Have A Happy Holy Day

Well, the season is upon us once again.

I've got no objections to that.

I just want to wish everyone a (belated) Happy Hanukkah, a slightly belated Slammin' Solstice and Cool Yule (they were yesterday), a slightly early Merry Christmas and Triumphant Sol Invictus (they both fall on December 25), a Super Saturnalia (it started on the 17th and ends tomorrow), a Good Kwanzaa (starts December 26), and a Blessed Boxing Day (December 26).

Tell me what I missed.

In Memoriam to Grandma W.

My maternal grandmother died recently. I'm going to miss her.

She had flaws and imperfections. I do not want to ignore that entirely.

I think her grandkids had a significantly different experience of her than her own children. To us, she was loving and attentive and probably sober.

One of my good memories, was that she was in a way my first employer. She had a paper route and hired me as her assistant. It was a rural route covering several miles of dirt roads, delivering a free weekly paper. She did the actual driving, and I folded and bagged the papers and put them in the tubes.

In a way, she was what I wanted in a boss. She didn't micromanage and she didn't intrude on my thoughts with a lot of empty chatter.

On the other hand, she didn't wait to make sure my arm was back inside the van before driving to the next house.

Anarchon- another Champions character sheet

This is kind of a placeholder post. I am working on something serious and with a bit of depth, but it's not finished yet. My maternal grandmother died a two days ago, and I am writing something to memorialize her. It's not done yet.


In the meantime, here's this, my second try at creating a Champions character:

Costumed Name: Anarchon
Real Name: Mikail Goldman
STR: 14 DEX: 20 CON: 15 BODY: 15
INT: 16 EGO: 13 PRE: 12 COM: 8
PD: 4 ED: 4 SPD: 3 REC: 6
END: 40 STUN: 42

POWERS (& Skills, they don't seem to have their own space on the character sheet):
Acrobatics, roll of 15 or less (14 Points)
Find Weakness, roll of 12 or less (15 Points)
Martial Arts, two extra *1/2 multiples (28 Points)
Climbing, roll of 14 or less (9 Points)
Stealth, roll of 13 or less (5 Points)

Shield: Armor Power for 9 PD, 3 ED, Obvious Inaccessible Focus, Unbreakable, Universal Applicability, Miscellaneous Limitation- Only Protects Anarchon's front and left flank. (10 Points)
Shield: 6D6 Energy Blast against Physical Defense, Obvious Accessible Focus, unbreakable, universal, Reduced Endurance cost twice (now takes 1 END) (30 Points)

Armor: Armor 3 PD, 3 ED, Obvious Inaccessible Focus, breakable, universal (7 Points)

Gun: 4D6 Ranged Killing Attack, OAF, breakable, universal, Charges: 6 (22 Points)
Knife: 1D6 Physical Hand-toHand Killing Attack, OAF, breakable, universal (7 Points)


CHARACTER DISADVANTAGES:
Hunted By NSA, a Large Group, with Advanced Weapons and Trained Personnel, Fanatic (comes up on 14 or less) (30 Points)
Hunted By FBI, a Large Group, with Advanced Weapons and Trained Personnel, Fanatic (comes up on 14 or less) (30 Points)
Hunted By Michigan staties, a Large Group, with Advanced Weapons and Trained Personnel, Full time (comes up on 11 or less) (13 Points)
Goes Berserk (on a 14 or less) when the following words are mentioned: government, politics, political, party (in the political sense), Republican, Democrat, capitalism, mayor, governor, senator, representative, judge, cop, gendarme, police, bill (in the legislative sense), capitol, conservative, liberal, right wing, left wing, president, law (Common trigger); recovers on 8 or less. (30 Points)
Public Identity (10 Points)
Psychological Limitation- Hates Parking Meters, Very Common, will take Irrational Actions (such as attacking parking meters in preference to living foes that are actually trying to hurt him) (20 Points)
2 Dice of Unluck (10 Points)


Backstory, such as it is: Mikail Goldman grew up reading comics. At one time his favorites were the patriotic heroes, like Nazi Smasher and Yankee Commando.

Somewhere, his viewpoint began to change. He saw the people of America as wonderful and beautiful and worth fighting for, but the Nation/Government itself as an evil to fight. He started small: jaywalking and never putting coins in the parking meters.

One parking ticket too many put him over the edge. He decided to become a costumed vigilante dedicated to fighting the power and aiding the little guy. He wears a lightly armored costume and carries a shield that he sometimes throws.

He is on the run from the law. So far his worst crimes are Attempted Murder and Assault With a Deadly Weapon, along with a lot of vandalism and destruction of public property (his favorite targets for property crimes are parking meters).

The first Champions character I ever tried to build

Costumed Name: Brick Breaker (named before I read the sample characters and saw Brick)
Real Name: William Wallace Standard
STR: 38 DEX: 13 CON: 25 BODY: 21
INT: 6 EGO: 12 PRE: 12 COM: 2
PD: 8 ED: 4 SPD: 2 REC: 12
END: 76 STUN:60

POWERS:
Instant Change (5 Points)
Density Increase started at 40 Points for +20 STR, +20 CON, +4 Body, +12 PD, +12 ED, -4" Knockback; Reduced END cost to 0, which made it 80 Points; thinking about it a little more: added a couple limitations: Only In Hero Form, and Only While Berserk, which I figure cut it back down to 40 Points again.

CHARACTER DISADVANTAGES:
Hunted By United States Army, a Large Group, with Advanced Weapons and Trained Personnel, Fanatic (comes up on 14 or less) (30 Points)
Unusual Looks (people react poorly on 14 or less) (15 Points)
Goes Berserk (on a 14 or less) when attacked; recovers on 8 or less. (25 Points)
Goes Berserk (on 11 or less) when made fun of; recovers on 11 or less. (15 Points)
Public Identity (10 Points)

(Brick Breaker currently has a surplus of Points, will reballance later; In fact, will probably rework from the ground up later as system knowledge and willingness to make judgment calls increases)

Backstory, such as it is: Dr. W. W. Standard was a promising bioengineer, hired by the United States Military to run one of those biological weapons research programs we like to claim we don't have. Through an act of sabotage, he was exposed to his own germ bomb. He mutated into a hideous creature and smashed up his lab.

Now he's on the run from his former employers, allegedly because of the danger Brick Breaker poses to the public. It's simply a fringe benefit that General "Earthquake" Jefferson will have some measure of personal satisfaction in obtaining revenge on Standard.

Le Mot Juste Sparkly as a Drag Queen on Ecsasy

The French have an expression: "Le mot juste" a fairly literal translation would be: the right word. It means more than that, though. It implies a certain perfection of phrasing that is almost sublime. It encapsulates the idea better than any other wording could.

I am not certain this is an example or not, but the two ideas have gotten intertwined in my brain. Some words and phrases stick in my mind. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." "Now is the winter of our discontent..." "Alas my love you do me wrong..." "Once upon a midnight dreary..." "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!"

I was at a meeting of Ways of the Earth, a religiously-oriented student organization at a local university. I was no longer a student, but this was a group worth making the commute once a week just to hang with.

One of the other students at the meeting was a twenty-something female who was into belly dance. She had along a costume she was hand-sewing sequins onto. She mentioned that she had an upcoming performance with her belly dance troupe that the costume had to be ready for. Then she uttered the following words: "This thing has to be sparkly. I mean really sparkly. Sparkly like a drag queen on Ecstasy, sparkly."

That phrase "sparkly like a drag queen on Ecstasy" burrowed into my brain there.

Now, when, let's say I look at a display of Christmas lights and tinsel and other sparkly things my internal monologue goes: "Ooh shiny! In fact, it's not just shiny; it's sparkly like a drag queen on Ecstasy."

Mnemonics and Pluto

I was thinking the other day.

Everything I remember from science classes is because of mnemonic devices. Unfortunately there is no mnemonic for remembering how to spell mnemonic. Until I googled it, my initial impulse was to spell it with a p as the first letter.

Anyways, most of what I remember from science classes is because of a mnemonic.

The spectrum of visible light: ROY G. BIV for Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo, and Violet.

Taxonomic classification order: Kings Play Cards On Fat Green Stools for Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.

The Nine planets of our home solar system: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pumpkins for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto.

Unfortunately Pluto no longer counts as a full-fledged planet, but has been demoted to minor planet. This rather spoils the mnemonic. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine is a sentence fragment.

So, Why Don't Bus Boys Get All The Girls

Bart Simpson (voiced by Nancy Cartwright): If this girl I'm seeing comes here, and she might, I wouldn't mind of you told her I was the kind of boy that does the dishes.
Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, with a tone of derison and sarcasm here): Yeah, bus boys get all the chicks.
-The Simpsons, episode entitled "The Good, The Sad and The Drugly" written by Marc Wilmore and directed by Rob Oliver


So, as the above quote indicates, telling a girl you're a bus boy is not the best opening line. I am somewhat puzzled about the why of it. Being a bus boy, among other things, by trade myself, I think there's a good case to be made for bus boys.

Males and females are mysteries to each other. At least that's the gist of the vibe I get from books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, He's Just Not That Into You, and Bridget Jones's Diary. Part of it is until humans perfect telepathy, everyone is a mystery to everyone else. While an individual might get lost in thought from time to time, really foreign territory is someone else's brain. This foreignness increases exponentially when crossing gender lines, though.

So because we are alien to each other, males and females, who attempt to make the effort towards some form of heterosexual romantic relationship, have some complaints. Two complaints I have heard females make of males are:

1) He's not very domestically inclined; he's no help around the house; he never cleans up after himself.
and
2) He's got some BS macho attitude about being head of the household, the one in charge, etc. and so on, simply because he's got the Y Chromosome and higher levels of testosterone.

Here's where bus boys might be an improvement:
1) If you are a true bus boy and it has taken root in your soul, you will feel a natural inclination to try and pick up after yourself a bit because dirty dishes left on the table are WRONG in much the same way that a Christian would find a Satanic shrine WRONG.
and
2) Maybe it's different other places, but where I bus tables, most of my bosses are women. While, I think I've always been more or less a feminist, low on macho BS to begin with, following the orders and instructions of so many females has killed what little I had left. I am ready, willing and eager to accept a female as my equal or superior. If other bus boys are similar, then that's a second point in our favor.

So if bus boys might represent a slight improvement over the average male, why aren't they the most sought after mates on the planet? Or at least in the industrialized Western countries where bus boys exist... I have two somewhat inter-related hypotheses:
1) Money
and
2) Social status

Money, I'll try to be concise about. Bus boying alone will never get you rich. In the whole game of dating, mating, and relating, having some disposable income at your disposal is a help.

As for social status, that's almost another essay. A while back I read a book called Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? It's one of those books of random facts that might be interesting. The whole book was sort of themed around sexuality and the whole weird mating dance that humans have built for themselves. I have since sold my actual physical copy of the book, so I am going from memory here, but this was a pretty memorable bit.

The book is presented in a sort of question and answer format. One question was something along the lines of, "why do women go for jerks?". The answer came from emerging scientific research. Among lower types of social mammals, like wolves and chimpanzees, females try to mate with a high status, as close as possible to the pack alpha, male. This ensures good genes for resultant offspring. Then the female will seek a lower status male to actually try to take care of her and her offspring.

There is no reason to believe these instincts and behavior patterns have entirely disappeared in humans. Now among humans, the type of aggressive behavior that allows one to rise to alpha status often comes off as jerky behavior.

Getting back to bus boys, we are almost certainly not the alpha of our local pack. We might not be the omega wolf, pushed to the fringes of the pack and forced to beg for scraps, either. The point remains that we are the guy approaching the alpha and asking if we can take away his salad plate so there will be room on the table for the main course.