I have spent an awful lot of time on trains today, travelling about two hundred miles to attend a job interview, now I am on the way back.

As such I am going to be exhausted by the time I get home at 10pm or so but as I was leaving the building where I was interviewed? I had a call from the director who interviewed me saying how he felt it had gone really well, it was a pleasure to meet me and he wanted to arrange for a call with myself and his own boss ASAP.

So I am pretty sure that I am going to get a verbal offer for the job of Senior Export Control Manager for Europe tomorrow evening, for a company employing 8,000 people. I am thirty five and six years ago I was severely depressed in a shitty admin role with no degree and what I thought were minimal prospects.

So thank you SSRI medication. You really fucking work.

Also, this weekend the lockdown in the UK started to ease up (too soon but meh). As a result my mum got to spend the weekend visiting and she brought along her nine month cockapoo puppy, Tinkerbell.

Tinkerbell is the most ludicrously adorable thing ever and apparently decided that I (like everyone she meets) was her best friend within a few hours of becoming acquainted:

I got a new kitten just before Christmas. Unfortunately he came with awful diarrohea and I was for a few days unsure he would make it, I am also down about (translates) $500 in vet bills whilst awaiting test results. But? He is super cute and super affectionate, he basically purrs the moment you touch him and will immediately climb into anyone's lap.

Eventually he made friends with Artemis, though she does find him annoying when he goes into Zoom Mode and desires endless play.

Also he loves to climb into my jacket and purr himself to sleep.

Little Stentor likes to spend a good chunk of every day inside of any jacket or fleece I am wearing.

She stole my cuff links then decided to crawl into an empty cereal box:

Today, kittens judge me for not letting them into the wardrobe:

So my current employers have some very highly placed covidiots.

After multiple instances of positive tested Covid cases in the building, my actual boss has told me and everyone else (he is the safety and compliance VP) to work from home unless completely necessary. Additionally it is required to wear a mask at all times when in the building.

The senior program manager and program director though? View people working from home as slackers and essentially refuse to wear masks in meetings, they also keep asking when I will be in the office and only vaguely accept my 'when this stops and lockdown is over, or when I come in for individual days to give in person training to hanger floor staff'. It is just idiotic, I know people at work who have had immediate family members die to this disease and yet the top level on site managers do not take it seriously at all.

Fortunately I have just been headhunted by another company who want to offer me a twenty percent pay rise, six more holidays a year, a 12% pension match, better sick pay, private medical care and permanent work from home. I was not actually looking for another job but I am definitely going to let them know what lead to me talking to the recruiter in my exit interview.

@greenflashlight If it helps, this was him earlier today while I was trying to work and suddenly had a little friend pop up over the monitor:

My kitten Stentor has been... Growing, he is over eight months old now and has turned from this:

To this:

But he is still a cuddle monster:

Also he LOVES people, he spent a few hours today just playing with my eighteen month old niece beautifully and is happy to purr himself to sleep in a lap or in bed with me.

Artemis continues to decide that perching atop doors is the best thing ever. It allows her to peer.

@too-old-for-this As somebody who has had cats able to go outside whenever they want via cat flap, who have in some cases been prolific hunters? They continue to be derps even when they are devouring and torturing prey literally every day.

We had a pair of brothers when I was a kid who were confined to the kitchen, living room and conservatory (plus outside) at night, they were very determined to get into the rest of the house so that they could literally spend all night chasing each other up and down the stairs Extremely Loudly. Once they worked out how to get on the roof they would crouch outside of my bedroom window and shout at me for hours in the hope I would let them inside. If I did? They would then throw things off tables in the hope I would open my bedroom door and allow them access to the wonders of the stairs.

If I ever did this then everyone in the house regretted it.

Given what they look like now as babies they are going to have the most magnificent manes once they have grown up.

Some of the time is used just amazingly well though, the entire Salusa Secundus sequence is less than a minute long and yet tells you so much about the Sardaukar whilst 100% selling them as being terrifying when coupled with their later appearances.

Unfortunately the last picture I have of him. Not so little guy went missing while I was at work just over a month ago and there has been no sign of him since. He was allowed outdoors but typically never went more than a few houses and never crossed any roads, generally not gone for more than an hour or two at a time. (mostly he chased squirrels or played with my neighbor's kids).

He was my little buddy who would follow me around glued to my ankle, sleep cuddled up to my chin in bed every night and would happily spend hours a day in my lap or arms. Pretty sure he got stolen and although he is microchipped I suspect I will never see him again.

@arkandel said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Another take on Lords and Ladies could be to introduce a level of strategic planning to it.

One of my peeves about settings like that, for some time, was that there was no cost to anything. Every other noble PC walks around throwing gold at problems; if Jane comes asking Jim for some ships to move her good he can just... give it since there's an inexhaustible supply. Here, have some imaginary ships, lady!

Similarly there's no downside in being nice. Hey peasants, I lowered your taxes! Love me! Which means playing cutthroat, cynical characters with an eye toward making money and using it to gain political advantages (think Littlefinger from Game of Thrones) doesn't give any edge over honorable ones (like Eddard Stark), and that ultimately cheapens both; honor is cheap without sacrifice, and bastardy is just dumb because... you act like an asshole IC yet get nothing to show for it.

I'd love to see a setting where clever players managing their estates well is meaningful and gets them the upper hand. Treating serfs well makes one popular - which grants bonuses - but empty coffers also translate to disadvantages that have to be played around.

Anyway. Lords and ladies. Resources. Meaningful choices. I'd like to see a good take on it.

One of the systems used on the Fading Suns game set on Vargo did this pretty well, basically you defaulted as a noble to having everything funded at the 'thoroughly mediocre' level when it came to loyalty of your people and vassals and that left you with a properly funded lifestyle for your rank along with some spending money but not a fortune. The moment you wanted to live in an extra fancy manner, or do well by your peasants, etc? You either needed to be excellent at managing your lands or obtain money from outside sources.

It ended up with things like one faction leader trying to sign a peace deal with the NPC neighbor and it being foiled because one of his baronesses was sending pirate ships to raid their coast and he had no idea it was going on. He thought the other party was making up coastal raids in order to try to get concessions but they were totally real and were making said baroness a ton of money.

I had a character who was held a senior military position and she was 100% embezzling the budget to help fund her personal goon squad of elite and ludicrously well paid murderers. They were just down the road from the palace where her boss lived though and so whilst he knew she was embezzling money he did not say anything due to being legitimately concerned about a coup.

It obviously had major problems but I loved how it rapidly turned landed nobles into money grubbing kleptocrats who would strike dubious deals with people and go into debt continuously. Successful military campaigns and sacking towns was also a great source of incoming if you could pull it off.

One thing that I do feel is valuable in a Lords and Ladies set up is a large population of NPC nobles and society. Then you can have people with social stats or plots influence things, or social pressures be applied, etc, without having to rely on player characters entirely.

Another consideration, for me at least? Player characters almost always have 'above average' stats and skills for good reason but if player characters then make up the entire structure of an inherited noble caste? That starts to create a world in which those of noble birth are inherently superior even if that was not the intention.

I am to be honest a big fan of making that kind of thing based on 'level' of nobility also, if you are a knight/dame? Be really good at stuff! There might well be thousands of NPC gentry and you are one of the people who stand out. Somebody is playing a duke or duchess? Have them given points to be statted like a vaguely kind of competent person because they are going to get plenty of spotlight and agency from their position and power. They do not also need to be a master duellist or peerless tactician or unmatched courtier, actually if they are merely decent at stuff then they have much more reason to want to recruit, retain the loyalty of and have to delegate power to other player characters.

Well I finally got blood work done and found out why I have been feeling so low on energy that I sleep 10-12 hours a day (whilst having a full time job). Apparently? Vitamin D deficiency. Not the best news but at least it is something I can easily treat with pills, thanks job that has been in an office with no natural light!

@ominous Witness the dread Hand Eater in all of his kitteny glory:

Hand Eater

My kitten Stentor has been... Growing, he is over eight months old now and has turned from this:

To this:

But he is still a cuddle monster:

Also he LOVES people, he spent a few hours today just playing with my eighteen month old niece beautifully and is happy to purr himself to sleep in a lap or in bed with me.

So is this still being worked on? I very much hope so because I would love to play on an Exalted game!