Noel

This looks excellent. Do you know where I can find something like this for Lake County?

I admit I was thinking more in relation to board games and somewhat lesser minis games. But there are a lot of RPGs where if they don't have a good index the book is unusable, and that feels like a problem.

Not just explaining, but explaining to people with no background knowledge. Sooo many games treat their rulebooks like technical manuals, it's nuts. A good rulebook should feel like a demo script not a textbook.

As someone who has done a lot of teaching and demoing of games, the number of times that I have desperately wanted to rewrite a rulebook is more than I can count.

Agreed, and because of that I wince every time I read a poorly written rulebook. Newbies have a hard enough time without having to bounce across 16 pages of dense reiterative language that could be condensed down to 8 and some pictures if the writer had any sense of clarity and brevity.

I've been pretty uncomfortable with calamari ever since I started learning about octopi. On the other hand the more I learn about chickens the more fine I am with eating them.

Lived in Santa Fe for two years. Had regular conversations with my mother about how if you paint the sky the way it actually looks it would be called unrealistic.

I am deeply tired of people saying they can't make art. I'm even more tired of people who obviously don't *want* to make art, but seem to believe they are entitled to it anyways.

The appetite is absolutely there. It's just that they've all been gobbled up and gutted. The closest thing in my area is Shaw, which is awful. The FB groups and such are currently serving the need, but feel more like the old grocery store bulletin boards than real news outlets. It's all so scattered

I have a deep rooted belief that people are both absolutely awful and incredibly amazing. These are not contradictory beliefs, and are more than often both true of any particular individual.

📌

I know a lot of people deeply upset with how the last shutdown went. And while I get that, having seen the first hand effects of SNAP not going out on time I believe it was the right call.

This is a good explanation as to the why and how this one is likely to go including the likely break points.

It's -10°F here. No one is opening their windows in this weather, or at all if it's below 40° or above 78°. Also it's called "airing out the house" in American English, not house burbing..

Oh my God, I would stab something. That's absolutely awful.

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Hmm, thinking on it "I didn't ask for this" is 1) a lot different from I didn't want to do this in the first place. And 2) Almost always incredibly whiny and self serving.

Greatness thrust upon you doesn't make someone more deserving. It just means they did a good job in a shitty situation.

Maybe it depends on the story but I mostly see refusal of the call portrayed as being petulant or selfish, then the character is changed out of those characteristics by the process of the journey.

That feels like a weird take on it. Mostly it marks him as stuck in his ways, or more charitably content with life. I don't see how that ends up making one more deserving outside of some weird protestant contexts. Unwillingness to go do the things that need doing is not a virtue.

I never saw the refusal of the call as being about humility. I always saw it as being unwillingness to move forward without outside forces pushing.

Your output is gonna be a lot slicker if you can put more money into it, but as a hobby experimenting is cheap. There are a lot of arts where start up money and studio space is a bigger factor to just making anything at all. Glassblowing in particular comes to mind.

This just isnt true. Even as kids in the 80's and 90's we had access to home video cameras. Today cell phone cameras fit in our pockets, entire sound studios fit in our closets and inexpensive home editing software is better than much of the post production software that existed back then.

I remember being a kid and being physically unable to fall asleep until 2-3am every night and then having to get up at 6am to catch the bus. It's no wonder I was sick all the damned time.

It would take a two-word amendment to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to subject ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the same liability for constitutional violations that local and state officers currently face.

If Congress actually cared about what it's seeing, it could pass that overnight.

Painted bas relief of a table worth of veggies and flowers.

Nearly finished. A few minor tweaks to the paint and I need to decide on the framing before I go and cut a full mat for the piece.

Shout out to @distractable.bsky.social for the mini easels. They are great for this.

I need an answer above Often that says the mere existence of ICE qualifies as the use of unnecessary force.

Digital sculpt of Dance, with a few leaves added, her dress extended across her knees, her tain extended and some of the filigree frame lines removed to make it less busy and more framed.

I currently have Music ready to start painting and I'm doing some tweaking to Dance to make it fit the final image I want a bit better.

Most of that I can do with just trimming a bit and adding a bit, but the upper left corner might need a full rework to create the framing effect I'm looking for.

Alphonse Mucha's Music, a woman sitting woman in an art nouveau frame with birds behind her. On the left is a semi round bas relief digital version. On the right an illustration of the original art.

Alphonse Mucha's Dance, a woman on her tip toes in an art nouveau frame with leaves swirling around her. On the left is a semi round bas relief digital version (for some reason lack in leaves). On the right an illustration of the original art.

In addition to sculpting and painting my own Mucha flats, I'm really enjoying working on these two that Oroborus Miniatures makes

The states run elections, not the feds. They literally don't have enough goons to cancel elections. And the thing is, even if that somehow happened it wouldn't consolidate their power it would end the union. Which would be awful, chaotic and violent but definitely not what I'd call a fascist win.

I covered the Chicago Police Department for years and it's impossible to miss the similarities to shootings here over the years. The tactical chaos. The car-as-weapon official account that doesn't match the known evidence. The immediate insistence on justification by forces representing the shooter.

Zoomed in on the wonderful massively high resolution scan on their website and it appears the ground he was working on is a grey green, so that's where I have started.