the GOP and Trump spent their whole terms golfing.

"Abbe someone."

Reminder to post a detailed update once I get a good nap.

Just finished watching Quantum of Solace again. Although it wasn't as bad as some people make it out to be, it wasn't that good either.

Mad Max : Fury Road. I wish I had seen this earlier or at the cinema.
 
None of us will ever be as cool as having our own rock concert follow us into battle cool.

I, Tonya.  Good stuff.
 
But what a group! A dummy hires someone dumber, who hires two people even dumber...
 

Trump Supporting Boxer Wears "Border Wall" Shorts, Gets KOd By Mexican Fighter

This is a very valid point - what is an RPG beyond "let's pretend" with more objective, rather than purely subjective, task resolution? 
 
"I shot you - fall down, you are dead!" 
 
"No, you missed - I am not hurt."
 
is replaced with "My roll hits any DCV up to 9", so we can determine whether I hit or missed.  Then we will roll damage and see whether you are dead, or how injured you are, if you were indeed hit.
 
But the line gets drawn in different placed by different people.
 
 
To take a more commonly debated mechanic, a great Charm or Persuasion roll by an NPC perhaps should be taken to indicate that my character should be more persuaded and willing to believe him than I, the player, wanted, or realized from pure intuition.  Rather than contradicting the dice when Slick Eddie rolls a 4 on his Persuasion roll, should I not relinquish a degree of agency to circumstances including Slick Eddie's social skills, and that great die roll, and accept that my character is seeing things Eddy's way?
 
If Slick Eddie had, instead, pulled a Saturday night special, and I laughed because I have a DCV of 10, and I know he has an OCV of 3, that 4 would still hit.  No one would side with me if I insisted that he should have missed instead of taking me out with a lucky damage roll.  Why should Slick Eddie's social skills should only affect me if I choose to allow it, or I am being "robbed of player agency"?  Just like, in CoC, the Sanity system will dictate just how hard my character's mental state is hit by shocking circumstances, and Cthulhu's combat stats will dictate whether how rapidly and gruesomely my character dies.
 
Note that I am intentionally flipping between "I/me" and "my character".  But I am not my character, and I should not conflate them.  I am playing a role in a game - hence the name of the hobby.  That is the role of my character, as my character interacts with the game rules. 
 
I am not being robbed of player agency when the dice do not go my way, and the mechanics dictate things do not play out as I may have wished.  I direct what I want my character to do in the game, be it resisting Slick Eddie's persuasive charms, dodging his gunfire, maintaining my grip when confronted with a shocking or terrifying event, or surviving an encounter with a Great Old One.  But my character's abilities, as compared to the abilities of those wishing to prevent my character achieving the goals I have set out for him, are adjudicated by the dice to determine whether my character successfully achieves the objectives I have given him.  At least, that is the way it works in a game.  When I see the results, I should be playing the role of my character as he responds to those results (or, perhaps, making a new character, depending on just how bad those results were for the present one).

I agree with RDU, my group has done something similar.  We have three different teams of heroes based in three different cities, so we mix it up that way.  It also helps to have more than one GM.  I've run about 90% of our sessions over the past five years or so.  When I start feeling the burnout one of the other GMs takes over for a session or two.  Invariably that gets my juices flowing again.  If for no other reason than they're not as good at it as I am. 
 

I would say, even at the height of my gaming, it was really a once a week occurrence for the RPG thing. Yes, sometimes more, and we had our long weekends of multiple games when we pulled people in from far away... but I didn't play multiple regular sessions every week. Our group had one weekly game night.
 
That said, even then, when I basically ran a large meta-campaign that lasted for 25 solid years, and five more sporadically, I could only do that by changing things up. Make a big world, with players having multiple PCs, so moving between small arcs of certain characters kept things fresh. "Ok, on we are playing the Vanguard, ,high-powered global heroes" vs. "Ok... let's play Mavericks for a while... NYC based, mid-level heroes on the edge of the law"  vs. "Now it's Malta Professionals, metahuman and cybernetic mercs working for whoever pays in Euro-African theater" etc.  The games had different feels and scopes and PC interactions... but at the same time, inhabited the same world, and got to see larger plots from different angles... maybe one group would set something in motion that another group might have to deal with... so the players really got to become part of the larger world.
 
That really helped me both, stay focused enough to continue moving a large campaign forward, but varied enough to not get stale or bogged down. It also allowed players to GM their own storylines at times. I found that really empowering, as I could then riff off some small thing they introduced, some technological MacGuffin stolen from a lab, whatever, and wind it into my larger plot, and it helped everyone feel like they were contributing to building the world. That level of interaction made it easier to GM, as it wasn't just people waiting to be entertained and I had to do all the prep.

Yes... Advantage Gained vs. Dramatic Challenge.  As a kind of hamfisted example... say, the player, when they get the advantage (adding extra dice to an attack, or guaranteeing a skill roll, whatever) the GM (or even better ,the play group as a whole) get a chit or something symbolizing "Drama!" which will force a challenging, dramatic shift when played. So... now, the PC, having just gotten the bonus to make a really difficult stealth role, sneaks into the base... GM asks, "Ok... any ideas on the drama challenge?" and one of the other players says, "I have an idea... how about this... we see PC Lad sneaking into the base, but cut scene, not far behind him, dressed in black with a look of determination on her face, is LL Smith, Roving Reporter and PC Lad's DNPC, who'd followed him up to Storm Mountain in the hopes of a big story! She follows PC Lad's path, and thinks she's made it when out of nowhere, a net falls on her followed by six ninjas! She's captured!"  
 
So now the PC's DNPC has been invoked, providing dramatic challenge, and it was a group decision and interaction that brought it into play, not just the GM "screwing with" the player. Suddenly the game becomes really fun and engaging storytelling. You'll get players debating whether it is good or necessary to risk further challenge for a benefit now. You can limit the number of times you can invoke the benefit, making it a special, powerful moment in the story, etc.
 
Sure, if you have min-max munchkins in the group where they only want to demonstrate rule mastery and that they are 'better' at the game than others... well, they aren't going to buy into this. But if people want story and drama and character development and such, this kind of thing can give a structure to pulling them out of the group imagination, rather than just hoping people are all on the same page and engaged.

Maybe getting your Drama Di(c)e back requires resolving the challenge brought on by their last application. 
 
In a Champions setting, there's a challenge in that subtracting 1d6 from a resolution roll is way more powerful than adding damage of 1d6 - maybe a Drama Die used for damage multiplies based on the number of dice already in the pool - say, 1 Drama Die = 1/3 of dice being rolled, since that's the ratio for a 3d6 roll to hit or succeed on a skill.
 
 
To flip that around, if the players are already good role players, then any role playing mechanics would largely fade into the background anyway, wouldn't they?  He's already role playing the SAN loss or terror invoked well anyway, so the fact a roll says he has to means nothing, really.
 
 
I prefer the 6e model that you get X points to build your character's mechanics and Y points to direct a portion of the challenges in the game, the latter being Complications, to the 5e and prior "you get more power if you accept being punished with disadvantages".  Similar to the comment above, I find Psychological don't chafe much when that is how you were going to role play your character anyway.  In fact, I see a lot of Psych's played to worse detriment to the character than a GM would necessarily enforce.
 
 
Just so!