Jealous! My sister lived in that area and we went squirrel walking a few times on visits but I was never so lucky as to have one crawl over me.
That walking up to you and standing up behavior - I've started to see that at a cemetery here in Portland that we walk around, but so far all the squirrels have waited a short distance away for food to be thrown to them.
Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there's a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).
There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They'll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.
Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They're just the best.
Dear god in heaven - I'm pretty sure that applying percentages to a d20 violates the geneva convention.
Thanks for the horror story! What a cautionary take in how to destroy an otherwise serviceable core mechanic.
Could you elaborate a little on the design issues?
From Wikipedia it looks like you roll 3d20 looking for at least two successes, where the TN is a character attribute.
I find success counting mechanics are much lower cognitive load at the table than adding up mechanics, plus there's a sensible limit to the number of dice and players will always have the target number written on their character sheet.
Plus that gives you a fairly clear 4 levels of success which is always easy to interpret as crit/pass/fail/crit fail.
I personally don't like using D20s but that core mechanic seems fairly smooth and elegant to me. Where does the physics degree part come in? Too many overly complex subsystems? Weird character creation?
That sounds like an incredibly exciting moment in the fiction! I always ask the other players what they think about character X bringing heat down on the crew.
One of the tensest most dramatic scenes i've seen in blades started with the characters doing a very threat-of-violence based intervention on the addict who kept mouthing off about their scores (+heat after indulging their vice). The target of the intervention made some very good points about the character who organized the intervention and there was this moment where everyone, one by one, changed the target of their drawn weapons.
Big shrimpin', catching zees!
Yes, he learned how to make bank on imperialism.
I wouldn't say the players are misunderstanding it
No, neither would I.
The people who are deliberately misunderstanding the term antisemitism are those who pretend they don't know that it means hatred towards jews by quibbling about the 'semite' part of the word. That whole comment was just about definitions of relevant terms, per the comment it was a reply to.
The israeli players are maliciously mischaracterising support for the palestinian cause as antisemitism. As a jew who frequently does not support the actions of the state of israel, this is a phenomenon I'm personally acquainted with and have quite strong feelings about.
Ah! My apologies.
the “you are using the wrong word because technically it shouldn’t mean what people use it for” arguments
Yep, totally agree. It seems like irrelevant trolling at best.
I just can't agree with this line of reasoning. It's so close to all the violent white supremacists who whine about how unfair and damaging it is to be called racist.
Hatred against jews has uniquely strong roots in western cultures that merits a specific term - every right wing conspiracy theory is still just reheated blood libel and protocols of the elders of zion. It's deserving of a powerfully negative term.
If your opponent in an argument is antisemitic, you should win. Of course, anti-zionism is not antisemitism and criticism of the state of israel is not antisemitism.
Misuse of the term is something to be challenged through discourse, rather than scrapping the term, I think.
Antisemitism is understood to mean prejudice against Jews.
Semitic languages is the formal name for the branch of the Afroasiatic language family that includes modern Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic and ancient languages like Akkadian and Phoenician.
Semitic people isn't a term that anyone uses for real, but if they did it would refer to peoples who have traditionally spoke semitic languages.
It's frustrating that the term antisemitism refers to prejudice against only a specific subset of the peoples who would fall under the semitic label. But deliberately misunderstanding the term antisemitism is also quite frustrating.
Hey Ester, since miles has your bag, are you now Bag Hitch Ester?