Ironhold

If this is a fantasy world, someone with limited mobility would not make for a successful adventurer under most normal circumstances. Unless the player can come up with a very good reason, I'd rule that they got magically healed somehow.

Anyone who digs into the depiction of most fantasy "default villain" monsters like orcs, goblins, and kobolds will find that they're "villains" because their culture values greed and aggression over sense and logic. They *could* co-exist with others if they wanted to, but see other races as sources of plunder. There's nothing stopping a GM from deciding that one or more groups of these monsters have chosen to reject the culture, and in fact a key part of the "Warcraft" movie was an orc chieftain coming to realize that their ways were unsustainable and that the land they'd already conquered was more than enough to farm and fish on.

Right now, there's a big to-do in the world of fantasy fiction. A number of people who self-identify as "progressive" have decided that orcs, the common fantasy villain monsters, are somehow racist stereotypes and that they're "coded" to be black. As such, they're screaming, shrieking, and otherwise demanding that orcs no longer be used as a villain race because to do so is to perpetuate real-world racism. I've heard of at least one school banning fantasy tabletop gaming because of it, and people are ripping into the revived gaming company TSR because they feel that TSR isn't doing enough to combat "discrimination" since they won't bend the knee. In response, a large swath of fantasy fans from across the political spectrum are going "Wait... why do you think of black people when you see orcs? Doesn't that say a lot about you instead?".

The newspaper I work for has a casual dress code. As long as we're not having a VIP in the office for a big interview, everyone from the publishing editor on down to myself can and will wear shorts in the warmer months simply because it's Texas and it's summer. As long as it's appropriate to go out in public in, we can do it. So other than face masks, COVID didn't change too much.

https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Drunk-man-sends-injured-baby-bird-to-wildlife-rescue-center-in-Uber-512463031.html Yes folks, this is a legitimate news story. It's from a CBS affiliate out of Kansas. A drunk guy spotted an injured baby bird, called an Uber, and sent it on its way to a rescue center. This actually happened.

That's basically how most "freemium" games work. You can play the game for free, but they charge if you want in-game boosts and power-ups. One of the worst offenders is a recent Harry Potter app game, where your character burns energy doing various tasks and has to recharge their energy over time. The game has several sequences where the task at hand requires more energy to complete than what's in your character's energy meter, and so players have to choose between leaving their character stuck in the middle of a dilemma for several hours or paying up to get more energy so that they can finish it all at once. Checkmate Creative, at least, sells T-shirts tied into their biggest game, so if you want to throw them some money to support them you'll actually have a tangible good you can show off. Likewise, the infamous "Doki Doki Literature Club" appears to have been guerilla marketing for a horror survival game, so Team Salvato probably ate the whole thing as a loss on their taxes.

Thanks. The long and short of it is that when I was in junior high my maternal grandmother began the slide into Alzheimer's. My parents spent so much time and energy trying to take care of her that I was pretty much an afterthought. They just assumed everything was fine and dandy with me unless they were forced to deal with something, and when that happened they usually did so with short tempers. I had trouble convincing them that I was having issues with my physical health (the scoliosis in my spine had so long to sit that not only did it warp my spine, it warped my hips and legs as well) and issues at school, let alone that I was having issues with my mental health. I had to fight with them for several years before I finally got in to see a doctor who recognized that yes, there was something wrong with my back. By then I had reached a point to where physical therapy was almost completely out the window; short of alien cybernetics, the best I can hope for is extensive and invasive surgery and lengthy rehabilitation. Mom has accepted that she should have listened and that I'm dealing with the consequences, but dad is taking longer to convince. I've also recently gotten them to understand that, mentally speaking, I was wired wrong to begin with and what I've lived through hasn't helped. They accept that I'm likely on the autism spectrum and that they missed the warning signs just like they didn't understand what I was trying to tell them about my back. But I'm having to also explain to them that I'm still dealing with severe bipolar because the strain of everything that happened overloaded my mind and that some days it takes all of my energy just to function. I'm also trying to get them to understand that the triple play of "they had no time for me and often treated me like a nuisance when I needed their time", a toxic high school environment (it was so bad that one of the campus cops came to work with a hangover and subjected me to a rant about tequila), and "you didn't go on a mission so you're worthless" left a massive void inside that I've never been able to heal on my own. My plan for this year, before everything went wrong, was to finally get in to see whatever doctors and mental health experts I could afford (my Obamacare eats so much of my paycheck I can't actually afford to see anyone under normal circumstances). The endgame was to get a full sum total of what I'm dealing with, and if needs be get an official certification listing a disability rating. I've sunk so much of my life into trying to save this town and gotten so little in return that it's the only way I can get the help I need to even *try* and get my life to a more normal existence (which, at 37, I highly doubt will ever happen; I've already given up on ever having a family of my own).

I'll be honest. There were times I cried in the middle of the night because I was just that frustrated. Since I'm with a newspaper, I'm an essential worker. My load doubled during COVID, both covering everything and making sure everyone got their newspapers. We were literally donating hundreds of newspapers to the city to give out with the meal assistance program to help keep the public informed. This is on top of being someone whose columns people read to be informed and entertained, as I had to walk on eggshells to find things that would keep people going. I also had to deal with my parents (who didn't handle the lockdown well) and several others who ended up needing help as well. Yes, I had to try and talk someone out of a suicide attempt. I was fried to a crisp, and am still having trouble getting back to normal.

Everything from violent crimes to domestic abuse to substance abuse to mental health evaluations all shot up during 2020, beginning when the various governments started implementing the lockdown restrictions. Most people couldn't handle being confined to their homes for such an extended period, while those of us who were essential workers had massive amounts of stress and responsibility dumped on us. This is a big part of why Texas and other states were so quick to start lifting restrictions, as they knew we all needed to get back to normal ASAP. The riots and looting that took place over the summer didn't help matters any, as it just got people even more worked up. And now that the lockdowns are eased, many companies are having trouble getting employees so that they can get going again. It's to the point now that there are people asking if, in many jurisdictions, the lockdowns didn't do more harm than good.

At one point, a story was circulating claiming that "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was one of the shows purged despite it being in color, and that the only reason the show survived is because the head of a PBS station here in Texas (some versions of the story say Houston) liked the series so much that he refused to hand the broadcast masters back over.

Those here who know my story know that I'm single in large part because I chose to "honor my parents" at a critical juncture in my life, setting up some rather catastrophic and life-altering events for which I'm still dealing with the consequences.

It's far, far more complicated and depressing than that. In the 1960s, the BBC and ITV both signed overly-generous contracts with their unions, which, among other things, limited the number of times any given episode of any given show could be rebroadcast in the UK. As older shows from the 1950s and 1960s started to hit their broadcast limits, and color TV became the international standard, the executives at both companies found themselves with large quantities of older programs they couldn't air and feared couldn't license out elsewhere. Because of this, they made the conscious and voluntary decision to destroy the masters in order to make room in their physical archives. Several entire shows were lost because of this, while others lost large swaths of their content. For example, the first season of "The Avengers" is gone barring three episodes. In the case of Doctor Who, because the show had aired in so many markets the world over, they were able to recover usable audio recordings from among the large group of fans who had recorded the show off of television. Recovering the video and the masters have been a far more complicated situation. In some instances, footage was reused between episodes. This meant that all they had to do was copy the footage and they had at least that snippet of the given episode. In other instances, material was found to have still been in the BBC archives. Several other BBC shows, like "Blue Peter", used bits and pieces of Who footage, including material that was otherwise lost. A few masters were found to have still been in the possession of the BBC itself, just misplaced and mis-cataloged in archives. Many international broadcasters, including stations as far away as Australia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, found broadcast masters in their archives that they'd acquired from the BBC and never returned. From there, however, the tales get more sordid. For example, when people found the broadcast masters from Australian TV, they discovered bits and pieces had been physically cut out to meet the demands of the nation's government TV censor. A search of the censor's archives revealed not only the missing pieces, but pieces removed from other episodes. Or there's the fact that the church, yes, us, recovered three master reels. The BBC was selling off some buildings in the early 1990s, and the church bought one facility, IIRC an office complex. The BBC didn't properly clear it out, however, leaving several metal cabinets behind. The church officials responsible for the building were able to pop them open, and discovered the master reels while inventorying the content. At least one master reel has turned up second-hand, an estate sale held by the adult grandchildren of a deceased BBC employee. The employee had taken several master reels of various shows with him on his way out the door, and his grandchildren didn't know what they were until a collector of rare media showed up. Several episodes are still missing, in whole or in part, however, and so there have been efforts to reconstruct them. This includes having Cosgrove Hall produce animation meant to replicate what the live-action material would have been.

MBA here. The employee in question is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's cheaper to fire an employee with a documented history of racist behavior than to handle the lawsuits caused by their actions. You'd actually be doing corporate a favor.

An extreme failure to process social cues can be a sign of various issues, everything from "on the autism spectrum" to "raised in an environment where they never got to properly socialize with others". If she has both going for her, then it's going to be extra hard.

During one of his many reflections on his time in the military, comic book industry figure Richard C. Meyer made the following observation: "It's not the bad soldiers you really need to worry about; it's the good soldiers who start sliding into being bad soldiers". What he learned from hard experience is that if these good soldiers start to come apart, it's a sign that their personal life is coming apart and that it's robbing them of the energy and focus they used to put into doing their job. Simply punishing them as if they were bad soldiers would only make matters worse, as it'd add to whatever the issue is. Rather, the better course of action was to sit down with them, have a talk, and find what the root cause of the issue was. That allows for a better determination of what's going on. For example, many business owners try to take advantage of younger soldiers by tricking them into bad contracts, usurious interest rates, and the like. If a soldier is distracted by their financial woes, they're not going to be at their best. This may require a talk with an on-base attorney or a financial counselor to sort out. Yes, some military bases actually do keep record of companies that mess over their soldiers and spread the word to avoid them. In the situation you're talking about, something has led to her feeling that she's worthless, which is leading her to slide into apathy and generally not taking care of herself, which is leading to the social outcast status that's reinforcing her feelings of worthlessness. Her desperate efforts to get attention suggest that she's being starved for attention she should be getting elsewhere, such as from her family or her local social circle. She's down low, wants someone to acknowledge the good in her, and that's not happening. What she likely needs is a friend, someone who she can talk with and who can gently inspire her to be a better person. Telling her to "just get over herself" is simply going to send the message that she's at fault for every little thing that's going wrong with her life, even if it's something she has no control over, like emotionally distant family or bullying from peers.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/04/15/there-may-not-have-been-russian-bounties-on-us-troops-in-afghanistan-after-all/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EBB 04.16.21&utm_term=Editorial - Military - Early Bird Brief The reports that Russia may have placed a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan may have been incorrect, and that this may yet again be a failure on the part of the intelligence community. So... oops?

If memory serves, church policy does indeed require that people be current on child support. So yes, bring this up to your bishop if you can prove it.

Once upon a time, talking about the church on the internet was "scalp or be scalped". I have the wall full of scalps to prove it. So whenever I hear some young buck or some of these former leaders talk about how fun and happy their mission was and how they love such-and-such platform because it lets them chat with family and friends, a part of me wants to say "You're welcome" because I know they don't understand what had to happen to make it so that they could do what they're doing online. And I've just heard a few too many people going on about their missions lately... edit - Yes, at one point I had been singled out by a counter-cult ministry because I embarrassed their leader. I successfully blew a hole in one of his conspiracy theories, and so that made me a priority for harassment and mockery. This was not the first time I'd been singled out by semi-prominent members of the Christian counter-cult or other such groups, hence the death threats. It wasn't a fun time, but it had to be done.

I *specifically* referred to the local and stake leadership in my area. Most of them were horrifically narrow-minded and old-fashioned, to the point that during one stake priesthood conference a speaker even advocated that parents remove the doors from their kids' bedrooms so that the kids couldn't hide anything from their parents.

As I've noted before, at the time I turned 18 there were some serious issues going on with my family to where my attempting to go on a formal mission would have been a hardship on my parents. Instead, I spent the next decade getting laid into by local and stake priesthood leaders and even largely shunned by many local members. This is because at the time, the mantra was "all young men must serve missions, and all young women are to only date returned missionaries". I was in defiance of this mantra, and so there were consequences. When I was in high school, most leaders were of the opinion that outside of e-mail and the barely-functional church website, the internet was literally nothing but porn. What they didn't understand was that this kind of mentality was keeping members off of the internet at a time when members online were few and far between. As such, those of us who were online were often the only member on any given internet forum. 20 - 1 odds in a "discussion" were depressingly normal, and this made critics of the church so brazen in displaying their overt hatred that "getting your first death threat" was a rite of passage. Talking to hundreds of people at once from all over the world? Being the personal bogeyman of an entire counter-cult ministry? Getting a writer for an alt-media platform to knuckle under with a single carefully-worded e-mail showing at length how badly out of date his research was? Didn't mean anything to the folks who thought that a mission involved a name tag and a bike. Then once the Bloggernacle somehow just "magically appeared out of thin air", suddenly the internet was a glorious place to be and a ready tool for missionary work. Forgotten were the people like myself who drew the lines in the sand and built the defensive fortifications that allowed it to thrive in the first place. Folks, you don't need a name tag to go on a mission. You being a member of the church means you're on a mission, and that mission is to be out there in the world as best as you can be. And even if it looks like you're not having any success, you could be laying the groundwork for more than you'll ever know.

I've been researching mass shooting incidents in the US for decades now. What I keep finding is that in the vast majority of cases, not only was the shooter mentally ill, there were warning signs that were ignored. Bell Tower Sniper? He himself wrote in his journal that something was wrong with him, but he refused to get help. Turns out he had a massive brain tumor. "I Don't Like Mondays"? She was disturbed and possibly on illegal drugs. No one noticed. Columbine? The kids were being treated by a mental health expert who prescribed them medication that was *not* approved for use in minors due to... risk of psychotic episodes. Couple this with the parents not paying attention even as the kids were building *bombs* at home, and the inevitable happened. And so on, and so on, and so on. There was a warning sign at some point, but it got ignored. The guy here in Texas who shot up a church to get back at his ex-wife? He was dishonorably discharged from the military for domestic violence. The military was supposed to have reported this to the FBI, but they never did and so his name never went on the official registry; this is why he was able to get the weapon he got. It's as much about people not acting on what was right in front of them as it is about the weapons themselves.

For the record, when I was younger I had a hard time convincing my parents that the odd pains I was feeling, especially in my back, were more than just the normal "growing pains". By the time I was an adult and able to get enough money together to go see a doctor, the "odd pains" had turned into scoliosis so bad that it had led to my hips and legs being warped to compensate. In addition to being in near-constant pain (it'd take multiple rounds of surgery and months of therapy to correct, as one leg is actually longer than the other), I also have a bit of trouble with steps and can potentially stumble if I'm not holding onto a railing or something similar. So I can understand Trump going for the railing or asking for a bit of help getting up and down if he's likewise got back or knee issues. But for Biden to just stumble like that, even when attempting to grab the railing, raises very unfortunate questions about his ability to move.

For those who don't know, I'm the entertainment writer for a series of local newspapers. I do two columns a week, an op/ed and a movie review (et al). When it comes to certain major holidays, I try to find ways to mark them. In the case of Easter, I try to have both a column marking the day and a review of a faith-based movie (even if it's an older one). For the latter, I've got that sorted. Mom wanted to watch "The Cokeville Miracle" some time back, so done and done. But for the former... 2020 nearly destroyed me for how I had to parent my parents through the crisis as well as helping pretty much the entire town out. 2021 isn't much better, with a lot of personal issues hitting me as well as the disaster here in Texas. As much as I want to be grateful for what I do have and what I've been able to make it to, I'm just so badly drained from a solid year of drama that I'm having trouble putting thought to paper. Anyone else not entirely feeling the Easter spirit this year?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hud-secretary-marcia-fudge-may-have-violated-hatch-act-with-comments-at-white-house/ar-BB1eLM36?ocid=mailsignout&li=BBnb7Kz Within mere days of being appointed, Biden's new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development may have violated the Hatch Act.

The newspaper I write for is rather short-handed even on a good day, so two nights a week I do deliveries in order to help pick up the slack. I often have a parent or someone else riding shotgun with me, both to teach them my route and because being together in a car for a few hours is a chance to talk in private. There have been more than a few instances where someone insisted on asking why I made this stop before that stop, why I used the route I used, and so on. "I did a major re-adjustment of my route so that I could factor in delivering newspapers to the schools during the school year. There are three schools along this seemingly indirect route between A and B, and it has the advantage of helping me avoid what is often a busy intersection." "Traffic flow at this particular intersection is such that I do multiple right turns in a row when servicing this neighborhood and simply loop around rather than attempting to turn left." "Deer live along this road, which is why I usually go below the speed limit when I take it." "I typically park *here* when servicing that business over there because the space most directly in front of it is a loading zone that is sometimes in use." "Even though the customer wants their paper in a specific slot on their mailbox, the shoulder of this road is crumbling into the drainage ditch and so it's not safe to actually pull up right next to it." Things like that. Usually, after a night or two of riding with me, they understand why I do what I do.