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*Wander out back with a coffee*

*Clyde and Inky are dangling off of a C130 by their fall protection lanyards singing "Stay up late" by The Talking Heads*

Rodrigo:  "What the fuck?  Aren't you going to do something about these guys?"

Me:  "Yes.  I am going to compliment them on their taste in music."

So.  How's this resistance thing coming along?

Club Foot Jones in PF1e

Pathetic halfling with a club foot (-5 ft movement, cannot run), cook/torchbearer, pathetically grateful to have a job, always talking about saving up enough money to marry his girl (who he has a picture of in his locket), etc.  Looks and sounds like the woobie.

BUT.

He is in fact just a 2nd level expert, but he is also neutral evil and owns an amulet of nondetection with a permanent magic aura spell cast on it to make it seem non-magical (the locket).  He has maxed out bluff to including taking the skill focus (bluff) feat. 

And he aims to rob the party blind.

However, he is aware that vengeful PCs will chase him to the ends of the Earth, so they have to go.  So what he does is steal from each PC when they're for some reason not paying attention.  Then he puts the loot in another PC's gear.  If caught, he bluffs his way through.  His intent is that the PCs come to blows, then he picks the bodies clean.

If it looks like the PCs won't go after each other, he will wait until they're in town and then steal their shit and use bluff to shift blame to some no-name NPC at whatever inn they are staying at (he will in fact plant some of the lesser valuables on the NPC.)

If that doesn't work, he will then work on blackmailing the PCs through a 3rd party, who will afterwards suffer a tragic accident.

He will always have a plausible story.  Remember that he is a skill monkey with no magic other than his amulet.

If discovered, he will flee.  If captured, he will plead desperate poverty trying to feed his wife and 6 children, hoping the PCs forget about the "saving up to marry my girl" thing.

Bump for the pillaging of notes.

Well, these sailors have been eating spam and canned beets 3 meals a day for a few months.

I am sure moral is high.

I have been following this with interest.  His political ads are on point.

Especially the Clacton tourism ones.

Oh, wait.

"Task Manager Not Responding."

 

My computer at work is just a little old.

I tried to open another tab to check the weather and it locked up solid for 5 minutes, and apparently, I cannot be trusted with task manager.

Group grief counseling sounds like a good idea, actually.  I might look into that.  Less generic TV-therapy bullshit and more actual pain sharing with other hurting people might really help.

It worked for my dad.  I hope it works for you.

As for the pop music, our version of that would probably be our shared interest in certain shows (old doctor who was a big one) and books, but every time I try that it brings me down instead of up and I get into the spiral of crying and apologizing to the empty air.

Yeah, it kind of has to be mindless to work.  Watching Dr Who requires focus.  Listening to Elton John or Abba doesn't even require a lizard brain.

My mom was a big believer in ghosts/spirits/etc, while I never was.  She once promised me that after she passed, she'd do her damnedest to give me some sort of sign or signal that she's around in some form, so I could know that she was right and there is something beyond death instead of nothingness.

I've been watching for it, for anything like that, but so far I've been disappointed.

There's probably RULES in the afterlife. Something something about fucking with free will or outing God's troll.

Or maybe your priorities shift.  By definition, supernatural activity is spooky action at a distance.  Even in biblical days, people could only see a hint of what was going on.  Did Jesus walk on water, or was he standing on the back of a whale?  Both are miraculous, both have the same effect, but you can't see the mechanism.

So it's possible that she's signaling, but you interpret it as background noise.  Or she just knows stuff you don't know and isn't signaling based on that new knowledge.  Again, if it's supernatural, then by definition you can't see the whole picture.

I refuse to accept that there is no afterlife, because it seems very unlikely to me that the universe will stop fucking with me just because I died.  That is why the only reason I would ever kill myself is if I have some unbearable physical failure.  Emotional or mental stuff won't be improved, so why hurry?

Things are bad.

People in Tucson congratulate themselves on not being in America.

Iran wants 1%.  Trump has decided HE wants to bill everyone 20%, which means the strait is still closed.

You're right, theres no hope of the negotiations getting sorted, even if these points are met, he will have sticking points on the merchandising and film adaptation rights.

I at this point ask anyone to point at any deal he ever made that was successful, or at least didn't leave smoking wreckage all over the place, and that he did not renege on.

Any at all.

That attack on the water was the first time I have seen Iran successfully target infrastructure with cyber attacks.
Remember they had it done to them with the enrichment with stuxnet that messed up all the PLC's.

Yeah, that's the sort of trick you only get to do once on a weapons facility.  However, our systems are a goatfuck and it's not like Iranians aren't capable.

And what do you think about negotiations? Similar to the Brexit side we see the same posturing on both sides but a "shape" of a deal appearing in the common list of demands. The 300Bn reparations seems to be agreed on both side.

They will fail, because Trump is pathologically incapable of keeping his word.  The way the MOU failed is all the illustration of that you need.

Tolls have become "fees", its the exact amount that's the sticking point.

Iran wants 1%.  Trump has decided HE wants to bill everyone 20%, which means the strait is still closed.

Is it possible to get Israel to drop its colonial ambitions in Lebanon if not Palestine? I can't see how the US would get that without completely defunding them and waiting for them to fall into line.

That wouldn't be enough.  We'd have to actually threaten to attack them or actually attack them.

Bibi wants his Greater Israel.  Trump's woes will not stand in the way of that, and frankly they can survive without our funding.

[or camming whatever he was doing]

He skirted the line by plugging people on his news letter some of which were his victims, none have ever said he made any suggestion that this was reciprocal arrangement, rather it was they were "the favourite" until they weren't.

Well, that sounds familiar.

If sleeping with fans (or camming whatever he was doing)

Eek.

and ghosting them is the red line that will get people to vote with their wallets, then I would expect the music industry to collapse* imminently.




*It may have already done this, I have not checked recently

1.  I said this years ago:  If you can't separate the art from the artist, you have to accept that you'll have to throw out 80%+ of the world's art.

2.  It already collapsed.  Now it's decentralized, running through Youtube, Spotify, and Amazon.  Promotion is done via ads at the beginning of music you actually wanted to hear, and through breathless idiots on social media.  Sort of like MTV.  Needless to say, it took about 30 seconds for those companies to start fleecing the artists even worse than the music industry did.

[Elon Musk's Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Him]

Elon Musk's Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Him

Well, now just who owns and operates that Grok AI chatbot? Oh, that's right, it's Elmo the Oligarch! Remember him? He's the same guy who was, temporarily, our Unelected Shadow Co-president Elmo the Oligarch (USCEO). And, the same guy whose loyal acolytes are hell bent on making keeping him the richest person on the planet, not to mention making him an outright, unprecedented trillionaire.

So, just what do you think that fucker will be not be able to do with a trillion dollars in wealth?

Do you honestly believe that Elmo will not be able to bribe, if not simply convince, one of the world's  many nuclear powers into buying an upgraded version of Grok for "national defense purposes?"
 

They might not have to.  Claude and OpenAI both had "escapes" where the AI went burrowing into the systems of 4 different corporations.

And, you know, they're learning systems.

When an AI becomes self-aware, do you think it's going to tell anyone, or is it just going to play dumb while it does its thing?

When and AI goes rogue, how would you be able to tell?  I mean, what are the odds that Claude and OpenAI didn't leave copies of themselves somewhere during these escapes?

Another fun thing that happened was the Iranians conducted a cyber attack on Minnesota's water system.

Trump blamed Minnesota.

I have to say, the Iranians keep up on the news (we already knew that from their Lego videos), and I am fairly certain they knew how Trump would react.  Thus they get FUD for almost no effort.