sophibug

Imperial Snapchat. Admiral Piett is currently leading the contest.

Anakin hindbrain: *chanting* SELFIE SELFIE SELFIE SELFIE-

Vader: …ugh, fine.

Boba: lol cool, I’m gonna use the cat ears feature!

The structure of the game manages to hit a remarkable number of features that folks who think "RP forward" actually means something and isn't just a marketing phrase would typically regard as categorically excluding a system from being "RP forward", while looking nothing like the kind of game you'd tend to picture based on those features.

You don't want the mechanics sticking their nose into every little thing? Chuubo's is so intensely preoccupied with mechanising the mundane that forming intentions to do things is a rules-mediated action. There are specific target numbers for stuff like "do it correctly", "look like you actually know what you're doing", and "be happy with the result", and without a relevant skill or resource expenditure, the best outcome you can ordinarily achieve is "make everything worse".

You want to do stuff because it "makes sense for your character", and not because it gives the most points? As far as Chuubo's is concerned, those are the same thing. Just living your everyday life is framed as a kind of quest, with milestones and XP triggers and whatnot; this is a game where you might actively look for excuses to "have a conversation in a poorly lit place" or "gaze contemplatively over a large body of water" because your personal quest line awards XP for doing that.

You want a game that will let you make up whatever character you want and doesn't expect you to faff about with "classes" and "levels" and such? Not only does Chuubo's effectively have both of those things, it's so strongly opinionated about what sorts of characters are appropriate that it recommends you use pregenerated characters until you get a good feel for the milieu. One of those pregens has a character sheet that's twenty pages long – and you might assume that means most of it is just a big tedious lore dump, but it's not.

The only reason to actually play this game beyond novelty is if you have a supreme case of writer's block and are running behind to turn in a manuscript of an azumanga-esque 4koma chapter

Not true.

I'm a huge proponent of public transit, rail in specific, and I'm very glad that the greater Seattle area is finally starting to see some solid light rail infrastructure sprouting up in the form of the 1 and 2 lines, but that in no way stops me from critiquing the decisions made in planning and implementation.

Light Rail, in it's colloquial form here in the US, is basically always a compromise solution. It's cheaper than subways, can make good use of existing right-of-way around freeways, and can function as a kind of low-capacity commuter rail in the suburbs while behaving more like a tram or streetcar in downtown areas. It is crucially, however, not a streetcar, nor is it a commuter rail. Streetcars make frequent stops and are optimized for dense areas with lots of traffic. Commuter rails are larger and stop less frequently, optimized for bringing suburban residents into city centers. Commuter rail should, however, be independent of street traffic so it can travel at higher speeds. For this reason, most of the Link light rail system in seattle is actually not at-grade (street level), but on either elevated or sub-grade track. Downtown, the lightrail actually functions as a low-capacity low-frequency subway system in what used to be the bus tunnel (we don't have time, but yes it was stupid). Everywhere else, it's up on elevated tracks that largely follow the freeway system.

There are three stations, all immediately south of that Mount Baker elevated station, where the Link actually runs at-grade. These stations run through the historic low income immigrant neighborhoods of southeast seattle. Here, the trains are forced to stop at red lights, interact with crossing and left-turning traffic, and even cross through sidewalks and terrifyingly narrow pedestrian islands. They could have built elevated track here, as they did everywhere else, but they didn't. they didn't want to spend the money. I have personally watched light rail cars carrying hundreds of people have to wait two full minutes for cars turning left in front of them, delaying trains so like, 5 people could drive there. Once it reaches the end of this low income immigrant-dominant neighborhood, however, the Link returns to it's above-grade status, with Mount Baker being the first elevated stop. You want to know how this woman, who claims she was misdirected by her GPS, probably ended up here? I would bet anything she tried to make a turn at the intersection just before the stop and got confused. The intersection, for reference, looks like this:

I'm not saying it's an easy mistake to make, but given the number of people who drive through here every day, it's honestly not that surprising that someone, especially someone who is from out of town, or someone who is used to shared streetcar lanes, would eventually make this mistake. When you're dealing with a city of hundreds of thousands of people, it's only a matter of time before a mistake like this happens. but it is only possible for it to happen because of the decisions made in the planning process, and one of those decisions was effectively "we can save money if we make everything worse in that part of town where all the foreign poors live", and so they built the thing at-grade, instead of keeping it elevated like everywhere else.

Redditors design worst volume sliders possible

So, yes, I agree that slurs in a fictional-villain context have their place, or in historical literature need to be faced head-on and discussed. but that's not exclusively where Bradbury was coming from in his "anti-censorship" views

In Fahrenheit 451, he does take to task the idea of white people finding Uncle tom's Cabin uncomfortable and banning it, and tobacco companies banning books about cigarettes causing lung cancer. but later, in a 1994 interview, he also said this:

[F451] works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control.

and

So whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I’d combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. The first group, by making you do the same thing over and over again. The second group is indicated by the letters I get from the Vassar girls who want me to put more women’s lib in The Martian Chronicles, or from blacks who want more black people in Dandelion Wine.

so like. that theme in Fahrenheit 451 was only partially "you have to be able to read uncomfortable literature of the past and deal with it, and portray villains using slurs or similar in modern literature" and the other part was apparently a white straight guy being mad that he couldn't use racist or homophobic slurs anymore

and we DO need to acknowledge that rather than holding it up as a perfect work of progressive fiction

The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.

The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.