To add on, at my work we started getting yubikeys for the people who didnt want Microsoft’s authenticator on their phone and found they still need to download the mfa to set up the yubikey in the first place. So its not a perfect solution if you dont want the authenticator to touch your phone at all.

I can also confirm that the help desk members who are not enlightened about Microsoft will ridicule you for not wanting the MFA even if its reasonable to not want Microsoft on your phone. As much as we think all techs are Linux nerds, I have the opposite at my work. Some of the higher up techs are constantly trying to get people to switch to windows 11…

Good ol Billy Shepherd

R/ambien used to have some of my favorite posts of all time. There is one where a guy recorded himself staying up on his (legally prescribed) ambien with a go pro. Nothing too crazy happens but seeing his cognition decline and him just become a top tier lol so random bot was hilarious. He kept getting angry at all the statutes and cardboard cutouts in his house because he thought they were moving haha

Saw them live in Boston! They’re fantastic musicians and if you have the opportunity to see them do their shit live I would highly recommend.

I’m proud to be wrong. The beef dudes or the imperfect dwarf are my favorite

I think America is really good at getting attention so everything good and bad is magnified by how much exposure it gets. So our dumbasses are some of the loudest and best at being noticed for their dumbassery in the whole world.

As an american, I can confirm these are not our best and brightest. The best and brightest have either started leaving or they are seduced by big business and paid absurd (for working class) salaries to ignore the problems of the country.

Wow you definitely aren’t american as I’m scratching my head to even figure out what you mean by some of these. The average grill in america is a standalone outdoor cooking station with a metal grate used as the cooking surface. They are also found in restaurants but usually they are in a bit of a different form that what the average American thinks of as a grill. the grates give the characteristic lines of grilled food that many seek. A griddle is a grill where the grate has been replaced by a flat piece of metal, often used for small or runny foods that would fall between the grates of a regular grill.

We also dont typically have standalone broilers. Most american ovens have a broil option where the top heating element becomes very hot and can be used to brown the food.

The main difference between grilling and broiling, in my american eyes, is how they are used. Grilling is a technique for cooking food from start to finish. Broiling is a technique used at the end of cooking something to brown it or something to that effect. I wouldn’t use the broiler in my oven to cook a whole meal, and I wouldn’t turn on the grill or griddle just to brown something.

In my eyes saute is when you use only enough oil to keep something from sticking or burning, while frying is when you use enough oil that it starts to really add to the flavor of what you’re cooking.

I think the worst thing Americans have done is the air fryer though. Its just a fucking tiny convection oven, there’s no frying going on at all. They just know us fat Americans are conditioned to salivate when we hear the word fry and cower in terror from big science words like ‘convection’ lol

All of these maps were made with Stars without Number revised edition, or dark heresy first edition in mind. They aren’t super intentionally designed to cater to either of those systems though.

I can certainly try. If I still have the dungeon draft files still I can load the original projects and make both clean and hex versions without much issue

Its not surprising. I used to work at one of these places and they would laugh at any viable alternative acting like it would never have a chance. They also were well aware of the fact that some of their distributors illegally kill the returned horshoe crabs and turn them into fertilizer. So any claims that they’re not hurting the horshoe crabs are bullshit. They’ve just offloaded the hurt to contractors who are 50/50 on actually trying to protect the crabs and just using them as bait. Even if they didn’t do that, I’ve always been suspect that the crabs do great in the wild after losing 60% of their blood.

They are talking about giving to charities, not directly to the homeless. Even if they were talking about giving directly, the drug argument is very silly. If they’re hungry they’re gonna buy food first. Maybe they’ll try to buy less than they need so they can use the leftover for drugs, but that’s their prerogative.

I work with the homeless and the vast majority are just worried about meeting their basic needs and being treated like a human.

Yeah exactly! I especially find this true for sci-fi. There are some great battlemaps for sci-fi out there, but they tend to depict very similar places in similar settings, as another commenter mentioned, or just be a recreation of something from star wars for the umpteenth time. There’s a place for maps of wildly different locales in sci-fi games. Alien planets have backwater towns too! Not every map needs to be a space station, a hangar, or a cyberpunk city.

Hopefully I’ve helped make a teeny tiny dent in the sci fi map variety issue.

SCP already seems like a great source. Its always fun to catch a glimpse of monsters as a teaser for that sort of game. I think some amount of sci fi can definitely enhance paranormal settings, but I understand not wanting to lean too much into that.

The Simon stalenhag books that the Tales from the Loop setting originated in may be very good inspiration for hooks. They have beautiful art with vignettes and stories from one or a few characters perspectives. Anything that is too sci fi can be swapped out for an equivalent paranormal phenomenon, or completely rewritten. The best part about them is that the stories are very minimal as to not distract too much from the art, this adds a lot of empty space for things to be added, which kinda makes it perfect for plot hooks. Also they art itself is gorgeous.

If you are looking for works functionally very similar to SCP, their sister site the Wanderer’s library is much more fantastical/paranormal. It may be a step too fantastical, but adapting single elements from high fantasy stories is a good way to tease a deeper weirder world.

In podcasts you can checkout the Magnus Archives. It is a podcast about a fiction organization that is like a much less powerful and scientific version of the SCP foundation. Not much else to say than the stories are pretty good and might inspire good hooks.

My final moonshot recommendation would be… Take a stand ability from a weird random Jojo’s bizarre adventure character, slap it on a hybrid of two cryptids, and you have a grade A paranormal creature escaped from a government lab. For example, a moth winged giant ape that can turn dead animals into other animals it can control, or maybe an alien loch ness monster that is appearing in multiple completely disconnected bodies of water by traveling through the reflections of a giant tower at the center of town.

Don’t know if this is helpful or just rambling. Personally I think the tales from the loop setting is at its best when its a near 50/50 SciFi/paranormal so I wouldn’t shy away from using tech to make things even spookier. Ghosts and machines don’t mix well, but in a good way.

Interesting, I was just wondering if I missed some deeper connection. I am unironically that guy who has only really played sci-fi RPGs, not shadowrun though. I don’t inherently associate European tolkien-esque fantasy with RPGs but I can see why others do.

What does this have to do with RPGs?

Kind of a pedestrian use case, which might be good for flavoring, but you could make a sweet “air” hockey table out of them. I imagine there being a future version of air hockey that actually magnets in a vacuum. You could basically flavor it as truly frictionsless air hockey, with the games having the puck fly around at incredible speeds.

Assuming that cars, or the preferred method of transportation uses the magnets to get around, you could also have new kinds of Rollerblades and skateboards that use the magnets to travel the infrastructure. Maybe its something that only punk kids do by slapping stolen magnets on planks of wood. They can cause problems as they constantly get in the way of the car users.

You could also flavor the skateboards/ as a corporation backed cost cutting measure. The only people with magnet cars are the elite/ultra rich and everyone else can only afford a magnet scooter or whatever. If you want a really cynical world you could even give right of way to the magnet cars, so common folk would have to dodge them traveling at incredible speeds.

I think there are a ton more examples, but I bet, assuming the super conductor is reliably reproducible, that we will have crazier use cases within a decade IRL than we could dream up here. Probably some weird way to make sprinklers work better or something

I finished a 3+ year long weekly Stars without Number campaign this week. An amazing experience as I have never experienced a campaign from start to completion on either side of the table. It’s almost left a hole in me as I started this campaign with the goal of running to completion and now I’ve done it and am not sure where to go.

Wasn’t the most climactic or dramatic ending but the game was run as a sandbox with this being the ending to a goal they have been working towards for a long time. Felt rewarding regardless.

I also co-dm a 40k dark heresy 1e campaign and play in a torchbearer campaign but neither of those had particularly notable sessions compared to my game that ended.

Finally it’s not playing, but I have been thoroughly reading Lancer to prep for my next long term campaign.