Best posts made by WTFE

It's so cute watching the village bumpkins pick up their pitchforks, confident that they, this time, can slay the dragon.

@Admiral said in But Wait, There's More!:

Darn, and here I was wanting the responsibility and power of the board so I could...

...well shit. How does one abuse their power on a small, niche internet bbs again?

Ask Rasheem.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that your old corsets being too big is "congratulations!" time.

CONGRATULATIONS!

@Roz said:

The reason that this kind of artistic reimagining of female characters happens is because the vast majority of them are significantly smaller than the average woman. And, like, the fact that you're calling that image which looks to me like probably around a size 10 or so (still smaller than average) to have "Thunder Thighs" and would "waddle around" is pretty gross.

The thighs in that picture are larger than the head. I'm a pretty fat guy still and my thighs, at my peak (4 pounds shy of 400!) were never larger around than my head.

Those, my friend, are thunder thighs.

Atom. For when you want to fire up a 250MB web browser to edit 16KB of text.

Kung Fu Fighting Drills Don't Work

So, I picked up a couple of weird teas a month or so back. These are each 1kg of raw pu'er tea.

The one in bamboo is just a pretty normal raw pu'er (about eight years old), but the one on the left is termed "spring snow bud raw pu'er" and looked pretty odd in the photos. So needless to say I was curious.

After a month, with my existing brick still being worked on, I succumbed to the curiosity and cracked open the package.

This is the weirdest-looking tea (as in actual camelia sinensis) I've ever seen. The tea is very friable (which is unusual for a pu'er block); what you're seeing there is about 500g left over after I broke off by hand a bunch of the tea and put it into a spare 500g tin I had lying around. This tea's look is a serious WTF, but the aroma is incredibly powerful, like flowers with a tiny hint of grass. The reason it's so easily friable is that it's just the tips of old-growth trees (not shrubs), so they're short. Usually pu'er discs are made with full, long old-growth leaves; individual leaves can be longer than 15cm. These are wound up around each other and compressed together before drying, so taking them apart takes strong tooling. (I use a pair of specialized pliers, although specialized knives are used too.)

It brews up like this.

That's the very first brew. The WTFery with the leaves continues at this point. It looks more like really fat juniper scale leaves than actual tea. This is because these are the first shoots of spring, as I mentioned earlier, and then just the tips. Each "scale" is a bunch of leaves wrapped up around each other in a tube-like formation. It really is tea, it's just not in a form factor I'm used to.

This is by far the best tea I've ever owned. (I've had better, but not in my price range.) It's sweet, with a very slight hint of distant sour and the ghost of a hint of pine flavouring. The liquor, as you can see, has almost no colour, but man does it have flavour. From that first batch I managed to get six full brews (increasing the soak time from 30s to about 2.5m by the last one) without having it lose any flavour. Even after the 2.5m soak time it doesn't get much darker in the liquor than it is in this photo. After the sixth brew the flavour started to noticeably degrade. By the tenth it was a non-starter.

And more general purpose emergency supplies:

Actually, strangers calling me by my name, especially my first name, are the opposite of polite to me. I find that off-putting and tend to get brusquer with them.

I love how people think that Rotten Tomatoes is a site that sets opinion.

They report on opinions. It's a review aggregation site. They're reporting on what a large number of CRITICS are saying.

And now the other thing I collect that I forgot to mention in the "things I collect" thread: weird-ass card decks. I'm not talking modern CCGs or the like here. I'm talking traditional cards … just traditional cards from other places.

Today I got another shipment in of weird-ass cards. The full photo essay has all the explanations and commentary. Here I'm just going to drop the photos (roughly in order from the mostly familiar to the WTF!?).

A former friend of mine was a big fan of Kinsey and thus assumed that everybody was secretly bisexual at some level or another. I was not a big fan of Kinsey and disagreed. He would often needle me with questions like "how beautiful would a guy have to be for you to want to fuck him?"

One day I met Jude Law. VERY briefly, only in passing, but I met him in person nonetheless.

The next day I told him "Nik, that beautiful" pointing to the movie poster featuring Jude Law at the cinema we were attending.

I know all y'all want to be kept up to date on my bizarre card obsession, so the latest deck is there to see.

Paper 四色牌 (Four Colour Cards)
Cheap and nasty as God intended. These cards date from a time when gambling was illegal so cards had to be made cheaply and easy to dispose of. The manufacturer of this set is keeping to that tradition. (How cheap? About a buck fifty -- after shipping!) The cards are marked with the names of 象棋 (Chinese Chess) pieces: four of each in each colour suit. Games played with this deck are typically 麻将 (or Rummy, if you must) style.

And my bizarre card collection has expanded yet again (with more to come, possibly even this afternoon; if so I'll just edit this message). This time I've added another 乐山二七十 (Leshan 2,7,10) deck, in the "Crystal PVC" format.

I've also added a handmade, plasticized silk set of 娃兒牌 (doll cards) from Sichuan. I'm not even going to try to explain these…

as promised, editing to add
Late in the day a set came in that I wasn't expecting to arrive. These are handmade of plasticized silk as well, but they are [紙骨牌 (Domino Cards)] instead of the "Doll Cards".

In addition to the above, which are Chinese cards, I snagged a poker deck from India which is not in the album because, you know, not a weird Chinese playing card deck. I will also not be putting the image here because it could be considered NSFW for those workplaces who think classic Hindu texts on virtue and gracious living are bad. Follow the link iff you're OK with Hindu holy texts being illustrated. On poker cards.

I… don't even…

I have a new piece of Maomorabilia. I felt compelled to share.
"Little Red Book" Lighter (I)

"Little Red Book" Lighter (II)

2016 summed up in a single picture.

The current version of FATE (FATE Core) is much smarter about these, but you can, with careful planning and a bit of luck, still stack a whopping humdinger of a bonus to an action.

Which is rather the point.

FATE isn't intended for drawing room drama. It's designed for high action, high octane, high concept RP. My notional "Dream of Red Mansions" MU* would be a seriously bad fit for FATE, but a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic wrecking machine of a game where people jump cars in other cars over still other cars to crash into a wall to jump out and start beating on people on the other side? Perfect fit.

When he was six, I bought a microscope for my son because he was so fascinated by my magnifying glasses. (Fascinated to the point of trying to work out how to use two of them together…) He loved it. For at least three months he pulled the thing out daily to see things up close. It's a pretty low-grade microscope but he loves it anyway. Even now, three years later (almost to the day--I got him his microscope for his birthday) he still occasionally pulls it out to peek at things. Say once or twice a month.

But…

First, it's a pretty crappy microscope all things considered. Sure it does the job, but it doesn't do it particularly well. And then on top of everything else it has all the usual issues of microscopy: setting up slides, for example, and having no real ability to take it out to where the interesting things are.

This birthday this will all change. There's a new microscope in town, and this new one is a portable, digital microscope with its own screen. It can be used standalone, snapping pictures or taking video of what it sees. It can be plugged into a computer via USB and then used with any USB camera or video software (including software that comes bundled with it). It can also be plugged into a television for live display.

I'm pretty sure my son is going to shit.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

Y'know, I aaaaaaalmost put a disclaimer that I am not available.

Here's what I'm reading: "I almost put a disclaimer, but then decided not to because I might get to trade up."

(This is me running away. Very quickly.)