I am moving on Monday and the removals guys turned up today to pre load the vehicle (it is going to be a long, long drive on Monday).
Now I have:
Half a couch, two seats
A coffee table
A TV
A bed
I have no other furniture and a tiny assortment of kitchenware plus cat essentials. Said kittens are now wandering the empty desolation being excited by the change yet also very confused as to why their entire universe is empty and weird.
@Sparks I can really connect with this, I am in the middle of moving half way across the country right now to start a new job, having just left what was frankly a pretty good job to seize that opportunity.
So not exactly a bad situation to be in a but a ton of change and worry. When one of my kittens comes up and squeaks at me to be picked up? It is a few minutes of bliss. She climbs onto my shoulder then basically rolls around and rubs herself against my face whilst purring and stretching, licking an ear, perhaps 'biting' me in a grooming manner. It is fucking adorable and the fact this cute little furry thing just completely loves and trusts me and wants to be close? It melts my heart.
@Quinn My little brother has some kind of weird mutation where his teeth have Super Enamel, they look... Weird, almost like marble or something with flecks of extra bright white through them. As a kid his milk teeth never failed and remained completely healthy as his adult ones tried to grow through, requiring him to have 14 teeth taken out in one day then braces to stop his mouth turning into some kind of pointy apocalypse.
But apparently he could now, if he wanted, never brush his teeth whilst devouring sugar every day and probably not have a cavity until he was seventy, according to our family dentist at the time he has over twice as much enamel thickness as is normal.
Dentistry here in the UK is I understand pretty different from in the US. Nobody gets braces unless they have seriously out of alignment teeth, I think maybe it was one in ten or one in fifteen people when I was at school? Tooth whitening or similar is barely a thing. Dental care is also... Sort of half NHS? If you can actually get assigned to an NHS dentist then you pay for checkups and similar but major work is heavily subsidized, this is hugely dependent upon where you live though because there is no guarantee you can actually find an NHS dentist.
The general result though is that on average UK people have worse looking but healthier teeth than US people and it is a whole lot cheaper on average. Apparently in the 70s dentists were paid entirely off the amount of work they did though and they were notorious for drilling everything, my father's teeth are shattered husks full of fillings because of over enthusiastic and not very competent dentists.
So I watched the Alita movie, taking advantage of being in the UK where it released last week (I have no idea why?)
It suffered from some 'time compression' where stuff that in the manga took a year+ seemed to take place over days but frankly? I really liked it, the huge eyes actually worked just fine in practice and I honestly found Alita really compelling as a character with how she was played.
The action scenes were utterly phenomenal and despite how ridiculous it was I was completely sold on Alita just being that fucking good. She was fucking people up despite being vulnerable and them presenting a real threat, she was just too perfectly lethal and agile and really came across as a force of nature who was still very much a young, idealistic and opinionated person. Just one who was a peerless killing machine and was ultimately totally okay with this.
I am so insanely glad that, when I was a kid, my parents took oral hygiene seriously and enforced some kind of authoritarian No Sugar zone. At the time? I hated it, it was the worst.
Now as a 35 year old with not a single filling who has never required a dentist to do more than look in my mouth, then shrug after perhaps scraping with a hook thingy and tell me to come back in two years? I am unspeakably grateful. I even still have all of my wisdom teeth, I get the impression there is a whole world of horror and expense that is common to virtually everyone which I just sort of passed on by thanks to having a huge mouth and a mother who was serious about health.
@RnMissionRun An accurate assessment. The unfortunately side effect was that they smell absolutely delicious out of the oven but I cannot eat them until tomorrow.
Cakes! It is my leaving presentation thing at work tomorrow and so I made some for my team. Not the most exciting cakes but they worked unlike the experimental batch at the weekend.
@Roz Dammit! Yes, indeed the wrong thread, thanks for that.
@Bad-at-Lurking Right, being a channeler is the Real Ultimate Power but the setting also makes it seriously distrusted and potentially dangerous in most areas. Most places seem to have male dominated societies - but ones that are fucking terrified of Aes Sedai coming in like wrecking balls and being something that they just do not have an answer against and must defer to. They do not like it though.
@Cobaltasaurus I tried to have a nice lie in today, as a Sunday where I had no commitments.
I was woken up at 6:30am by a cat vomiting onto my feet, presumably because when I did some baking last night she went berserk to access then lick at the mixing bowl in order to devour that buttery, sugary goodness. Thanks kitten.
I do not understand my brother.
We have dipped back into Minecraft on a friend's server and he has apparently mined 31 diamonds already, but his house does not yet have a roof. Priorities!
@Kanye-Qwest Yeah, if you want to set things pre books then guys just do not get to be channelers, or if they do? They are pariahs who rapidly turn dangerously insane.
Male characters get to be badass sword ninja guy flunkies to Aes Sedai if they want to be maximum personal power and still from what I recall hold most of the positions of political power and influence in the setting. At least outside of the Aes Sedai who probably consider everyone apart from them to exist at their sufferance and are not entirely wrong.
I am not playing anywhere at all right now and have not been for a while. I am looking at jumping into The Stack but am currently in a stressed limbo status where I am about to move and start a new job so I have no idea what my schedule is going to look like in a month's time.
So I play computer games if I have a free evening instead.
My little brother's wedding this summer was pretty great, it was held in a field with a big tent available and the ceremony itself took place in an isle of trees to the side as we sat on benches made by my brother and his friends out of scrap firewood.
I think the total cost was a few thousand pounds because there was a huge supply or alcohol made available, a nice cake, a pig roast, ice cream, etc, along with I think somewhere around 200 people. Most people then slept overnight in tents.
One issue is that FS has each 'attack' keyed against a specific defense roll/skill but there should probably be multiple ways to defend against a lot of stuff.
If somebody chucks a fireball at you then you can try to cut the weave to mitigate it entirely, or block it with a shield of air, or if you are not a channeler you might be able to dodge it? Though mostly you get burninated.
Locking people in weaves of air was also a huge deal in the books and I am not sure how well that would translate to FS3. The ability of literally any competent channeler to immediately and inescapably incapacitate any one (or several if an actively powerful channeler) non channeling person in a heartbeat came up rather a lot.
@Ganymede I have absolutely broken up with somebody before because they texted me at 3:30 am for some bullshit reason and woke me up before getting pissy that I told them I wanted to sleep. I had to be up at 6:30am for work, that was Not Cool absent a genuine serious issue.
I suspect that there will be a surge of interest once the TV series becomes a thing in a year or two, which might be a good time to launch such a game and ensure it gets a sustainable player base.
My only actual experience with a WoT MUSH though was one that I forget the name of many years ago where I let staff persuade me to play the Taraboner crown prince who was in disguise as a knight errant/minor noble and was searching for a bride in foreign courts. Which was a cool concept but not a good choice when I had minimal interest in being swarmed by waifish noblewoman competing to be the shortest and most in need of a courteously rapacious knight.