Ish

Okay, it ain’t much, but at least I got some paint on something. 

Snails, slugs, and all the other creepy-crawlies that live under rocks makes a much more fitting aesthetic match for the evil dwarf archetype than GW’s “Mesopotamian Fire Worshipper” idea... And I’ve never seen anyone else do it. 

I’m genuinely excited to see how this army of your unfolds (and kinda wish I had a few hundred bucks to spare so I could steal emulate the idea.)

F34r muh 1337 h4x0r sk!llz n3wb

10 minutes ago, InfestedKerrigan said:

My current group is trying to use Discord to be able to track notes and OOC stuff.  Looks like they've used it instead of Skype for playing with a couple long distance party members.  I'm not really a fan of discord, but I don't know if it is a custom interface thing, or what.  Reminds me of old IRC chats. 

I've always had a good experience using Obsidian Portal for tracking campaign notes and so forth.

I'm thinking you might want to change your password...

I’ve had some very good times playing in games of Shadowrun and Mutants & Masterminds run over Skype, with the GM just using MS Paint to occasionally sketch something out on the fly and using Skype’s built in image sharing options for other pictures previously drawn or pulled off the web. No built in dice rollers or character sheets, we all just relied on the honor system and rolled our own dice. No battle maps or anything either, just some very rough “okay, John is in the lobby and Jessica’s up on the roof” type descriptions.

Worked well enough, but virtual tabletops like Roll 20 and the like certainly seem to offer a lot more... 

A good friend of mine has been spending her quarantine time learning how to use her Cricket sticker maker...

I’ve got no proof, but this has my “Tweaker Broke Into My Car and Stole My Battlefoam” spider-sense tingling.

I’m just hoping that my employer remembers the whole “essential employee” thing when it comes time to renegotiate our contracts.

I should be returning to a more sane schedule come Monday. I’ll let you all know.

My workload has nearly doubled: I've been pulling 12 hour shifts at my first job and 8 hour shifts at my second job. 

Fun fact, country-music legend Kenny Rogers’ first top ten hit was the psychedelic rock deep-cut ‘Just Dropped In.”

Always wanted to... Never have.

The Israelis — whom I still haven’t bought but keep daydreaming about — have the Merkava 1, Merkava 2, and Magach 6 (which is basically an M60 Patton with slightly different machine guns).  Not really seeing any great reason to want to mix tank types in an armoured company with them. 

The Magach 6 cost a lot less than the Merkava (about half) but doesn’t fire as effectively on the move. Seems to push it towards more of a “defensive” role, but that’s not really a good match with the rest of the IDF’s options.

(All of this is pure theoryhammer, since I’ve never played.)

1 hour ago, Raindog said:

Someone warn the Japanese schoolgirls!

There’s a shop on Etsy that sells a very nice looking Flail Snail miniature (which has nice historical connections). It would make a pretty good mid-sized solo monster for Infernal Dwarfs... I don’t think they have a Chaos Spawn or Hydra equivalent, but I’m not that familiar with their army list.

I’m just waiting and hoping for the weather to get a bit warmer so I can do some spray priming.

Can’t do it indoors due to my husband’s asthma. Normally, I’d be able to do a couple of minis (3-6) just after he leaves for work in the morning, knowing that the fumes would all dissipate before he got home from work in the evening... But his office has ordered everyone to work from home.

I need an airbrush. 

“Continent” is a bit of a fuzzy word, with even geologists and geographers arguing about exactly what it means. Europe and Asia are, conventionally, considered to be separate continents despite being one continuous landmass... Madagascar is generally counted as part of Africa and New Zealand is generally counted as being part of the Australian continent, but both are actually on separate tectonic plates.

Colloquially, the people of the British archipelago have always thought of “the Continent” as a separate and distinct grouping apart from themselves. An Irishman, a Cornishman, an Englishman, and a Scot might all see the others as different than them... But the blokes on that side of the channel were even more different. Me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the guys in the next village; and so forth...

Napoleon Bonaparte is often (apocryphally) quoted as saying “Geography is destiny.” in the context of geography shaping military campaign strategy and individual battle tactics. But it’s a pretty apt “rule of thumb” when studying human history in general. Islands, rivers, mountains, and oceans have an undeniable impact on the way human societies develop.

”My band of monkeys on this side of the river must be different than the band of monkeys on that side of the river; But even that band of monkeys is more like me than those freakish monkeys that live on the other side of the mountains; and don’t even get me started on those truly alien monkeys that live out on that island! Why, I heard they don’t even pray to the same Giant Sky Monkey that we all do!”

To tie this all back to something a bit more geeky, this is often something that makes or breaks a fictional setting for me. Compare and contrast the myriad distinct cultures of Howard’s Hyborian Age, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, or even Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (especially in the early years when Rick Priestly was still “showrunner” for the setting) against things like Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Paizo’s Pathfindrr, the world of the Warcraft franchise, or GW’s Age of Sigmar.

These later settings either have cultural and social distinctions with little to no logical reason for the separation or they have no cultural and social distinctions at all, when there are massive reasons they should be distinctly different. No, sorry, the fact that humans living in the Realm of Fire prefer to dye their clothes a different color than the people living in the Realm of Shadow (and vice versa) doesn’t count as distinct cultures, Gee Dubs.

Arrgh.

7 hours ago, WestRider said:

Best. Cosplay. Ever.

The Greeks called everyone who wasn’t Greek a “barbarian,” and the Athenians kicked it up a notch and called other Greek tribes and city-states “barbarians” if they weren’t sufficiently Athenian-like (such as Epirotes, Eleans, and Macedonians).

Once Rome rose to primacy, they started calling everyone who wasn’t Roman or Greek a “barbarian.” And after Augustus, it wasn’t uncommon to find Romans referring to even the Greeks, Egyptians, and Carthaginians (who at this point had ruling classes of Greco-Roman descent) as “barbarians.” 

Of course, all of these “barbarian” cultures all had their own derogatory words for the Greeks and Romans. They also had their own special terms for their own group.

Although many modern day nincompoops who like to dismiss all of Europe as one homogeneous blob of generic interchangeable “white people,” the idea that everyone in Europe belongs to one singular “race” or “culture” is an extremely new idea. Eighty years ago, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, and their contemporaries would have been aghast at the idea that Germans, Britons, French, etc. were all part of one “race.” Thirty years ago, Tatcher, Gorbachev, Franco, etc., would certainly been shocked to learn they were all part of the same “culture.”

Heck, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkle have spent the better part of the last decade as figureheads for an extremely bitter argument over the idea of their being a single European culture!

1 hour ago, jesselowe said:

Francis I would like a word. Several, actually, after the Battle of Pavia...

To be fair, I was grossly oversimplifying several centuries of history in order to make a broader point about Europe’s transition from ethnic tribalism to modern nation-states. 

1 hour ago, Munkie said:

I only need enough meat to get me to cannibalism season, anyway.

The best cannibal seasoning is just simple salt and pepper.

I’m an Anglophile, not a Teutonophile.

The city of Rome was “sacked by barbarians” seven times in its history. But it’s tricky to refer to the people who did the sacking as “Germans, French, Italians, and Bulgarians” as those countries didn’t exist and the people doing the sacking wouldn’t have identified themselves as such.

In 390 BCE by the Senone Gauls, who lived in the region that roughly corresponds to the modern French-Italian border;

In 410 CE by the Visigoths, in 455 CE by the Vandals, in 546 CE and 550 CE by the Ostrogoths; all peoples who originated in Central Asia, who moved into Central Europe, but traveled extensively and spread throughout the continent;

In 1084 CE by the Normans, under Robert Guiscard Duke of Apulia and Calabria, which is basically the “toe” and the “heel” of modern Italy’s “boot;”

And lastly in 1527 by mercenaries serving Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

You can kinda think of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals as distant ancestors of the modern Germans... But that’s pretty tenuous, plus they’re so far back in history that, really, they’re sort of the ancestors of everyone in Europe.

Guiscard’s Normans originated in what is now France (specifically Normandy), but of course the Norman came from Scandinavia originally (Norman = North Man)... and they all lived in what is no modern Italy and Scilly. 

Charles V ruled the Holy Roman Empire at more or less it’s apex, covering pretty much the entirety of the European continent. Only the British isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Balkans weren’t part of it... and he had some minor territorial holdings in most of those regions too. 

It wouldn’t be until the Treaty of Westphalia (1648 CE) when Europe would really coalesce into the modern nation-states we have today. In fact, most historians will argue that the idea of a nation-state – where the people identify more strongly with a national government than ethnotribal affiliation – was essentially created by the Treaty of Westphalia... and it would still be several centuries before Italy, Germany, and France would all “unify” into Italy, Germany, and France.

Toilet paper isn’t actually in short supply, even if store shelves are temporary empty, there’s still warehouses full of the stuff and no reason that Charmin, et. al., cannot make more. We should just chill. 

But people won’t chill. Stocking up on toilet paper is a relatively cheap action, both in terms of monetary cost and opportunity cost. People like to think that they are “doing something” when they feel at risk.

The panic over toilet paper isn’t a real reflection of toilet paper supply. If you have enough supply on hand already to get through the next week or two, you’ll be fine. There will be more on the shelves soon.The toilet paper panic started in Australia, back in December/January, when China first began to shut down its exports. Australia gets the vast majority of its paper products from China, so when China started to cut off the paper supply, Australians started to stock up on essentials. Americans get the majority of our paper products from the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. We’re not going to run out.

Chicken is cheap, especially in bulk. So if $20 will buy you two pounds of steak, four pounds of ground chuck, or ten pounds of boneless skinless chicken thighs, people feel like they are “doing something” by buying the bigger quantity.

Of course, since the U.S. is a net exporter of food and with the exception of some specialty items, like wines and cheeses, we get all of our staples domestically... We ain’t gonna run out of food.

Disaster preparedness experts call this “zero risk bias,” in which people prefer to try to eliminate one type of possibly superficial risk entirely rather than do something that would reduce their total risk by a greater amount. It’s why people stock up on toilet paper, bottled water, and cans of soup... But never buy a basic first aid kit. There’s an old joke amongst preppers that basically boils down to one guy in his apocalypse bunker with ten million cans of beans and no can opener.