skulblaka

It sounds by all accounts like he went over to Russia and just continued being the exact same man that he was back home. And the Russians of the time loved him.

I aspire to have principles that I stick to with the gusto that Cassius Clay exhibited. I didn’t even know about Clay’s Battalion but I believe it on sight because that sounds like exactly what he would do in that situation.

Cassius Marcellus Clay was the son of one of the wealthiest slave owners in America and grew up to be the single most influential and most dangerous abolitionist in American history. He had so many duels with slavers, and won so many of them, that he became statistically the most dangerous duelist to ever exist in North America.

When his cousin, Kentucky senator Henry Clay ran for president, Cassius wanted to come campaign for him down South. Henry vetoed this out of concerns that Cassius would come down south and duel so many slave owners to the death that it could be considered election interference.

The Fat Electrician has an excellent video on the life and times of Clay, I highly recommend it. And if you’re wondering, yes, Muhammad Ali was named after this Cassius Clay.

Mercy got that Glock delivered straight from the angry hands of God and it shows

Yes, but it isn’t just :chicken: or something like you’d see in Discord. It’s unicode, so it’s actually U+1F414. Egg is U+1F95A.

Pretty sure it does, actually. If I look up a route and my partner looks up the same route at the same time both from within our house, mine usually has about a 3-5 minute faster eta.

I do a lot of highway driving. It’ll frequently tell me “in X miles take the exit towards [whatever]” but it will refuse to tell me what exit number I’m looking for until I’m within a mile or two of it. This is frequently a problem when I have exits with A/B/C branches which is often. I don’t give a shit if I’m exiting towards I40, just tell me I’m exiting on 13B, and tell me that from the beginning.

It used to do this, it changed a couple years ago, and I’ve been pissed off about it every time I’ve had to drive somewhere since then.

It’ll also randomly change voices on me, it’ll flip flop constantly between the American accent and a thick British accent. No rhyme or reason to it either, it’ll be a different voice on the same turn on a different day. Drives me nuts.

sickness

Solved by money, there’s nearly no sickness in the world that you can’t get treated effectively if you pay enough for the privelege.

loss of loved ones

The rich don’t love anyone

old age

We’re making great strides on this in the medical sector, also solved by money. We don’t have this one truly “solved” yet but I expect a workable solution within 100 years.

death

Not if you upload yourself to Xitter and get turned into a chatbot!

This wouldn’t be nearly the first time I’ve said some stupid Americanism without realizing it, but mind telling me what it was at least?

Cartilage isn’t.

But, as always, the real answer is “a wizard did it”. Skeletons don’t just hop up and animate themselves.

Come have a seat at my D&D table…

Yeah but if it weren’t an option we would adapt. Commerce would not grind to a sudden halt.

Unironically I keep a devil on retainer for this. I’ve interacted with the Fae twice and it went poorly both times. I’m not speaking to them again without my lawyer present.

Fae don’t play by the same rules as mortals. Just because they possess your name doesn’t make it their name. It just makes it not yours. And Fae magic doesn’t necessarily rely on truenames, it relies more on expression and emotion. If you think that your name is your name, and now a Fae has taken it from you, it gives them power over you. And most especially Fae power is held in deals, contracts, favors, tit-for-tat. They asked you for your name and you gave it freely. That’s a contract. If you want it back, you’re going to need to draft a new contract.

Besides, most fae won’t exert such complete control. Some will, definitely. But most of them prefer to trap you inside dealings of your own design. You’ll make an initial deal, which you know is a bad idea but you don’t have much of a choice - it always starts like this, with an offer you can’t refuse, such as recovering your name after giving it. Then you make another deal to escape the consequences of the first one. Then another. Then another. Before you know it you’re bound by multiple conflicting deals and can’t possibly keep your word on all of them - and then that’s when they really get you. Broken promises hold terrifying power with the Fae.

Dropping the demand for rentals is supposed to address this. But there is going to be a great big gap between “no one is renting” and “we can’t afford to keep this house that no one is renting” where the prices will skyrocket to try and make up costs, which kind of shoots this plan in the foot unless all the newly emancipated renters plan to pitch a tent for a couple years while the market settles.

4chan has long been the fountainhead of the internet. All memes and pastas spring from there in some fashion or another. But so do other, darker things…

Anyway, I’m a fae touched warlock now so who’s laughing now, Ma.

In my experience, the answer to this is nearly always “everyone involved in the situation, except for you.”

One of my favorite bits about Shadowrun in particular is that directly alongside this futuristic world of cyberdecks and prosthetics and automatic weapons, are fully fledged hauntings by things like bug ghosts and big fuck-off actual dragons (one of which owns a corporation) and other mystical crazy shit.

I’ve played a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 but I haven’t gotten my hands on RED, so I don’t know if it has something comparable. But it sounds like you’re describing an Invae nest. Notably, bug totems are the only sort of spirit in Shadowrun that requires a sacrificial host to manifest, and bug shamans will capture people in order to infest them with bug ghosts which will gestate like xenomorph babies.

The hivemind behind these Invae are pretty much a perfect slot-in for your gestalt locust swarm if you wanted, and they’re only interested in one thing: breeding grounds. Would be an interesting moral choice for your party. It’s a powerful entity and it can do or offer many things but its price is always going to be several corpses. Not necessarily your own, or corpses of innocents, it doesn’t care about that, but it wants live bodies that will then suffer greatly and then die. And then after they die they will release many little bug ghosts, which are a nuisance at best and highly deadly at worst. The bugs ate Chicago back in 2055.

“Old man that only speaks when he knows it’s wisdom” is a killer character concept though, for what that’s worth. I’m picturing a real Uncle Iroh kind of guy. Doesn’t speak that much but when he does people know to listen.

Ohio as a state is a liminal space full of cornfields and a feeling of wasted potential. A disproportionate number of American astronauts come from Ohio, proving that the primary thing on the minds of Ohioans is getting as far away from Ohio as possible no matter the cost.

If something is Ohio it’s a place or a situation that you don’t want to be in. It’s a dead end with a feeling of vague discomfort.

The modding scene is (or, well, was) pretty active though, if you’re into that. There are still official te4 forums, but most folks hang out in the discord (yeah, I know.) including a couple old head modders that are pretty familiar with the codebase if you’re trying to do something exceptionally interesting with it.