sawall

My group was playing a session every couple of weeks up til March, and we're all too responsible to endanger each other. I'm looking forward at getting back to it, during our last session one character retired and another was one scenario away from it. We're excited to see what new characters get unlocked and how that changes up the party. I've been really enjoying my Scoundrel but it's probably time for something new for me as well.

I'd looked into switching over to the video game version of it with them, but it looks like there were a lot of glitches last time I checked. Have you tried that and had any luck with it?

The fact that there continues to be news coverage of the process is pretty wild. States certified a couple weeks ago, electoral voting took place last week, and now some people are anxiously awaiting for January 6 when congress... counts the electoral votes. DJT allegedly legitimately thinks that Pence can just declare him winner during the counting process, which would be completely insane. Pence has smartly decided to leave on an international tour a couple hours after he rubber stamps the electoral vote count to hide from Trump's ire.

I thought season 2 was great. It did get a little side-questey at times but I actually like that about it. Seemed like they developed interesting new characters, concepts, and angles in each episode. I have really enjoyed seeing different parts of the galaxy in the time period depicted.

I'm pretty sure that season 3 will continue following Mando and get into whatever's going on with the Darksaber, the Mandalorian homeworld, and Bo-Katan. A "Book of Boba Fett" live action show was announced back in November, so it seems like that will be spun out of this, and he isn't a Mandalorian technically anyway. We're also getting parallel shows out of Ahsoka and Rangers of the New Republic, so they'll be expanding this bit of the universe quite a bit!

I'm pretty excited that Star Wars seems to have gone all in on TV. They see the writing on the wall for at least the next couple of years for movie theaters, so this is a smart pivot and should also generate a lot of great content. Given how many misses there have been in the last few Star Wars films, maybe TV is a better medium for the ambition of the stories they're trying to tell.

Part of me is thinking about watching Clone Wars and Rebels. Several of the characters that we saw this season, including Ahsoka and Bo-Katan, came out of those series. Rebels is supposed to be pretty good while it sounds like Clone Wars is better if you're just really in it for the lore.

Happy Christmas! We had a nice Zoom call with my family and mostly hunkered down. We were utterly ambitious as far as cooking was concerned - our local co-op grocery does some great holiday sides in their deli section so we just bought a few of those and we were good to go. At Thanksgiving we had a lot of ham and turkey and had WAY too much food for the two of us, so we ramped it down for Christmas.

Not much new in Austin on the pandemic front, but I'll say that it seems like that even though we're going into "stage 5" the restrictions look a lot more like they were in "stage 2" or "stage 3". For example, one of the local theater chains is still open - there's distancing between seats, but... that doesn't work indoors.

I think we're now at the point where most people are fed up with the false starts and stops of lockdowns and are just trying to be safe but stay in business because stimulus isn't going to places that actually need it. I know I'd be frustrated at this point if I was a bar or theater owner. Rather than do the right thing like New Zealand, there was never a hard lockdown and it seems like there's been inadequate testing and tracing. I have friends who had contact with people with COVID but they were denied testing because they didn't have symptoms... again, that's not how this works!

So overall I have the sense that nobody is trying to contain it anywhere and are just hoping it will all go away once enough of the population is vaccinated. That will be pretty slow going but it's the only thing that Americans seem able to work with.

Loved that opener.... it was sort of a fantasy story, but morphed into Star Wars. I appreciate that they are keeping this almost completely episodic, it gives them more of a chance to play with different ideas. Great stuff!

I think fatigue is playing a major role here now. Apparently contact tracing tells us that a lot of this third wave in the US is coming from small game nights and dinner parties where people are trying to expand their bubbles because they think it's been long enough or some stupidity that has nothing to do with looking at the sheer increasing numbers. Lots of locales are getting right to the edge of available hospital beds now, and I think we might see a doom spiral when that happens.

Almost immediately after saying I wasn't sure if I'd watch the new Borat, I watched it.

There were some brilliant bits and some terrible bits. I do think they hit some interesting aspects of American culture (although parts that I myself don't have much contact with), but I think I could have done without seeing about half of it. The actress who plays his daughter is a force of nature and incredible during the better parts.



It's kind of both? Pretty sure he was just tucking in his shirt during that shot since he had just taken his mic off. Also, it wasn't clear that Rudy had any idea that the character was supposed to be underage. During the interview she was made up and looked like her actress' actual mid-20s age.

Rudy did accept an invitation to have drinks with a younger woman in her hotel bedroom instead of just going after the interview was over. I suspect they would have caught a more obvious move on his part if Borat had waited another minute before bursting in. But, Rudy isn't married, so.... eh?

Looks like half of the students at University of Texas were partying in close quarters maskless in downtown Austin for Halloween. YOLO!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/jm...eet_last_night/

I can't believe Trump tweeted about the Texan bus incident. That was barely getting any coverage. I guess he thinks it will engage his most rabid followers? I don't know anymore.

FBI is apparently investigating whatever is going on with it. A friend and I were also doing some research into the Trump Train group and there seem to be some super shady companies behind organizing those rallies. I only spent a couple hours so I am curious to see what comes out when investigative journalists dig in.

re: FBI investigation:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/31/bid...rump-texas-bus/

I haven't watched this yet either (not sure if I want to try to stomach it) but I found this article and quote interesting:

"A deleted scene from Sacha Baron Cohen's 'Who Is America?' may have pointed to an elite pedophile sex ring"
https://www.newsweek.com/sacha-baron-cohen-...epstein-1267152

I voted early a few days ago. I had to go do it in person because: Texas. COVID-19 isn't a "legitimate medical excuse" to vote by mail here. Yes, really.

For the first time in my life I voted for all Democratic candidates without even considering Republicans. Often I'll end up voting for a Republican or two based on candidate experience but after the last four years of steady decline into insanity and authoritarianism, the Republican party can fuck off.

Amazingly, there is a better than 50-50 chance of the Democrats taking the SENATE. That is amazing, the deck is so stacked against them. This is the only way that we'll see real positive change. If McConnell remains in charge of the Senate we'll just hit a second round of deadlock like we had in 2010.

The United States needs serious reform to be functional again. I am hopeful that the episode with Trump will demonstrate that we need to create legal guardrails to enforce the norms that we didn't expect anyone would break. We may be lucky - if Trump was more competent, he could have done way more damage. This might give us the opportunity to make needed fixes before we end up with someone worse.

Assuming Biden gets in I don't want to see another repeat of 2008. Obama gave the lending market a pass and they were back to their old tricks soon thereafter. There need to be real punishments for criminals or they'll just bide their time for a couple years and go back to criming next time the public is looking the other way again.

I've played Among Us with a few friends using Discord for voice chat. I can imagine how awful it might be with randoms who don't have any social reason to not shut up when they're dead. Happy to try to jump in sometime or try to invite y'all into a game with a bunch of fair-minded folks I know if the time zone thing works out... I'm mirth#8004 on Discord.

I've just been playing the free version on an iPad but should probably upgrade to paid so I don't have to watch adverts between rounds.

Al is making me want to check out SS13, that angel/devil thing sounds brilliant!

I am not surprised to hear NZ is pretty locked down. It certainly sounds like a paradise.

Ireland has a lot of appeal because it's kind of like home to me. Dublin has a gritty industrial feel that's reminds me a lot of Seattle back in the days when I was growing up. I've actually been out of normal work for a few months now so job portability / finding isn't an immediate issue for me.

I have a similar hope as Akire does about Washington. The "Cascadia" separatist movement has been slowly burning for the last couple decades, the idea is to merge British Columbia, western Washington, and western Oregon into a nation that's in a common bioregion that has a more homogeneous culture and economy. https://www.cascadianow.org/

I've played a few rounds of Among Us with some local friends, which seems like a watered down version of Space Station 13 with some elements from the Werewolf card game.

Most players are crew members who have to go around doing little mini games to fix things on the space ship. Some players are "impostors" and can't do the mini games but they can kill crew, sabotage systems, and fast move between the vents. When a crew member finds a dead body they "report" it and then the players get together to talk about who might be the culprit so they can shove them out the airlock. The crew wins when all impostors are found or if they complete all their tasks, the impostors win if there are as many of the alive as there are remaining crew members.

It's quite a bit of fun, and as a group plays together they will tend to develop strategies that impostors have to figure out how to circumvent. One approach is for players to clump in small groups with the theory that they'll be able to report if someone gets killed. I was in a group doing this and got a little hung up as I was walking and went out of line of sight of the group for a moment, and got ganked from behind by someone who rushed to catch back up with the group after being gone for only a second or two. My body wasn't found for a couple minutes by someone else, and the people in my group all gave each other alibis, which was a lot of fun to listen to since I knew one of them was getting away with murder.

Most of my family is up in Washington State near Seattle, so that would probably be my first move, if I did feel like I needed to make one. British Columbia, Ireland, and NZ are all interesting to me, and I've been kicking myself for not having made it to NZ during my jaunt a few years ago.

It remains to be seen whether or not Trump has bounced back. Part of his course of meds is a powerful steroid that might explain his more-extreme-than-usual behaviors lately. He may very well crash after a few days. Or he'll be fine. He hasn't appeared live since he went into the hospital, so it's possible that a lot of what we're seeing right now is clever edits and him exerting sheer force of will for a minute or two during a recording while he's laid up the rest of the time.

The way he's been treating Secret Service and his staff by wandering around maskless goes past narcissistic and straight into sociopathic. He really doesn't care about other people.

Trump just rejected the notion of doing a virtual debate over Zoom. Most analysis says it's because he doesn't want to be on mic control but I have to wonder if he thinks he might not be up to a debate then so is taking an easy out.

I restarted ONI again and, after watching some videos and playing up to around cycle 100, decided what I didn't really like about it is that it seems to drive you towards completely strip mining everything. I like games where I fit a base into the environment in an interesting way, not where I just built out the same old grid regardless of what neat chaos the game gives me. I'm just too much of a hippy and get nostalgic for all of the neat little natural plant areas in my asteroid.

So... back to Rimworld for me, soon!

I believe 2022. I was hoping for late 2020 but a few countries, including my own, are being idiotic, and it's affecting everyone else.

IMO the economy is being held up by hopes and dreams. All business models need to change permanently, this isn't a temporary thing anymore. Commercial real estate is going to collapse, especially in city centers. Dense urban living is suddenly WAY less appealing.

Maybe this is just the Boomers taking one last gouge by propping up the value of their suburban nightmare McMansions that suddenly seem way more appealing now.

We've got the start of a little garden at our house. I think we can make things work reasonably where we are (~ 5.5 miles from the Austin city center) but if Texas goes deep red during the election, I might have to reconsider everything about my long term location.

I totally take back my recommendation for at least the Switch version of UnExplored. It seems to have some real performance issues, constantly pausing the game to generate more bits of the dungeon. It would be fine to have long load screens but it can happen randomly in the middle of combat, which totally breaks flow for me. It is fine on some levels and totally bogs down others, and I think I got lucky with my first hour or two. No idea if the PC version is any better but meh.

I dusted off Brogue and the reddit forum recently and have been playing along a bit. I am really out of practice!

I had been avoiding playing on the community edition at first because it seemed like it was only web-based for a while (maybe I'm wrong about that?) But I see that it is now available as a desktop app so I might try out competitions again.

In my quest for other roguelikes, I came across UnExplored and bought it on the Switch for almost nothing. I've only put a couple hours in, but even with that little play I get the sense that they took all the loot and monster tables from Brogue, converted it into a pausable realtime roguelike, then made some mods and changes to work with the realtime component. Dungeon gen also feels a bit similar to Brogue, but I'll have to play more to get a real feel for that.

Since it's realtime, now there's dexterity involved in the combat - you need to aim your daggers with the joysticks and you need to make sure monsters contact your sword when they rush you. Weapons have a cooldown which means they turn black for a couple seconds before they can be used again. There are levers, locked doors, altars to sacrifice gear at, and things that can be activated by throwing weapons at them.

It's definitely worth a look if you want a good roguelike experience away from the keyboard: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/23...xplored-review/

"Jim'll Paint It" is an artist who paints all kinds of weird mash ups of pop culture, mostly movies, in an Archer-esqure cartoon style. His schitck is that people will make weird suggestions on social media and then he'll paint whatever strikes his fancy: https://jimll.co.uk/

A couple examples:

The ghost of Bob Ross embelishing the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2:


The chest-buster scene from Alien portrayed by Muppets and puppets:


The Village People, all portrayed by Vladimir Putin


Aliens <3 Predator

I missed Waterworld last night, which I bet would have been amazing, but there's Titanic tomorrow night and Jaws on Saturday night, for the interested!

My team put 23 hours into the Telechallenge and got an "honorable mention" but didn't end up placing. We ended up supporting Michael Key, because the other candidate seemed like too much of a Silicon Valley jerk. We hacked through various voicemail systems and found messages that we leaked to the media that were then posted as news items in the youtube item above, usually in the context of it being the candidate trying to spin the story to make it not sound quite as bad. If you go back to that youtube channel you'll see how the different stories ended up unfolding.

I was in a session on discord with the game creators (the main designer is actually "Founder Jack Carson VC" in the video above) and they had over 100 people record audio content for them so that the voicemail systems seemed real. While hacking the systems you'd hear people's incoming messages, which might give you a clue about what their password was. Some people had dumb passwords on their mailboxes like 0000 or 1234, and if you broke into those you could hear messages from other people and get more clues about what their passwords might be. A Trekkie had 1701 for NCC-1701 and a Star Wars fan had 0504 for "May the Fourth be with you". There were also at least a couple real voice actors that you had to socially engineer. One of them was your handler who gave you hints and accepted recordings of voicemails, and the other played a crazy conspiracy nut who you had to get to trust you to spill the real story. There were multiple mail systems involved fronting for the campaigns, a shady government lab that was connected to the campaign, a digital media company, and even a crazy conspiracy program called Alexa Jones, which basically sounded like unhinged Alex Jones content but voiced by a synthesized voice that sounded like Alexa. There was at least 30 minutes of Alexa Jones content which were these totally nutty conspiracy theories about the flat earth, how Warner Brothers was using the Harry Potter movies to soften us up for wizards taking over, and how one of the candidates was actually an alien (which turned out to be true). Then there was "Phonechan" which was basically a 4chan style message board implemented as a voicemail systems; you'd navigate through menus of boards and threads and then could reply to threads with your phone. It was a lot of fun and the production value was very high (although part of that production value was to make the voicemail systems themselves suck like real voicemail systems ).

If you want to check some of it out and can make free calls to the US, they have left the Alexa Jones system up at 716 559 7999, and most of the content is under the "1" menu. The "premium content password is 1084.

The other one I should mention is Telechallenge, which is entirely telephone based. It's a combo of voicemail hacking, phreaking, and social engineering. My friend and I got really far on it last year. We were up all night hacking through "corporate" voicemail boxes in a mostly automated contest, and we were shocked at around 3am to get a live answer of someone we were supposed to manipulate into giving us info. Lots of fun. They get entirely into character so there is a story you're supposed to get into and support one of the two fictional teams. This year is a Presidential election!

Starting pages for that are these:

DEFCON is all virtual this year and one of the villages put up a text adventure contest that might be of interest: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/rrn...ogues-adventure

There's also a mud running at mog.ninja 4000 if you're into that! ... and a million other contests and things