Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.
In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.
Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.
Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:
1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.
2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:
Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.
Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.
Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.
As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.
Despite all the law enforcement resources expended, empirical research on the dangers or benefits of erotic services ads has been sparse. But a new study provides strong evidence that when law enforcement closes down sites like Craigslist or Redbook, women die.
The September 2017 study, authored by West Virginia University and Baylor University economics and information systems experts, analyzes rates of female homicides in various cities before and after Craigslist opened an erotic services section on its website. The authors found a shocking 17 percent decrease in homicides with female victims after Craigslist erotic services were introduced.
The data does not provide a single clear explanation as to why female homicide rates drop so steeply, Scott Cunningham, one of the paper’s authors, told ThinkProgress. It’s possible, for example, that when Craigslist opens erotic services ads, some women in abusive domestic situations decide to become sex workers, move out, and so escape violent homicide at the hands of their spouses or boyfriends.
The most likely explanation, though, Cunningham says, is that sex workers simply make up a huge percentage of female homicide victims. When sex workers are safer, female homicide rates drop significantly.
[…]
Once sex workers move indoors, they are much safer for a number of reasons, Cunningham said. When you’re indoors, “you can screen your clients more efficiently. When you’re soliciting a client on the street, there is no real screening opportunity. The sex worker just has to make the split second decision. She relies on very limited and complete information about the client’s identity and purposes. Whereas when a sex worker solicits indoors through digital means, she has Google, she has a lot of correspondence, she can ask a lot of questions. It’s not perfect screening, but it’s better.”
[…]
In theory, closing down advertising is supposed to reduce exploitation of women. In practice, when resources are taken away from people living on the edge of poverty, they have fewer options and are less able to protect themselves.
For all these reasons access to the Internet can transform the experience of sex work. Young women who have been able to screen clients using sites like Craigslist, “almost feel like this is a safe job because they have these tools,” DiAngelo said.
Sex workers report that free online advertising makes them safer. There is now data showing that erotic services ads significantly decrease female homicide rates. So, will law enforcement back down and allow these sites to operate again?
(Click the link for the full article, quotes posted for brevity)
Once you know the consequence of a choice you may make you become responsible for that outcome. That means those who campaign against uncoerced sexwork and those who legislate against it are absolutely as responsible for the consequential increase in murders of women as the murderers, not as responsible as A murderer but as all of them put together. Because a choice is made that is knowingly resulting in all those murders.
Arguments about the problems with the sex work industry must be weighed against the deaths and whether other ways of dealing with those problems exist. Other methods of reducing the murders can be examined for efficacy in comparison with the least harm being the ethical choice. Ideological positions that don’t take into account the data of consequences are still mass-murder and no defence.
I don’t enjoy slamming writers. I really don’t. I *want* to enjoy reading my favorite characters. I want to look forward to their appearances. I want to feel good about supporting well written books that feature them.
But when said character’s personality is routinely mangled and her dialogue is the polar opposite of what she SHOULD sound like, you’re damn right I’m not happy.
Say it with me, now. Laura. Kinney. Is. Not. Kate. Bishop.
Which is really sad because the other bew X-Men came off much better, IMO.
Kelly Thompson and Matt Fraction WERE the ones TO basically write Kate Bishop completely differently than her YA personality…so…
I will emphasize, “Worst Served”, as in “deserves far better than the scripting and direction has provided.
Jodie Whittaker is charismatic, fun, and wacky as the Doctor ought to be, but everything else just feels like disassociated parts that don’t fit together yet are still miming as though they were a clock. Ideas and concepts bounce around each other but rarely interconnect in a meaningful way. Everything feels very “First draft”, the ideas are sometimes interesting but are rarely explored in-depth, and the aliens mostly come across as samey afterthoughts.
It’s the version of Doctor Who that exists within a comedic bit about Doctor Who fans.
The show has leaned into the historical episodes, and the examination of historical and social events through them has mostly been handled well, I’d say, but the sci-fi that’s supposed to glue everything together has been dry and crumbly. It isn’t even that the show has been exceptionally bad, just lackluster. Even the next episode previews are so short and vague that they aren’t even really tantalizing.
Seriously, what are our monsters this season? The Stenza are another warrior/hunter race only all the good gimmicks were taken so they adorn their skin with the teeth of their victims. Next we had talking rags that strangle you, that’s a monster one of the Mock the Week regulars might come up with to make fun of declining BCC special effects budgets. Then we’ve got a racist with a time machine and a thankfully limited imagination.
After that we get giant spiders, not related to Metebelis (seriously, the Doctor could have at least relocated them there), mud aliens that are mostly just people in zombie makeup, and then a Dollar store Zagreus Knockoff but mostly carnivorous moths (which was the Isle of Rangoon’s Joke, thank you very much) and someone’s Labyrinth OC. Oh yeah, and there was that species that was recording the engrams of dying people so they could live on…. haven’t seen that plot point before. In this show. Multiple times. Since the reboot.
It all sounds like the kind of ridiculous stuff the Doctor fights, and it is, but all the good ideas are made somehow dull and the bad ideas are too restrained to be truly fun. None of the new aliens is really interesting enough to warrant even a revisit, and there’s certainly no contenders for new iconic baddies. The Slitheen were terrible, but at least they were trying. The most visually interesting design this season has been a ball of sparking eels that you can’t really discern clearly most of the time.
I hope next season finds a direction and makes things interesting again. Jodie Whittaker shouldn’t have to wait until Big Finish to get to really shine.
I have always wondered that myself. You see it with Jumborg Ace and Jumborg 9.
Even more Ultraman like was Jumborg’s ally, the Alien Emerald.
Oh an then there is Fireman though in his case, being that he is fire-related, I would say that’s why he is red.
Then there is Redman but, well, his name has Red in it and is borrowed from one of the unused ideas for one of the other Ultra Heroes.
Red is also a very important color in Japanese culture. It represents Power and is the traditional color of the sun as seen on the Japanese flag. A lot of powerful heroes are red, including the traditional leaders of Sentai teams. There are some non-Tsuburaya Heroes that have a similar color scheme as well such as Iron King produced by Nippon Gendai and Senkosha
:
As well as Toho’s Godman:
and Megaloman:
Admittedly, you might look at those last three as Ultraman copycats but the point still stands.
However, Tsuburaya had a few non-red and silver (or white) heroes as well such as Mirrorman who is Green and Silver:
And Izeborg who is Red, Silver and Green!
Thanks for the Question!
Izenborg: for when the Krampus is not enough to deal with naughty children at Christmas.
deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
The problem with with the criticism of “callout culture” as unmerciful is, in my eyes, that most people are suspicious of mercy because it always gets extended to the culturally prominent and not to their “less important” victims.
And this goes doubly so for the white people saying shit like “Love your racist/LGBT-Phobic/Trump-voting neighbor uwu,” who A) Likely don’t have any marginalized friends affected by that shit, and B) Are basically telling marginalized people “My feeling of normality is worth more than your safety”
To use an extreme example, all the efforts to re-habilitate George Dubya by the centrist weenie brigade are basically telling all the civillians who died because of his war started on lies to eat shit.
What I’m sayin’ is, mercy towards the marginalized and towards the powerful is not equivalent and we need to realize that.
Monsters and Stuff 