Posts made by Ghost

I've also learned that fried rice (shrimp, pork, vegetable, doesnt matter) and egg drop soup is both the ultimate DEPRESSION meal and the ultimate HAVE A COLD meal.

Hot. Filling. Reheats well. Reasonably priced.

Chips and salsa is a valid meal. Fight me.

Other runners in my *fuck it" repertoire:

Can of chili.
Can of anything.
Cereal for dinner.
Egg noodles with milk.

How about we keep this thread to the OP's topic of food, cost of, etc and keep all of the race and privilege talk to the politics board or a separate thread?

I'm 100% interested in talking about food, veganism, eating on a budget, etc.

I'm -1000000% interested in competing over who best understands privilege and racial issues while trying to discuss veganism, food, and eating on a budget.

Edit: Shit. I just read @Arkandel first post and it says "social" issues. Looks like I am understanding the thread wrong. Carry on. Without me, alas, but carry on. But I think a non-political thread about eating on a budget, diet support, etc (not connected to the mental health thread) thread would be cool.

I've read the costs of going Vegan in the US to be somewhere around $17/day to $200/month per person.

The problem with this in the US is that you can get 9 burritos for $9 at Del Taco. The "dollar menu" at McDonalds(or any fast food place) is simply more economical for families with lower wage constraints.

@Jaded said in Good TV:

The only complaints I've heard about The Witcher is that the actress playing Yennifer was a poor casting choice and did not convey the aura of charisma that Yennifer was portrayed as having in the books.

Which is just like...their opinion, man.

Which is weird to me. I think the actress really did a great job at channeling Yen's sense of disdain and disenchantment. I always read her as seeing her old self every time she looked in the mirror. She did well

@Groth said in Good TV:

@Ghost said in Good TV:

@Groth Yea Triss was good stuff in terms of casting. I think the major appearance points of Triss are red hair and freckles. The casting nailed that. I got the sense that they changed her behavior a bit to avoid her being a bit of a Yen clone. It would have been a lot stranger had they made Yen less Yen.

The single wierdest casting choice to me is Fringilla because unlike a lot of other characters she has a lot of family and is supposed to hail from what is basically fantasy france. Does that mean all of Toussaint will now be sub-saharan African or what?

Yeah, no telling, really. Not sure.

I wonder what it would be like to sit in on a design panel with a producer while making decisions like that.

@Groth Yea Triss was good stuff in terms of casting. I think the major appearance points of Triss are red hair and freckles. The casting nailed that. I got the sense that they changed her behavior a bit to avoid her being a bit of a Yen clone. It would have been a lot stranger had they made Yen less Yen.

@Sunny said in Good TV:

@Ghost

Actually, I think he's just disagreeing with you and providing his sources. You said you hadn't seen it, he said he had, and showed you where it was.

No, they're arguing that I'm wrong about 'it didnt happen' when I never disputed that it did.

All. I. Am. Saying. Is. That. I. Think. It. Is. Progress. And. That. It. Wasn't. A. Point. Of. Extreme. Social. Media. Or. News. Response.

@bored said in Good TV:

@Ghost I don't know what your source really is on 'it didn't happen.' There was an entire narrative around the showrunners being total SJWs and turning the whole thing into a farce (there's still a rumor that the Nilfgaard armor looks like balls as an attack on the patriarchy?), and yes, a lot of 'if Ciri isn't white we riot,' etc. It was fairly evident on r/witcher source

There's also the Polish fandom, which in general wasn't positive toward any race bending. I think you may be reacting to a lower level of blow-up than say, Star Wars, without taking into account that the fandom there is several orders of magnitude larger.

You are 100% correct that there was a thread from a year ago and that despite me above clearly stating that I didnt doubt there was some dissent I agree 100% that you believe I said it didnt happen.

You're missing the point of what I was trying to say because you're focusing on being antagonistic.

@TNP said in Good TV:

@Ghost You mean there's no 'They made Johnny Storm black?!' equivalent? I roll to disbelieve.

I'm sure theres some of that, somewhere. What I'm saying is that I think it's nice that they were able to darken Triss and Yen in the Nertflerks series without there being some big social media blowup like there was with Johnny Storm.

I dont doubt that theres some asshole on 4chan griping somewhere about it. I'm just happy that we aren't seeing these actresses chased off of Twitter over it.

I cant remember seeing a non-white character in any of the Witcher games. This production company made a great decision, and it has paid off nicely. Nice to see that. That's all I'm sayin. Feels like progress.

@bored said in Good TV:

@Ghost said in Good TV:

Even better? I get the sense that the fans of the books and games didn't care at all about the casting of Yen and Triss that it didn't even register. People WANTED this.

It must be nice being this naively positive

Your sunshine and grace is so on-point that it's inspiring.

Alas, despite some 2018 drama about rumors of Ciri being recast racially, the series (Netflix) premiere and to-date fandom has not received a lot of critical social media drama about the castings of Triss and Yen. At least very little from what I've seen. This is a good thing.

Man I fuckin LOVE that Witcher did so well that it's considered a contender of the Mandalorian.

We get Baby Yoda memes and an influx of metal bands covering Jaskier tunes. Everyone wins.

The fucking SMARTEST thing the Witcher did was spread out skin color amongst the characters. The games are very monochromatic, and in that one subtle move they avoided negative critique. Even better? I get the sense that the fans of the books and games didn't care at all about the casting of Yen and Triss that it didn't even register. People WANTED this.

+1 to good fans being good fans.

@nyctophiliac said in Invisible Sun:

Have you seen Kingdom of Death? That looks like a $400 initial investment and then you gotta buy minis on top of that. UGH.

These people are nuts.

THAT BEING SAID I wouldn't mind a MU with the Invisible Sun setting/theme/flavor. A girl can dream.

An IS MU would be neat. It's a VERY creative setting. I love that you are bound by the limits of your own weird imagination. Living in a Castlevania-type castle that crawls around the city on the back of a giant crab's back that belches steam out of its eyes is considered normal.

However, given how Monte Cook and Co set up so many gates to control how the inward flow of cash, I imagine an IS MU could be cease and desist fodder. It sounds reasonable to me that they'd be on the lookout for ANY shared book material online or an ability to play the game without $$$ buy-in.

I mean, FFS they made the books/sheets on 10x10 paper to make scanning a pain in the ass.

@nyctophiliac said in Invisible Sun:

Oh I know this thread is way dead but I just found IS now and it looks really good I was wondering what your thoughts on it are after almost a year? Is it worth the $100 investment?

I think it is ONLY worth it if you have a dedicated group of players you can guarantee will invest and stick with it.

At some 250 for the base cube, 100 for the pdfs, 60 or so for the vislae kitsch, it's probably the most monetarily demanding RPG type hobby I've seen since Warhammer 40k.

I wouldn't buy it in the hope of finding players to play it with you. I would wait until you have a group of players who also want to invest and then pull the trigger.

More: Theres very little RPG-wise you can't do cheaper with a cheaper, hacked system, your own system, or finding a similar game. InvSun's biggest con point (as in pros vs cons) is that they placed a money gate on content that can be done cheaper in other systems.

Look at it this way. The "true" game is best with the game board (that per-scene changes the path of the suns and will alter +/- in play), the cool 6-fingered hand that holds the sun card for the whole session, and the hundreds of proprietary spell, equipment, etc cards.

The $100 pdfs contain all of the cards and can be printed, but are you willing to print them out? Make a board? Use some kind of card stand? How much extra will that cost to print those cards out?

IS worked hard to compartmentalize everything. The books have the names of spells, but the spell CARDS have the descriptions of what they do. To put both together you need the CARD and the BOOK. The $60 player kits have the book, but no cards. The $250 cube and $100 pdfs have the cards, but to randomly reward a player with a random spell you'd have to hand them a randomly shuffled card, which means needing some kind of printed card.

Very clever work was put into making sure pirating and sharing would lose them money, but the end result is that the game is very gatey and unwieldy if you havent shelled out the money they wanted you to.

@Ghost said in RL things I love:

Quietly rooting for my buddy to find love.

My wish already came true! He came to house party tonight with a date!

@Arkandel said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

Hey, my last 'AHEM THE THREAD IS GOING OFF TOPIC' post of this decade!

So does the existence of PvP/PK and/or a +warn mechanism relate to whether the power curve is normalized (and where) on a game? If so, please carry on. If not let's discuss that in a separate thread.

I think it does, and I apologize if it's taking the conversation in a different direction.

I'm not bringing up PK in a "we should get back to that because I like it" sense, but more in a "if you're going to have power levels, you have to consider that power won't just be some railroad that people get on with a constant rise" sense.

Or, in short: If you're going to consider power levels varying across your playerbase it may be wise to consider a mechanism that will allow for the rise and fall of power levels and the inevitable "class warfare" that may come between power levels.

I think +warn/pk/pvp was/is important to consider if varying power levels are in play because these systems have a way of breaking up parallels. Without loss, loss of power level, pc death, etc the date the PC was created will always maintain that character to be more capable/powerful than PCs made after its creation.

June 2020: Anne joins the game at level 1. Bob is level 5.

December 2020: Anne is level 5. Bob is level 12.

December 2024: Anne is level 30. Bob is level 38.

Any good life cycle requires destruction in the Kali sense

@Ominous said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

@Ghost

I am not sure I ever encountered +warn. How did that work?

As to the central topic, I think high level play can work, but the server has to be designed for it.

+warn was basically a thing you would do when another PC was bringing things to a point of conflict. So if you were threatening a biker PC, their player would hit +warn. If you continued threatening, a GM would get called to moderate combat.

It was basically a warning of "you are choosing a course of action that could lead to PVP" and gave players the opportunity to choose an out beforehand.

I may be opinionated, but IMO IC PVP/PK is a tool/lost art that never should have been completely taken off of the table.

@Ganymede said in The Haul:

@JinShei said in The Haul:

Means a woman who sleeps around. Implications of dirty, or slovenly.

Yeah, that doesn't jive with a mean-spirited Triceratops at all.

Yet those horns are three-way.

That's all I got.

@Arkandel said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

For example would you prefer to play on a MU* where mechanical power uniformity is enforced ("all characters fall within levels 4-6")? Or one where the majority might be levels 4-6 but some (regardless of the method they're chosen) are 8-10?

For MU where writing and inclusiveness is expected for all players at any given time: uniformity.

For MU where the TT RPG elements are enforced and a factor to results: Power levels and gated scene attendance based on "level".

My personal preference is the latter. I'd play in either game, but if it has a system I'd prefer my level 18 Jedi Consular isn't, by system or roleplay, considered to be just as capable as a level 1 Jedi Consular. I prefer to fight level 18 things, prefer TT RPG and sheets, and am of the opinion that most players aren't the best at acknowledging their "level one-ness" in the presence of Level18 PCs. If anything I think gating scenes based on power level to determine "right fit for the scene" may be a bit more honest than simple "whoever signs up first" but this is just my outlook.

Then again, my preference is also to go back to the days of +warn and moderated PVP if warn is ignored.

Quietly rooting for my buddy to find love.

I got this buddy who is(?) in the closet. Its one of those things where everyone we know KNOWS, and for all we know HE KNOWS (he probably does but it just isnt public stuff because hes in a very "dude man bro" job).

Dude is fucking adorable. Always smiling. Always has good jokes. Never seen him angry. Always offers to pick up the appetizer. He's basically a cub that looks and talks like the guy from Tucker and Dale:

Sober: "Oh yeah, dude, I used to dig trenches an shit. Yall wanna shoot some pool? My ass just sitting here playin minecraft. Later I gotta take the truck up north n' help someone uproot a stump from their lawn."

A few dozen beers in: "Dang, man, you got strong shoulders. We should all just cuddle and watch some Walking Dead or some shit..."

So one of my first wishes for 2020 is that he finds the wuv. Guy is a sweetheart, Reuben as hell, and deserves a solid thing. Also, because me and the 3 or so other friends he flirts with are taken and my girl is like: "Hah. I love that guy. Hands off mine, buddy."