Wow, what a turnout! Thank you for stopping by! I realize your time is valuable, and things are a little crowded, so let me start with a few disclaimers so those who wish to can leave right away. ( Read more... )

I Am A: True Neutral Human Druid/Wizard (3rd/3rd Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-15

Dexterity-14

Constitution-13

Intelligence-14

Wisdom-14

Charisma-14


Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Primary Class:
Druids gain power not by ruling nature but by being at one with it. They hate the unnatural, including aberrations or undead, and destroy them where possible. Druids receive divine spells from nature, not the gods, and can gain an array of powers as they gain experience, including the ability to take the shapes of animals. The weapons and armor of a druid are restricted by their traditional oaths, not simply training. A druid's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast.


Secondary Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

...but this time on a national scale. And rather than being about trans-women being barred from a ritual at Pantheacon, it's about Susan Fluke being barred from testifying before Congress.

Once again, people are more pissed off over an asshole speaking Assholese than they are about the wrongful act of exclusion that the asshole is backing.

Did you catch that? I mean, Rush Limbaugh called a liberal woman a slut. Like that doesn't happen every goddamned day, every single time that meat head opens his mouth. Let's all be shocked that a hateful, sexist pig said something hateful and sexist and piggish...to the point of letting it overshadow the fact that NO WOMEN WERE ALLOWED TO TESTIFY IN A HEARING ABOUT ACCESS TO A DRUG FOR WOMEN. Yeah, keep talking about Rush. Forget ol' whatsername and all that chitter chatter about contra-whoozits and just keep feeding the media buzz about Rush Limbaugh. I'm sure the glut of attention will really hurt his ratings, not to mention alienating his regular advertisers. I'm sure they'll all be shocked that he would ever stoop to such crass and insensitive name calling.

*headdesk*

A reply to lokhlass

Quick background for those just joining in: From what I'm told, Z Budapest held a ritual at Pantheacon. She billed it as being about celebrating all the diversity of the feminine form or something like that--basically, for all women--and then added that trans-women weren't allowed. Apparently, she's stirred this pot of shit before, and general opinion is that she was just looking to start trouble by doing it again this time.

A friend of mine posted about this, and when I joined the conversation, there were already 233 comments to the post. People felt very strongly. But what struck me was the focus of their ire. While everybody was royally pissed off (and rightly so) at the way Z deliberately excluded trans-women from her definition of "woman," nobody seemed bothered in the least by the fact that she was excluding them from the ritual itself. So the action of discriminating against trans-women wasn't the problem for these folks. The fact that Z decided to be nasty about it and use exclusive language rub salt in the wound was the crime. The only crime.

I have a problem with this. For starters, I think if somebody is going to assert her animosity toward a whole category of people by declaring that they're unwelcome, it's silly to expect that person is going to be all warm and fuzzy in the language she uses to refer to the people she hates. Indeed, if a group claims to be all-inclusive and tolerant, that means that all viewpoints are equally valid--even the politically incorrect ones--and to say that one perspective is valid and another one is not suggests that some agenda narrower than "all-inclusive" is being pushed.

Secondly, I think it's ass-backwards to get all bent out of shape over hostile words while being perfectly okay with hostile actions. This position, or perhaps just my inability to communicate it clearly, is catching some flak. Below is a too-long-to-post reply to a comment someone left.
( Read more... )

Remember that blog I was talking about starting a couple years ago? It was to be some kind of how-to thing on homesteading and such, sort of a "survival guide for those who aren't survivalists." Remember? And I never did anything with it? Well, that's not exactly true. It's been stewing all this time. I think the stew is done. The original idea has...matured. I'm happy I held off. It could not have been before 2011 what I feel it can become now.

Oh, one thing, though. I had hoped this would be a money-making venture when I first conceived the idea two years ago. I had hoped I could get paid for writing or selling things or advertising or something. Now, though, I'm not sure how that would even be possible without damaging the credibility of the blog--my credibility as its author. Maybe it could lead to promoting other people's workshops and classes and such. I guess that'd be alright. But as a chiefly commercial activity, I just don't see it happening.

It occurred to me earlier this evening. Capitalism and Communism both share a crime in common: they both steal wealth from the people who produced it to give it to people who didn't. In a communist state, the less productive worker steals from the more productive one...and to make the system possible, the government steals from them both. In a capitalist state, the employer steals from the worker. Socialism attempts to redress this through reparations, stealing back a portion of what was stolen and returning it to the original producers. It seems to me it would be better just to avoid all the stealing in the first place and let each person control the product of his labor individually.

Is anybody else's account "temporarily unavailable?" I was posting something and it locked me out. I'd heard Anonymous was threatening to take it down, but I thought that was supposed to have been on either the 5th or the 11th. I'd also heard it was too big for them to actually do. Interesting, though. I've never had this happen with Facebook. LJ, sure, all the time, but not FB.

I think it's brave of you to be willing to be a voice of dissent amidst such passionate opposition.

A horrible cost has been paid, but I think bin Laden's life is the least of these costs.

There's no reason for gloating. It took the entire US military (with some foreign assistance) ten years to catch this one lanky, infirm man hiding in the mountains. That's nothing to gloat about.

I don't think for a moment that this solves anything in "the war on terror." In fact, I'm rather expecting an attempt at another big 9/11-like hit within the next year or two now. With both bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed out of command, there have to be other rising stars within the movement--and that's what Al Qaeda is, a movement, not an organization. Al Qaeda will no more be ended by bin Laden's death than the American Civil Rights movement was ended by MLK's.

Re: "dragging us down to his level"--I think it's self-deception to believe we were ever at any higher level in the first place. America created Osama. He was an ally against the Soviets, a brave "freedom fighter." His mission never changed; only his target did.

If a line needs to be drawn between justified military action and simple bloodlust, you must first define what justifies military action. I've been of the opinion from the beginning that 9/11 did not. Terrorist actions not committed by other nation-states are crimes, and crimes are matters for law enforcement. (Unless they occur on the high seas, oddly enough. I have no problem with the Navy going after pirates. Invading other people's homelands is something else, though. And then, of course, we also open up the debate of whether there's really any difference in whether the American men with guns are wearing patches that say FBI or US ARMY.)

I think there's an urge among "civilized" people to want to sanitize killing. We might see a military action as justified, but we're not supposed to get exuberant about it. "Young man, go burn that village and shoot anyone who runs out--but don't have fun doing it! Don't enjoy your work or take pride in it. That would be sick."

This is one area in which I break with the Christian ethos. I feel that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing with your whole heart. If an enemy must be killed, be savage and revel in killing him; if you cannot, your heart is telling you that killing him is immoral. No amount of professionalism or noble statements of regret will make it right.

And I think that's where you're at right now, Don. This savagery you see around you is leaving you queasy, and that whispers to your soul that maybe killing bin Laden was immoral.

But how else could this possibly have ended? Was there any hope of reconciliation? Was he going to surrender and spend the rest of his days in a cell next to someone who killed a cashier in a liquor store robbery? This had to happen.

So I don't think it's really that killing bin Laden was immoral. Rather, I think that many people are just averse to violence even when it's appropriate. There are certain forces in our culture that condition us to feel repulsed by any kind of physical harm, even to the point of being repulsed by the death of our own meat. This is unnatural, and needs to be treated as a dysfunction. An eye for an eye might leave the whole world blind, but turning the other cheek just leaves the bad guys in charge. The meek won't inherit the earth. Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't.

These people you see celebrating the murder of one angry, confused man in Pakistan aren't evil. They just received news that Satan is dead. Forgive them their joy

Among the many treasures that the former owners of our house on Woodland Avenue left behind is a mill. I wasn't sure what sort of mill it was meant to be, and I'm still not. The instructions caution that grinding some types of plastic can cause static electricity, and the part where the ground-up stuff comes out has a threaded sleeve for screwing on a Mason jar. It doesn't have burrs like a grist mill. Rather, it reminds me of sort of a cross between a chipper and scissors. There's a wheel with knives on it. When the wheel rotates, the material being ground gets pinched between the knives and some sharp little ledges on a ring surrounding the wheel.

I know this because I tinkered with it tonight, got it working, and used it to make chicken feed. I'd been working on taxes all last night and all day today, so I didn't get to the feed store as planned before they closed. Luckily, I had a 50lb. bag of whole corn I'd bought for deer, most of a 40 lb. bag of sunflower seed, a 10 lb. bag of rice, and a bag of poultry grit.

The mill has three little screens--"sieves" the instructions call them--of different sizes. You attach the one you want and get anywhere from a coarse powder to what must be something like corn starch. I installed the coarsest sieve and was impressed with how the cornmeal was pouring out of it...until it locked up and caused the electric motor to shut down about five minutes later. ( Read more... )

Yes. A few different stuffed animals used to take turns accompanying me places. I've still got at least two of them around here, probably in the kids' toy boxes.