There was also:
Fighter1: Is anyone checking for traps?
Fighter2: I think the halfling can do something like that.
Fighter1: But is he doing it?!?!
Wizard: Just stay at the back if you're afraid of traps.
Rogue1: Yeah don't worry about it.
Fighter1: WHY IS NO ONE CHECKING FOR TRAPS?!
Fighter1 has left.
Rogue2: Hey I found a trap!
During a dungeon crawl the DM described the hoard we had stumbled across with detailed descriptions of jeweled swords, crowns, coins, doomsday machines, and inexplicably a penguin.
At which point the Halfling rogue we had with us looked left, looked right, then picked up the penguin and ran off with it.
Then he cast animal awareness and it became Hubert the clove smoking penguin that wrote depressing poetry about being the only penguin that could talk.
It was great.
Yeah I just got an equity raise at work and on the one hand I was like hooray a raise! And on the other I was like...so how long have you guys been massively underpaying me? 
I REALLY want to garden but we have to figure out our outside space first. This house is old, so it's likely that there's some lead paint chips in the ground from the siding at some point (it's got vinyl siding now but that was clearly slapped over some old wood shingles) so planting in the ground is very iffy. We get SO MUCH SUN on the side of the yard that has some grass that I really want to build a raised planter, but it's also the only yard space my kids have to play in right now until we can find the money to tear down the huge old garage in the backyard that I hesitate to take up more space over there.
Also so many chipmunks and bunnies. We planted tulips the first year we were here and we have not seen ANY of them because as soon as they come up they get eaten! Even fox pee doesn't keep them away!
@tinuviel said in Meshing Groups:
Oh, another thought: Why are these people in particular here? Come up with a reason for why these specific individuals are involved in the story you're telling. Give each something that only they can do, so that everyone is useful/helpful but won't really succeed without the other people.
This is what I try to do--find that little something that a PC might not get to play or mention all the time that would be cool to include that can build off another little something another PC has, etc. And yeah some people will still shrug and only be interested in what they're doing, but most of the time you'll get a couple people to hit it off and EVERYONE is going to love it if you allow them to use the random skill they picked up for fun instead of the main standard ones that always get pulled out. Let that guy who picked up a couple ranks in geology find a safe place when rocks fall. Have the person with points in fashion know that an NPC of that level would never be caught dead in those shoes, etc.
This is obviously easier for staff to do on places where sheets are hidden, but if you're doing a player run plot and don't have access to people's sheets you can also just straight up ask them if there's something they'd like to highlight. More often than not you'll find SOME overlap that can link people who don't really know each other together. I think we've all had things on our sheets at some point we wished we could actively use that just never come up.
But in a group of 5-7, I'd say if you can get even just 2 people that didn't know each other before to really engage together that's a win and anything above it is a bonus.
@tinuviel Do the assignments in advance. Best advice I ever got while going through grad school. I'd just knock out the papers that I could early in the semester and have them waiting around so I could tweak them if I needed by the time the deadline rolled around. Far less stressful! It's how I managed to keep up with things even when I have birth in the middle of spring semester.
Thanks-A-Lot were the best and I'm mad they got rid of them.
I've always liked the peanut butter patties/tagalongs though. Just a good ratio of cookie to chocolate to peanut butter.
My kids do a taste test video every year so if anyone doesn't have a local cookie provider hit me up. They do online ordering and delivery these days and barring snow storms, shipping has been super fast even in COVID times.
Their favorite is the lemonades. My oldest says they have a 'sour lemon' taste but she likes the yellow chocolate on the bottom to balance it.
Some states have outright banned remote learning. The department of education has done that here. It will not count as 'in school hours' even though some classrooms have set up streams since there are kids that are out for extended periods because of COVID. This means that during the current spike even though most of the teachers in the district WANTED to go remote for at least the week after vacation everyone had to go back. Districts have basically been left on their own once again to scramble trying to do...well, anything. There is no leadership coming from above. Or above the above. Hell my daughter's kindergarten teacher was all set to come in Monday from vacation but decided to go get one of the completely voluntary tests the school was offering that Sunday and whoops, she was positive.
She otherwise would have been in class Monday and Tuesday--a class where the kids aren't the best at wearing masks judging by the pictures we get every day from school--because she didn't actually start having symptoms until that Wednesday.
It is maddening to me that employers and school administrations are just pushing for back to 'normal' when normal can kill people or leave them with long-term health issues. We're asking teachers to risk their lives once again while severely under compensating them. Or having plans in place to keep them safe. It drives me crazy that we are not innovating here and I have written lots and lots of emails to the heads of just everything I can get my hands on to try to get someone to listen.
Here's one for my friend who is an art teacher and a single mom and just had an art show where she sold a ton of stuff and will be listing even more on etsy soon:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/MenagerieByCNKurman
Another for a friend who does AWESOME stuff with chainmail:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/Chainbow
Who knew oyster shell ornaments and lit bottles would be a hit gift?
https://www.etsy.com/shop/OShucksOysterShells
And I'm a Disney fanatic so I love all their signs and magnets I have so many:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/SimplySawdustStudio
I'm a sucker for travel posters:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/HarknettPrints
You have probably seen an ad for these on Facebook--they work! Just remember to flour the dough before rolling:
@juniper For years I would fight against things like that and then on reviews be told "I'm hearing a lot of 'that's not my job' and you need to be more of a team player" and when I would say "Why does Jim not get asked to do these things?" They would frown and write down 'hostile rather than helpful.'
The fun flip side of that is being promoted a few times and when you defend your team being told you 'mother' them rather than, you know, being a good manager and standing up for your team.
To me a MUSH is basically just cooperative storytelling in a text-based medium. I guess it could have pictures or some visual aspect, but at its core you need the people to drive the story and make things happen and interact with one another.
Whereas a MUD is a hack and slash that sure you could do some RP with other people, but you could also just go around killing orcs or whatever and never have to interact with another person if you didn't want to. You could be the only one playing the game and it wouldn't matter because you're not telling a story you're playing one.
If you're on Twitter please check out the #clearthelist and #clearthelists hashtags--if you have any spare cash you can throw it towards amazon lists that teachers post there. These are things that they will otherwise have to purchase themselves for their classrooms. A lot of them have books up there that are only like $6 or like cases of markers/crayons.
A couple of celebrities are picking up on this and retweeting teacher lists and every little bit helps. It's also eye-opening for some people to realize that some districts don't provide ANYTHING and teachers need to buy every little thing you usually see in the classrooms from posters on the walls to the rugs on the floor.
@ifrit You know it's not a Doctor Who episode because it wasn't based in Cardiff or Victorian London.
@silverfox Yeah like @Duntada said treatment is a lot more effective now. Definitely still scary, but my father-in-law is in his 80s, overweight, and diabetic and he got COVID around Christmas last year. He wasn't feeling well and was sent home from his local hospital (in the middle of Kansas where they don't believe COVID is real and very few people wear masks) because they didn't "think" he had pneumonia and whoops two days later it was in both lungs and he tested positive for COVID. He ended up airlifted to a larger, better hospital in January and spent a month there but against all odds he's still alive and just got off home oxygen a couple weeks ago.
He absolutely 200% likely would have died earlier on in the pandemic. At no time did they intubate him and his oxygen dropped to scary, scary levels. I completely credit the hospital change to saving his life. But it really seems like hospitals have figured out how to bring that death rate down at this point so don't lose hope.
But I also get your anger because my sister-in-law who lives near him and had visited him during his contagion period basically stopped speaking to him when he said that he had told the board of health he had been with her for contact tracing reasons. She then got sick, refused to be tested, and of course refused to wear a mask or get a vaccine. It makes me so mad knowing she probably infected a lot of other people.
A Star Wars game where no one is under 40. You lived through the collapse of the Empire and rebel or loyalist it sucked and you had to make it work and now the First Order is here and ugh, these fucking kids. While they go around having their climactic angst-ridden one on one battles or whatever you're out there keeping the galaxy running, thwarting evil, being evil, smuggling, trying to build something that's going to survive the god damn collapse of the First Order why do they keep thinking something better is going to come around maybe we should kill all the engineers that major in death stars.
Sure the kids have their showy battles, but you're doing the real quest work/world building.
And everyone can be jedis, whatever. Lightsabers for all!
I couldn't find a better thread than this old one to post this--I am not a huge webcomic (or regular comic) person, but Lore Olympus was recommended to me via this article and I basically read through the whole thing (it's still a work in progress being updated) in two days.
It's a retelling of the Persephone/Hades story (I am a sucker for Greek mythology but especially Persephone/Hades and Psyche/Eros stories) and I love it. It deals with trauma of all kinds, how manipulative abusive relationships can be, how consent and boundaries can work in healthy relationships--it just approaches things in a way you don't often see and warnings are offered at the start of strips that might be triggering for some people. The art is really good, I was annoyed at the scrolling, but the storylines and the depth of the characters, even the side characters, is really worth it. Several of the strips had me in tears.
Anyway, it seemed like something other MUSH people would enjoy so here you go, Lore Olympus!
@ortallus It's really encouraging they didn't see anything on an MRI. A friend of mine was having stroke like symptoms, went to the hospital, but talked them out of doing an MRI because he was worried about paying for it (America!). 6 hours after he got discharged he had a stroke that, thank god, wasn't debilitating and didn't kill him but would have totally been seen on an MRI had they done one.
If she's not already writing down her symptoms when she experiences them that can help with diagnosis (and make her feel better). My best friend was in the ER last week and ended up hospitalized over the weekend because she was having heart-attack like symptoms (and had been for months) and everyone was on the edge that she was just about to have a major one but...nothing. So they've sent her home and she's documenting symptoms when they happen as they go through what sounds like an exhausting diagnostic period. But at least for her she feels like she's doing something about it and being proactive by writing things down.
@tek Over in Israel we had scorpions and ants that had learned to carry their butts high in the air so they LOOKED like scorpions and scared the crap out of every new volunteer for the first two weeks.
Over in Crete we just had racism against Armenians. And every once in awhile someone would fall over going to lift up a heavy rock that turned out to be pumice from the Thera eruption. Never got old. Well, the racism did. Fast. That dig was so fucked up.
@grayson I mean, technically you haze the new people by having them do that. No one licks bone twice in the field cause there's better ways to do it.
Unless they really want to.
But seriously it really really REALLY upsets the locals if they hear about it.
@Ganymede I saw this and immediately thought of you. Well no, I immediately had to remember how to breathe again after laughing so hard. IS THIS YOU
God dammit I cannot figure out how to embed it. It's not a rickroll I promise.