#This is set a few hundred years ago relative to our campaign
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tea-with-eleni · 1 month ago
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Invitation to Dinner
Vasili knocked on the door to my room at the inn before Nyshka, for once. He smiled down at me. I know I looked unwell. I hadn’t slept, again. The nightmares were getting worse. Still, he was too polite to say, “Volenta, you look like hell.” Instead, he said, “Good morning, Miss Volenta. May I accompany you to breakfast?” I took the arm he offered and let him lead me downstairs to the inn’s common room.
“I’ve already eaten,” he said, pulling out my chair for me with a smile, “But I hope you won’t deny me the chance for your company.” I tried to smile back, but this morning, something about him made me uneasy. He looked as charming and as well put-together as ever. He set his bag on the table and began to dig through its contents. “This isn’t purely a social visit, I’m afraid to say,” he said. “I do have a message to deliver.”
“From your employer?” I asked. I was going to be very smug if I could get him to admit that he worked for Strahd. Nyshka still didn’t believe me, even though I’d convinced everyone else. “Something like that,” he said, pulling out an envelope. “I think it might be an invitation from the castle, actually. I’d hoped to receive something like it myself, but, alas.” He shrugged. “Perhaps another time.” I frowned at my toast. I’d eaten about half of it, but I hadn’t tasted it. The nightmares were still too fresh in my mind.
“Should we be worried?” I asked. “He isn’t inviting us to the castle to eat us or anything, right?” Vasili raised an eyebrow and almost looked like he was going to laugh. I tried to smile, to laugh it off, even though the question was entirely serious. “I mean, given the rumors…”
“I don’t think he has the habit of eating anyone like you,” he said gently, patting my hand. I met his eyes, then had to look away. There was something in his gaze that was… almost too intense for the conversation. “Are you alright, Miss Volenta?” he asked. I shrugged, wishing suddenly that I was anywhere else — or that anyone else had joined us! It was silly, I belonged to Lady Gold Heart herself, mother would laugh at me… but there was something about him.
“I’m fine,” I said, faking a cough. “Just… a little nervous. The lord of the land and his lady are supposed to be… intense.” He did laugh a little, then, and I knew I was blushing. He hadn’t let go of my hand. “You don’t have anything to worry about, I’m sure, Miss Volenta,” he said. “Just pretend I’m there. Or, if you mess anything up, feel free to blame me. My reputation can survive some tarnish from Lord Strahd.” I pulled my hand away. His hands were cold, and it left me wanting to bury my fingers in my skirts. He must have forgotten his gloves, despite the chill weather. “Your reputation might survive,” I said, “But if we accidentally insult his lady or something, will you? I mean…” I tried to sound more confident than I felt as I tapped my neck. He smiled and shook his head. “I’ll be fine,” he promised. “Truly. You’ll be fine as well. He just invites interesting people to the castle sometimes. Maybe you'll secure a patron for your— what was it? Merry band of misfits?” It was my turn to shrug, laugh off how my sister had introduced us.
He left me shortly after that, so I could read the invitation myself. The wax seal looked official and the text told me almost nothing about what to expect, once I deciphered the antique style of handwriting. Strahd von Zarovich apparently thought it was time we met face-to-face and we were invited to join him for dinner in two evenings’ time. I had a feeling the invitation was going to prove compulsory. It wasn’t the most pleasant surprise with which to greet my sister and our friends when they finally joined me, but at least it was better than telling them that I had, once more, dreamed about amber and shadows and teeth and far, far, far too much blood.
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azerothtravel · 2 years ago
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Secret Origin
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I'm just an old time Warcraft nerd who's too dumb to quit. My first WC game was Warcraft II, when I was in high school. I gravitated toward the Horde because they were funnier. I liked the game, but wasn't too good at it. Jump ahead to the release of Warcraft III, it's a whole other thing. I read all the lore in the huge manual. I was completely taken with the concept of orcs as once noble, tragic victims trying to make their way in the world and atone for their crimes. A friend of mine had me read some of the novels. I was suddenly way, way into the setting. Plus, I knew a lot of people who played WC3. I enjoyed the Orgrimmar campaign in Frozen Throne with no idea it was more or less a test run for WoW.
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But I didn't like MMOs. I wasn't sure about WoW. Then I got into the beta. I hauled my whole-ass desktop over to the house of the same friend who loaned me those books, and we were up til 4am downloading the client and then getting started. Gormorash the orc warrior was born that night (And so was Skarsnik the troll hunter, but he lost interest after BC). I was immediately sold. Running around Azeroth at ground level, full of detail from the RTS games, was a ton of fun. Gormorash went on many strange adventures in beta, like a hilariously inept "raid" on Westfall where half our group died before we got there and none of us were even level 60.
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Then Gormorash was rebooted on Argent Dawn US when the game launched, a member of <Flaming Skull Clan> with several other friends of mine.
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By middle 2005, almost literally everyone I knew played WoW. My oldest friends, friends from college, friends from the internet, relatives. Basically 2 friends and my parents were the only people not playing. Friends of mine who didn't know each other met and bonded through WoW. It was a glorious time.
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By the end of 2006, I'd been through 2 guild collapses and one server move, as they opened up free transfers to Eitrigg and my friends all took it. I wasn't sure I'd keep playing. The novelty had worn off for most of my friends. I wasn't that into raiding, and doing Arathi Basin over and over was only so interesting (Gormorash just lived in Hammerfall for like a year). I was maybe gonna quit. And then, in early 2007, my brother found 2 Collector's Editions of BC just sitting on a shelf in a store, and asked if I wanted one. I had the vanilla CE, but I'd missed BC when they were released, and didn't buy BC at all. He bought them and shipped me one, and we leveled 60-70 together. It was a lot of fun.
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Along the way, I started a new guild with some online friends, and Gormorash is still in it. He's never missed an expansion. Most people have fallen off the wagon. Our guild typically only has 3 active members at any given time these days, but that's fine with me. Sometimes a couple people come back for major content. It was lore that got me into all this, and that remains my primary motivator for playing. My endgame is more PvP and leveling alts than raiding, but the game has literally never supported those 2 things better than right now (2023), so that's pretty good. I still have a good time. And that's why I have hundreds of screenshots to choose from stretching from the 2004 open beta to just a few days ago to post on this blog. With the sad exception of most of 2006, lost in a hard drive failure, I have a comprehensive collection of every screenshot I ever took, and that's what this blog is all about.
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I've made a few other Gormorashes on other servers, but rarely leveled them very far. Someone out there made a Gormorash that isn't me, a fact that shocked me when I found out. Who stole my name? Was it you? I have characters of every race on both factions, but still tend to prefer Horde. If you see me, say hello!
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Gormorash is an orc warrior who came of age in the camps. With his brother, Rugurrash, he's led a guild of adventures for many years, with trusty allies Snarfner, Vallkillmore and Canon rounding out the core group. His hair's started to gray after saving the world 8 or 9 times, traveling through space and time and the realms of death, but he's still out there, still exploring, still getting into trouble and mostly getting back out of it. He's an alchemist and herbalist in his spare time, and has a completely unmanageable collection of pets. He is really, really tired of being forced to fight his own Warchief, and really hopes the gods don't lean on that already very tired trope again in the future.
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urrone · 4 years ago
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memememe
Tagged by @swaps55
Tagging . . . . people. @tonysstark @existenceisthis @stumblingoverchaos and anyone else who wants to do it! 
Nicknames: my parents call me bird, my favorite coworkers ever called me animal, my current coworkers sometimes call me mama bear but not EVERY time, and I guess you could call Merrin a nickname
Zodiac: Leeeeeeeo baby
Height: 5′10″
Hogwarts house: I have sorted into both the noble house of Slytherin and Ravenclaw. Given the option I generally choose Ravenclaw, but normally refer to myself as a Slytherclaw. 
Last thing I googled: I got up out of bed to fill this out right now because I shit you not the last thing I googled was “can a chimpanzee and a human reproduce” only to find out THAT THERE WERE FUCKING EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED BY THE RUSSIONS IN THE 1920S TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THIS VERY QUESTION. (So far the answer seems to be no.) 
Song stuck in my head: I don’t have one right now, but the last one was Into the Unknown thanks to my niece. 
Amount of sleep: Anywhere from 4 to 6. Maybe one night a week I’ll get 7 or 8, but that’s really rare. 
Lucky numbers: 2
Dream job: I don’t have one, I’m not wired that way. I’ve honestly never given a shit who gives me money, as long as my bills are covered. I don’t have some work thing I’m super passionate about. I hate questions about work. The quickest way to make me despise a thing is to start paying me to do it. I’m not saying I hate my job or anything, but I’m there to get paid, not to fulfill some lifelong passion. Questions like this are a symptom of a capitalist society and I am not here for it. 
Wearing: A sleeveless cotton dress with Indian style elephants on it. 
Favorite instrument: I love listening to bagpipes (could I BE more of a cliche? no.) but I love playing handbells.
Aesthetic: I honestly don’t know. I feel like in person friends could answer this question better than I can. The best way I can describe myself is by saying I love clutter. 
Favorite song: It changes as I hear new music, but right now it’s Saturn by Sleeping at Last and has been for a few years. 
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Favorite author: Sharon Shinn, Tolkien, NK Jemisin
Favorite animal: elephant (if I’m allowed to go fantasy though it’s 100% unicorns.) 
Favorite animal sound: elephant trumpets, cats purring
Random: I only started playing D&D when I moved to Austin 7 years ago, actually it was a little after, about 6 years ago. And I made a decision shortly into the campaign that not only changed the entire campaign but also set up the next campaign. (Cutting because this got hella long.) 
See, my group was stuck in a dungeon in the middle of a Forgotten Realms desert. My DM has his own little world that he’s set up with different zones and different rules. He specifically wanted a Forgotten Realms desert so it would have wild magic surges, our wizard was almost useless. Our rogue had moved to Michigan a few months prior and I had taken a level of rogue just to be useful in checking for traps. The rest of my levels were all in ranger. (Also, for reference, this was 4.5 edition.) 
There was a vampire in this dungeon, because of course. He couldn’t escape because of the desert and the lack of cover from the sun, so he’d been stuck there for hundreds of years. He took control of our wizard at once point and we almost had a TPK when he made her cast fireball and a wild magic surge made it like 10 times more powerful than it should have been. 
After this encounter (we all survived, somehow), I walked very confidently down the hallway after rolling a 1 to check for traps. Friends, there was a trap. It was your traditional pit with spikes at the bottom. One of my traveling companions, maybe the cleric, cast feather fall on me so I didn’t get impaled. And then we got into the period where the dice gods made up for the one by giving me the four best rolls of my goddamn life. 
1. A teeming horde of rats was approaching through these tunnels that opened in the sides of the pit. I couldn’t get back out of the pit quickly before the rats would be on me. I asked my DM if I could somersault into one of the tunnels to at least have a defensible position, and rolls a nat 20 on acrobatics to do so. I slid seamlessly into a tunnel about halfway up the pit. 
2. As a ranger, I had a lightning longbow and lightning arrows. (This DM has always been REALLY generous with the loot, we were still relatively low level at this point.) As the rats approached, I rolled really well (broke 20 but not nat, I think it was a 19?) on plugging up the hole at my feet with a rat corpse that I made swell by stabbing it with a lightning arrow. 
3. To plug up the hole at my head, I pulled out the dagger I’d looted off a corpse earlier in the dungeon, waited for a rat to come slithering by the mouth of my little tunnel, and rolled another nat 20 to stab through it and pull it back toward me to plug the hole at my head. 
So now I’m lying here in this tunnel, not a ton of room around me, with dead rat corpses on either end and live rats chewing on the corpses to get at me. And that’s when the vampire appears. 
I honestly can’t remember why he appeared, or how our conversation started. What I do remember is that I told him the virtues of letting us traverse the rest of the dungeon unmolested by him, and that if he would just hide himself in my bag of holding (as he was not alive, I confirmed with my DM, the 10 minute rule of staying alive in a bag of holding would not apply to him) I would deliver him to a shady wooded area where he wouldn’t immediately be burned to a crisp upon exiting my bag. 
4. My DM asked me to roll a charisma check. Now, I’m sure you know that as a ranger, charisma isn’t ever gonna be one of your highest stats. When you spend a lot of time in the woods and shooting at things from a long distance, it doesn’t really matter if you can make friends or scare people while you do it. I think my charisma modifier was 0 at the time. So I rolled. And friends. It was my third nat 20 of the night. Not only did that vampire happily mist his way into my bag of holding, I didn’t have to give up anything to get him to do it. My friends rescued me from the rats and we made our way out of the dungeon. 
Now, what happened with the vampire is an entirely different story, which I will tell if someone wants to know but not tonight because this is already long enough. 
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hmel78 · 5 years ago
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In conversation with Raphael Doyle ...
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A few weeks ago my attention was drawn to a video in which Tom Robinson [Tom Robinson Band / presenter on BBC radio] spoke about a project he’s working on with his old friend, Raphael Doyle. Now, Crowd Funding has become the ‘in thing’ and many people pay it no mind, but this pledge was different. And why? Because there’s real a story behind it - This is not just about a band expecting their fans to donate money in return for a signed photo, or a cheesy ringtone, thus ensuring  the next album is made. From what I’ve heard, the album is going to be something special musically - but not only that, this album is a genuine work of LOVE; not for profit. but for the sake of creativity, for the music ; it’s about old friends, and new, coming together to be a part of Raphael’s album - And they’re against the clock  (for more than one reason) which makes it all the more compelling. I was, of course, interested to know more about Raphael, who along with Tom Robinson and Hereward Kaye in the late 1960’s, formed the trio ‘Cafe Society’.
I should imagine you’re already familiar with Tom, and perhaps Hereward too [from his days with The Flying Pickets], but Raphael has clearly managed to remain off the radar - until now! Born in Northern Ireland, Raphael absconded to England when he was 15 - An unconventional teenager, but a keen songwriter and poet - he found himself at Finchden Manor in Kent, before carving a career, one way or another, in music. ‘Cafe Society’ enjoyed a relative amount of success but it was short lived, and following the break up of the band in 1976, Raphael’s  biography states that he was, at that time “Painfully short on confidence and increasingly dependent on drink”. By the time he was 19 Raphael had already married Rose. Over 40 years later, through thick and thin, and with a clan of four children, they’re still going strong! When I first spoke to him he was telling me about his return to living in the North East of England, having been lucky enough to buy back the very same house he and Rose had lived in as a young couple ; add to that his return to making music, and it would seem that there are many aspects of his life that are coming ‘full circle’.   “Never Closer” is the title of the album - Raphael sings us through a number of extraordinary tracks inspired by “a messy life encompassing darkness and recovery pain and love”,  but at the end of it all, quite contentedly  concludes - “The whole journey has definitely been worth it” ... You can keep up with Raphael’s story, and the pledge campaign, as it unfolds via his website and social media, but in the meantime, we thought we’d attempt to extract some more of his memories about those early days as a musician.
HR : If you’re open to talking about it Raphael, I’d like to go back to 1968 - to Finchden Manor**, where you met up with Tom Robinson - what was life like there?
Raphael Doyle : Well, I was 15 when I arrived at Finchden. I'd come from Northern Ireland where I'd had unhappy fallings out with a couple of schools.  I was clashing with the conservative, Catholic environment of my upbringing, and I was a fledgling hippy in the world that didn't like that. Finchden was like another world entirely - suddenly you found yourself somewhere where you weren't in the wrong all the time - where you could be yourself. It was very unstructured. Your time was your own.
HR : Were you encouraged to be creative?
RD : It wasn't so much that you were encouraged to be creative, but more that you were given the space to be yourself. So some people got into making things, some got into gardening, lots of us spent a lot of time talking. And there was a great spilling out of creativity, whether music, art, pottery, poetry. Whatever people had in them. Just in the time that I was there, there was Matthew Collings scribbling away amazing cartoon-like drawings, who has gone on to become a very highly regarded artist and art critic. There was Mike Medora who was playing searing blues guitar and he went on to do the festival circuit with Global Village Trucking company. There was Danny Kustow, still a much loved guitarist, who became famous beside Tom Robinson in TRB. There was the amazing and eccentric Robert Godfrey who went off to form the Enid, a legendary prog rock band, and he took with him a bunch of other boys, notably Francis Lickerish, another brilliant guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. And there was Tom and me, writing songs, putting groups together- and I guess we were encouraged, yes. We used to be brought out to play to visitors… I remember us being taken off on long journeys in George Lyward- the founder -in his old car to visit Lord and Lady somebody or other in a mansion, and he would give a fundraising talk, and Tom and I would sing a couple songs, and then wander outside where we chanced upon this old guy in ancient corduroys tending a rhubarb patch, who turned out to be the Lord himself. Very PG Wodehouse!
HR : Actually it sounds like fun,  despite being a difficult time ... There’s a great quote from Hereward [Kaye] about your songwriting, he says “The lyrics were all his own and smelt of trouble. How I longed to be deeply troubled like him!”     What was it about music, and songwriting that engaged you? Is it fair to say that without music, you may have strayed onto a very different path?
RD : Well, Hereward was right. I was a troubled young man. We all were at Finchden. But even before I went there, back in Northern Ireland, music and writing had become my escape valve. I came from a little seaside town, and a Scottish wild card called Colvin Hamilton took over the swimming pool cafe and turned it into a venue -  The Scene  - and he would bring down bands from Belfast. This was at the height of the early 60s R&B boom. ‘Van Morrison’ and ‘Them’ were the big name. I was too young to be let in but I'd spend the weekend nights with my ear pressed to the blacked out plate glass window, listening to that raw, rough earthy music. And at home, and in friends’ houses, I was listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson, John Mayalls blues breakers ... So Music was already my landscape. It didn't stop me getting into trouble though!  So it was arriving at Finchden, having a place of respite , the chance to heal and grow, and there to get together with Tom and start honing my musical instincts - that's where my direction became set. I became a musician at Finchden.
HR : It was Tom who introduced you to Hereward, in Middlesborough - what happened in the interim before you eventually moved to London and formed ‘Cafe Society’?
RD : Tom's family were living in the north-east and I went up there with him for a holiday. A neighbour of his decided to introduce us to some other arty young folk she knew of from Middlesbrough, and that's where Hereward came in. We just clicked - it wasn't so usual then to meet others passionately into writing and making music. Hereward in Teesside and Tom and I in Kent would make reel to reel revox recordings of each new song and post them to each other, then when we'd meet 2 or 3 times a year and we'd have long sessions playing the songs to each other and trying out harmonies. So then when we finally got together in London it was natural to get into a bedroom or a cellar and just spend hours playing and arranging and practicing.... We were buzzing on it.
HR : From what I’ve read, many people were buzzing about it, including Alexis Korner. You had a really strong connection to him - how did that come about?
RD : Alexis had been at Finchden in his youth - he was an 'old boy'. While we were there his daughter Sappho stayed for a while ... I remember Alexis and Sappho singing the country blues song “Trouble In Mind” together. This was when Tom and I would be wheeled out to play for visitors and there were some powerful times when Alexis and us would play in a packed Oak Room to visitors and wild eyed disturbed adolescents ... So Alexis got to know us and became something of a mentor. HR : Alexis was really big on the music scene, especially with  ‘Blues Incorporated’ - how connected  were you to all of that?  
RD : I remember staying at his place in Queensway and meeting John Mayall - I was a bit dumbstruck. It wasn't that long before that I'd been standing in the dark in a blues club in Belfast watching the ‘Blues Breakers’ with John Mayall and the new guitarist Peter Green playing stunning music, and here was the man standing before me. I don't know what I mumbled but I think it was embarrassing. Another time I was sitting in Alexis' front room with Andy Fraser who was someone Tom and I both loved very much. We'd been to see ‘Free’ at the Redcar Jazz club - the place of been jampacked and heaving and the band were incredible. And here was Andy talking to Alexis about what to do now Free had broken up. He put together a band called Toby. A little while later Hereward and I nicked his drummer Stan Speake, for the band we were putting together while we were waiting for Tom to come to London.
HR : So when Tom arrived, and ‘Cafe Society’ formed properly, what attracted you to the folk scene above any of the others?
RD : We didn't really choose the folk scene. It was just that we were three guys with acoustic guitars, a focus on harmonies, writing our own songs. In those days you either put together a band and played places like the hundred club, or you went to the booming folk circuit. So we began there ...
HR : You landed a residency, as a 3 piece, at The Troubadour coffee house - what do you remember about those first performances?
RD : As far as I remember we had a residency at Bunjies first. We were playing around a lot of clubs- The Rising Sun in Tottenham Court road was a good one. But the Troubadour had the cachet; it had a more serious reputation. We used to go down there and do floor spots on other people's nights and gradually we were building up a following. So then we got a night of our own-Tuesday nights.   It was a wonderful time, a very atmospheric place to try out new songs, to practice our harmonies. We had a captive audience in a little space and it became a shared experience. I think we had a very distinctive blend.   Tom was serious about the nuts and bolts of arrangements and song structure. Hereward was a showman, flamboyant in his songs and performance, and I would escape into the music and let my soul pour out. It made for a dynamic blend. And we were all fans, we all loved music, for us the people we listened to were our heroes and we wanted to join them. HR : And it wasn’t long before you did, was it? RD : No - By now we were trying to get a deal. That was the big Next step in those days. First you build up a bit of a following, then you got management, then you got a deal. We got a manager. Hereward knew John McCoy who ran music venues in and around Middlesbrough where he came from. John went on to become Chris Rea's manager and got him signed and started on his career. We used to go up and play at the Kirk, the most happening club on Teesside at the time, which John owned and ran. He listened to our stuff and wasn't quite sure what to make of it but he agreed to manage us, and one thing led to another and it resulted in Ray Davies of ‘The Kinks’ coming down to the troubadour to check us out. It was the same night Alexis was headlining for us so there was a real buzz in the air. Ray did a bit of a floor spot with us standing alongside not quite able to believe what was happening. Ray saw something in us, I think, that chimed with his own sense of song. He signed us up to his new indie label Konk -the first one in the country-and he himself produced our first album.
HR : Presumably that opened a few doors?
RD : Sure. From playing the London folk clubs, suddenly we were getting support act slots on national tours. We supported ‘The Kinks’ a whole bunch of times,  which was a bit odd because we were this very well mannered acoustic trio in the middle of the stage set up for this raucous pop rock band and the audiences were kind of looking for a good time. But we went down surprisingly well on those tours.  HR : Didn’t you also open for Barclay James Harvest? RD : Yes -That was a bit weird because they were a full blown prog rock band with colours and smoke and atmospherics and everyone took the whole thing very seriously!   I think for some of them a support band was just a necessary evil so we felt a bit sidelined. But luckily a lot of their audiences were the listening kind and enjoyed what we did. Also I have to say that Woolly Wolstenholme was a really sweet guy and he was always very encouraging and would make time for us. We learned a great deal on all of those shows. Sometimes it's when you're not doing your own show, but having to make your mark in someone else's, that you can learn most about holding true to yourself and standing firm as a performer. Then I remember we did the Alan Hull solo album tour. Alan was big at that point as the singer songwriter of Lindisfarne so it was a much better match for us as an acoustic trio. He did the whole tour solo and the audiences were great for us.  Mind you the dressing room was a place to be .... A parade of beautiful people hobnobbing with the latest thing ... Eh, that'd be him, not us!
HR : So as things progressed, and you were having this amount of success as a trio, what prompted you to add more members and form a ‘proper’ band, changing the dynamic, and presumably the sound?
RD : Well, as I said, we weren't really a folk group. We did love people like Neil Young,  Paul Simon, Dylan... We used to finish with a James Taylor song “Lo and behold” . Tom always really liked Richard Thompson. I remember at The Troubadour we used to sing the Fairport song 'Meet on the Ledge'. But really our folk credentials were accidental. We always saw ourselves as a band. Hereward and I had both been in blues bands, and played the raunchier end of R&B pop. Tom's musical interests ranged really widely. He was a big fan of early ‘Manfred Mann’. He and I were besotted with ‘The Band’, “Music from Big Pink”. So really we were just waiting for the chance to expand and go electric - unfortunately it happened just as Ray Davies was making the first album with us. He signed an acoustic trio, but while Ray was supervising recording us at Konk, a process in which we didn't feel we had much say, we were off down the road when not needed in the studio, doing our own demos in a little place in Holloway with a drummer and a bass player and a keyboard player. We abandoned the folk circuit and started to play the pub scene. The Golden Lion in Fulham, The Three Kings in North End Road where the unknown Elvis Costello was forcing himself on the attentions of a bemused audience! Upstairs at Ronnie Scott's. There was a new buzz around and we wanted to spread our wings. So with one thing and another the Konk relationship fizzled out.
HR : ‘Cafe Society’ were dubbed band of the year by Sounds magazine in 1976, but the same year saw  the arrival of ‘The Sex Pistols’ and a whole new scene - what impact did Punk have on you and the rest of the band?
RD : We had built up an expanded following as a band and it felt like we had lots to do. But Ray Davies brought in a production team to work on our second album, who were nice guys but they were not about new music. We were trying to make a go of it with them, and Hereward and I were both newly married and putting a lot of time into that side of things - so the impact of punk, for me at least, Was Tom turning up one night to visit me and sitting down in the front room and telling me how he had been going to the hundred club and seeing  this group - ‘The Sex Pistols’ - and that everything was changing. Tom was going out nights and seeing them and ‘The Clash’, the new bands, and he knew that the album we were recording was redundant.   And he did the right thing. He went off and he dived into the deep end of this new wave. A few short months later Hereward and I were standing at the back of the Lyceum on the Strand looking in disbelief at this mass of thousands of people all with their backs to us, Facing forwards, arms raised and yelling to the rafters for TRB. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I think we did both, but very proudly.
HR : It seems at that point, Tom was destined to go a different route - did you and Hereward plan to continue?
RD : When Tom announced he was leaving I didn't want, for myself, to carry on. But Hereward really wanted us to finish the album, which was looking more of a Hereward album anyway. So we continued. But it was without any real sense of ownership or involvement or hope. Really, it was over when Tom left.
HR : What direction did you take musically after the band broke up for good?
RD : I put together a band doing mostly my songs and some of my favourites. There was still a healthy pub rock circuit in London and we were playing places like the golden lion in Fulham and the Stapleton near Crouch end where the Jam were making their mark. There was a buzz - EMI were interested. Robert Plant came down to check us out. But the truth is my confidence was in bits ... I would be sick and need a drink before going on. I couldn't handle the business side - promoters, A&R men. Aargh. It freaks me out just remembering it. You either have the balls to be a good self promoter or you don't. I didn't. I carried on writing songs and playing in many different settings - clubs, in pubs, in schools, and made a couple of albums with a  gospel rock band in England and in the states. Later I returned to the blues with an old friend Paul Davey on guitar. I always loved Paul's playing and he has a quality to him which is very authentic. He is not flashy, he's like The early Peter Green I saw all those years ago in Belfast. But essentially I think I'm still what you might call a soul/folk singer. I love to make contemporary music that is now on the surface, but plunging deep into the timeless in the feel
HR : Some 40 years later there seem to be a lot of things that are coming full circle in your life ... in music particularly ...
RD : Yeah - Really when I look back my life has been about life, but music is a thread that runs through it either in the actual doing of it or in the yearning for it. I absolutely love making music. And that special magical thing of making music with really good musicians, where an unspoken understanding happens and creates a platform on which something even better then you know how to make, actually suddenly happens. A moment outside time. I remember seeing an interview with a very respectable English poet John Betjeman  - he was old and in failing health and he was asked rather respectfully if he had any regrets. And he said "yes. I wish I'd had more sex ". That's how I feel about that level of music making. And that's why am so blown away with what's been happening. Everything I've hungered for has come to me this year.  Making a new album, working with great people, and a really special night at the Troubadour. HR : Oh yes - the show at The Troubadour - how did it feel to perform there again? Was the atmosphere the same?
RD : Actually, the atmosphere was even better than before! I've just been listening to a recording of the opening song, “Give Us A Break”. It's a song of Tom's he and I used to do back at Finchden and we did it acoustically to start the night and it was magic. Then a series of great artists doing floor spots, then me with a spot-on young band, and Tom and Hereward getting up to join in. It was a 10 course meal by candle light! And the audience .... They might as well have been on stage, we were all so involved together.
HR : You remained friends with Tom, and Hereward - as you say they played with you recently, and have teamed in for your Solo album “Never Closer” - how does it feel to be back in their company on a creative level?
RD : Well you know we haven't been strangers to each other.
Hereward and I are brothers in law as well as friends so there's always been opportunities for us to get the guitars out and play together.  My song “Feet on the Floor”, on the new album, wouldn't be the same without Herry's harmonies.  And he's put a lovely, subtle keyboard part on “Kiltermon”, one of the most important songs for me. Tom though, his part in this has been crucial. He says he sees himself as executive producer, just making sure it happens but leaving the music up to me. The truth is he is much more than that. Looking back to the beginning, I wouldn't even be a serious musician but for Tom. And so to be doing this album in partnership with him is just fantastic.
The sense of coming full circle, of completion, of fulfilment is really strong in my life this year. This album is a big example of that, and Tom and Hereward and myself getting up on stage together at the troubadour, and being in the studio together looking into each others eyes, listening to each other, singing together, is deeply wonderful for me.
HR : You’ve said recently, that the recording process took the magic out of the music in the early days, so what has changed for you with this solo record?
RD : The heart went out of the music in the recording process in the 70s for us because it was an artificial environment and a rather autocratic structure. Music is about musicians sharing from their souls together, and that sharing combining, meeting in the air and combining into something extra. That just can't happen in a compartmentalised and splintered and structured and often rather heartless recording process. It's not always like that of course, but too often it has been. We need to get back to the magic of creativity. With this album it's very different. I suppose it's not too strong to say that this album is an act of love. And everybody involved in it is acting with creative integrity and with mutual regard. It's a great thing to be part of.
HR : What was your inspiration for putting these songs together, now?
RD : Back in the spring I noticed that I couldn't grip the plectrum when I was playing the guitar. That led me to check some things out, and I was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in April. I've had a good long summer since my diagnosis, holding the condition at arms length, and it's been great - But it is increasingly something that I am living with day by day so it is a big part of the reality of this stage of my life, and will only continue to be so, and more so ... So it's true to say that all this has come about in response to my diagnosis: Tom and my son Louis started looking at the songs that had never really seen the light of day, and talking about making an album - they were both very much spurred on to bring this about with me because time is an issue.  I wasn't sure  ... I certainly didn't want to make an album just for the sake of it. I wanted it to exist primarily as a piece of work in its own right, and have not wanted my health issue to be a dominant factor in what I've been doing - but the reality and beauty and urgency of this project has come about in trying to get these tracks down while it is still possible. Every stage of this process, of building this album, has been full of surprises.  It's incredibly alive. It's the story of a life. And it's a great collaboration between creative artists - not just me, but Louis, the brilliant Gerry Diver, Tom and everyone who's contributed..
HR : As you say there, the album also features your son Louis - what does it mean to you to be able to have this creative relationship with him, and your other children?
RD : It's been brilliant doing this with Louis. I always say he outstripped me musically a long time ago. The work he's done, from his early band the Cadets, to Slides, and now the Spare Room is often amazing. When he and I started looking at the songs for this album we started to get some of those shivery moments, like I used to get rehearsing in the cellar in Clapham with cafe society. I remember the rehearsal before the troubadour, we got the band together at the Music Room in New Cross and I had Louis on one side of me and my other son Jess on bass guitar on the other side, and we were all blasting out harmonies and it was like something in me just took off and flew up into the air. To be doing this together, at The Troubadour, and in the studio, and at such a wonderful high standard, is something that it's hard to explain. It's just beautiful.
HR : When are you hoping for it to be released?
RD : We are making the album with crowd funding - pledge music - so people are pre-ordering their copies and that helps pay for the cost of making it. The aim is to release it in January - hopefully on the 6th, my birthday - when I'm 64! 
HR : And what can listeners expect? RD : Well, the answer to that changes every week and every time we go back in the studio. It was going to be a good album, but there is all kinds of magic brewing in the cauldron. What can I say. I'm blown away by some of the things we've done. Gerry Diver is doing some extraordinary work on arrangements and production. Louis has written some great music, played brilliant guitar and found lovely musicians and I, I promise you, am singing my heart out. I tell you, I'm a happy man. But there's lots of previews on the PledgeMusic page, with some videos of different songs from the album or the Troubadour - keep watching.   It's at  http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/raphael-doyle-never-closer , and my Facebook page raphaeldoylemusic
https://www.facebook.com/raphaeldoylemusic/?fref=ts
“I Come From Ireland” - a spoken word track is currently claiming worldwide acclaim, having made it to a feature in the Huffington Post!
The album - Songs Of Experience - can be found here http://www.raphaeldoyle.co.uk/
[Sadly Raphael passed away in March 2018. It is with huge thanks to my friend Ian Donald Crockett, that I had the pleasure of knowing Raphael for that short time].
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newstfionline · 4 years ago
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Headlines
A wobble lessened Laura’s devastation (AP) Hurricane Laura was a monster storm that could have, even should have, wreaked much more destruction than it did, except for a few lucky breaks and some smart thinking by Gulf Coast residents, experts say. Just before striking Louisiana, Laura wobbled. It wasn’t much, maybe 15 miles (24 kilometers) for a Category 4 storm that was nearly the width of two states. But it was enough to move the worst of the storm surge east of Lake Charles and into a far less populated area. And even before that, Laura threaded a needle between well-populated New Orleans, Port Arthur and Houston and came ashore in Cameron Parish, which is the second least-populated county along the coast. The population of the average Atlantic and Gulf Coast county is 322,000 people. Cameron Parish has less than 7,000. The storm was still devastating, but not quite as catastrophic as it might have been.
Hurricane Laura cleanup starts (AP) The angry storm surge has receded and the clean up has begun from Hurricane Laura, but officials along this shattered stretch of Louisiana coast are warning returning residents they will face weeks without power or water amid the hot, stifling days of late summer. The U.S. toll from the Category 4 hurricane stood at 14 deaths, with more than half of those killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators. Across southwestern Louisiana, people were cleaning up from the destructive hurricane that roared ashore early Thursday, packing 150-mph (240-kph) winds. Many were deciding whether they wanted to stay in miserable conditions or wait until basic services are finally restored. Simply driving was a feat in Lake Charles, a city of 80,000 residents hit head on by the hurricane’s eye. Power lines and trees blocked paths or created one-lane roads that drivers had to navigate with oncoming traffic. Street signs were snapped off their posts or dangling. No stoplights worked, making it an exercise in trust with other motorists sharing the roads.
Weather slows California wildfires; thousands allowed home (AP) California wildfires were slowly being corralled Friday as cooler, humid weather and reinforcements aided firefighters and tens of thousands of people were allowed back home after days of death and destruction. In the past two days, evacuation orders were lifted for at least 50,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and wine country, officials with the state fire agency, Cal Fire, said. Around the state, hundreds of wildfires—coming months earlier in the season than expected—have killed at least seven people, burned more than 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) and pushed firefighter resources to the breaking point. Two are among the largest wildfires in recent state history.
1 killed as Trump supporters, protesters clash in Portland (AP) One person was shot and killed late Saturday in Portland, Oregon, as a large caravan of President Donald Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter protesters clashed in the streets, police said. It wasn’t clear if the shooting was linked to fights that broke out as a caravan of about 600 vehicles was confronted by protesters in the city’s downtown. An Associated Press freelance photographer heard three gunshots and then observed police medics working on the body of the victim, who appeared to be a white man. The freelancer said the man was wearing a hat bearing the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a right-wing group whose members have frequently clashed with protesters in Portland in the past.
Rival Themes Emerge as Race Enters Final Weeks: Covid vs. Law and Order (NYT) As a weeklong Republican offensive against Joseph R. Biden Jr. ends, the Democratic nominee plans to resume campaigning in swing states and has released a multimillion dollar barrage of ads attacking President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. The moves come as the presidential campaign barrels into the critical last 10 weeks. They represent a bet by Mr. Biden that a focus on Covid-19 will prevail over Mr. Trump’s “law and order” emphasis and his attempt to portray Mr. Biden as a tool of the “radical left.” The question of which argument feels more urgent to the American people is likely to play a critical role in determining the outcome in November.
Dreading the School Year? Some Parents Are Taking It On The Road (Bloomberg) When the novel coronavirus began spreading across the globe early this year, Bridy and Kurt Oreshack were so concerned that they pulled their children out of school three days before it officially closed. Their anxiety quickly gave way to other emotions. “We thought, there’s never going to be an opportunity like this in our careers,” says Bridy, a wealth advisor in San Diego. She and her husband, an attorney, had hoped to someday spend a year traveling with their kids, who are now 5, 9, and 10. When Covid-19 disrupted schooling and made it not merely acceptable but desirable for the Oreshacks to work remotely, they decided to make the leap. Instead of attending their normal bilingual private school, the three Oreshack children will “roadschool” for the 2020-21 academic year, stringing together a series of road trips to national parks and the Pacific Northwest, with a stretch in Hawaii in the mix. “We’re only on Day 2 of homeschooling,” Oreshack says from her home in San Diego, where the family is temporarily recovering from summer explorations. “But so far, it’s been rad and wonderful.” Combining homeschooling and travel—an approach often known as “worldschooling”—isn’t new. But it has been a very rare phenomenon, limited to families willing to trade stability, structure, and conventional education for adventure. Now, “roadschooling” is emerging as a Covid-19-era alternative for Americans who are limited by border closures but not by commutes.
Coronavirus cases in some European countries are rising again, but with fewer deaths (Washington Post) Coronavirus cases are surging again in Europe after months of relative calm, but the second wave looks different from the first: Fewer people are dying, and the newest and mostly younger victims of the pandemic need less medical treatment. Unlike the initial hit of the pandemic this spring, which overwhelmed hospitals and turned nursing homes into grim mortuaries, the European resurgence of recent weeks has not forced as many people into medical wards. But the increase is widespread, and it is unsettling societies that had hoped the worst was behind them. Paris on Friday joined some other French jurisdictions in imposing a citywide mask requirement, with cases spiking. France, Germany, Spain and others posted caseloads in recent days that had not been seen since April and early May. Spain has been hit particularly hard, with per capita cases now worse than in the United States. And with almost every European country planning a return to in-person schooling, many starting next week, public health officials are holding their breath for the impact.
Riots in Sweden after Quran burning by far-right activists (AP) Far-right activists burned a Quran in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, sparking riots and unrest after more than 300 people gathered to protest, police said Saturday. Rioters set fires and threw objects at police and rescue services Friday night, slightly injuring several police officers and leading to the detention of about 15 people. The violence followed the burning Friday afternoon of a Quran, near a predominantly migrant neighborhood, that was carried out by far-right activists and filmed and posted online, according to the TT news agency.
Turkey to hold military exercise off Cyprus amid Mediterranean tensions (Reuters) Turkey said it will hold a military exercise off northwest Cyprus for the next two weeks, amid growing tension with Greece over disputed claims to exploration rights in the east Mediterranean. Both sides have held military exercises in the east Mediterranean, highlighting the potential for the dispute over the extent of their continental shelves to escalate into confrontation. Two weeks ago Greek and Turkish frigates shadowing Turkey’s Oruc Reis oil and gas survey vessel collided, and Turkey’s Defence Ministry said Turkish F-16 jets on Thursday prevented six Greek F-16s entering an area where Turkey was operating.
Russian city holds eighth anti-Kremlin protest (Reuters) Thousands of people took to the streets on Saturday in Russia’s far eastern city of Khabarovsk to protest against President Vladimir Putin’s handling of a regional political crisis and the suspected poisoning of his most vocal critic. “Putin, have some tea,” protesters chanted as they marched on the city’s main thoroughfare, in a reference to the case of opposition politician Alexei Navalny who fell gravely ill this month after drinking a cup of tea at an airport cafe. Residents of Khabarovsk, about 6,110 km (3,800 miles) east of Moscow, started holding weekly rallies after the July 9 detention of Sergei Furgal, the region’s popular governor, over murder charges he denies.
Surge in South Korea coronavirus cases sparks hospital bed shortage concerns (Reuters) South Korea recorded its 16th consecutive day of triple digit rises in new coronavirus cases on Saturday, extending a second wave of infections that is fanning concerns about a shortage of hospital beds in Seoul. The spike in cases has depleted hospital facilities, with the health ministry reporting that just 4.5% of beds in greater Seoul were available for critical cases as of Friday, down from 22% a week earlier.
Zimbabwe’s ‘keyboard warriors’ hold protests off the streets (AP) Unable to protest on the streets, some in Zimbabwe are calling themselves “keyboard warriors” as they take to graffiti and social media to pressure a government that promised reform but is now accused of gross human rights abuses. Activists use the hashtag #zimbabweanlivesmatter to encourage global pressure on President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government. Tens of thousands of people, from Jamaican reggae stars to U.S. rap and hip-hop musicians, have joined African celebrities, politicians and former presidents in tweeting with the hashtag. But some analysts say online protests might not be enough to move Mnangagwa, who increasingly relies on security forces to crush dissent despite promising reforms when he took power after a coup in 2017. Tensions are rising anew in the once prosperous southern African country. Inflation is over 800%, amid acute shortages of water, electricity, gas and bank notes and a health system collapsing under the weight of drug shortages and strikes by nurses and doctors. Revelations of alleged corruption related to COVID-19 medical supplies led to the sacking of the health minister and further pressure on Mnangagwa. His government has responded to the rising dissent with arrests and alleged abductions and torture.
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fyrapartnersearch · 5 years ago
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Back Again, Plots a Plenty
Ah, FYRA, hello. Back in January I had proudly bragged to a partner that I was done posting ads because I had all the writing I needed. Was I actually that naive or has 2020 actually been that long? Damn COVID. Anyway, my name is Chris, a dude in his late twenties with a lovely wife (that also uses this board for ads! Hey, Poe! I miss you!), two gorgeous animals that I love sharing pictures of, a comic book addiction and crazy ass job in a COVID19 ICU as a night nurse. Basically, the roleplay will *ALWAYS* be super medically accurate. I've been writing long enough that I list my skill as 'god damn professional' and post 2-3 times a week but am available for plotting and gushing over our line nearly around the clock. I can crank out anywhere from 4-16 paragraphs a reply, depending on the action and characters. I only write m/f (as the dude) and f/f. Always aiming to write in the long term.
I'm easy to reach! Either drop a line to me at [email protected] or on Discord at NurseBatman#3674. I'm also on Gchat and skype at Chrisx104 if anyone still uses those dinosaur messengers. Anyway, onto plots, originals first and then fandoms. Original
Political Intrigue, m/f
A male US congressman with an image as a family man plans to make a jump to the senate and hires a young and savvy woman to be his campaign manager. One thing leads to another on the road and the two begin a secret relationship that revolves around garnering more political power. This line is heavily influenced by my love of House of Cards and could involve sabotage, murder, black mail, etc. Definitely a line that I could envision lasting a few 'seasons'.
Lost in America, m/f & f/f
A piece set in 1970s, my favorite era of time. A group of teenagers, most of which have recently graduated from High School, decide to leave their sleepy little east coast town behind for a new life out in California. Loading up into a VW Bus and blaring some music that would eventually be deemed 'classic rock', they had out on their adventure. I'm envisioning a cast from 4-7 and will HAPPILY throw in some horror elements into this line.
The Social Media Age, m/f
A successful but relatively down to Earth guy runs across a beautiful woman that he immediately begins chatting up, unaware of her world wide following as a social media influencer due to his utter disconnect from various platforms of social media. She's intrigued by the fact that he isn't a part of her world and the two hit it off. We can develop it further from there but I have a ton of ideas. I sort of envision this line as an *EPIC* romance line, with the possibility to write in a thousand fun locations across the world.
A Detective Story, F/F
Twin teenagers are murdered and two female detectives are kicked the case. I'm really wide open on this one, in regards to the setting and if there's a relationship between the two detectives previously or not. This is just heavily influenced by my love of True Detective.
The Fight Life
This one is a bit of a longshot because I'm definitely looking for someone with some knowledge in regards to MMA/UFC, my personal favorite sport. I'd love to find someone interested in writing a female MMA fighter that is just breaking into the big leagues. I have a bit of a supporting cast in mind to build around her (Coach, best friend, and a love interest) left over from when I couldn't get this line off the ground previously due to a partner's chronic ADD. This line would include getting to write some pretty batshit crazy fight scenes.  If you're interested but don't know anything about MMA, I am a willing, willing tutor.
FANDOMs
DC Comics
I would definitely just love to write an original continuity Batman against an original continuity Catwoman. We can pick the circumstances of their meeting/reunion (adding in knowing each other when they were younger) and what sort of Gotham we want to write in. I have a lot of experience writing Bruce but have never gotten to do this pairing much.
Marvel Comics
PLEASE, I so badly want to write Peter Parker. I have read comics for a hundred damn years and have never really gotten to write the Spectacular Spider-man and really, really want to. Unfortunately, most of his love interests are sort of lame, Black Cat/Felicia Hardy notwithstanding. If anyone would be interested in writing these two, I'd love to do it quasi MCU adjacent, with Peter at college when he meets Felicia before later encountering (unknowingly) encountering her as Black Cat.
Crossover Comics
I love writing John Constantine and he's one of my favorites to write. I'd love to find someone interested in writing Wanda/Scarlet Witch since the MCU has never really touched on the magic aspect of her powers and give her a drunken Yoda to deal with and channel her obscene amount of power.
The Matrix 
An old fandom that I wrote years ago but one with a lot of original potential for fun. Maybe something with the next anomaly or just a crew working to ease humans out of the matrix after the films. Idk.  Dead Like Me
An old show I loved. What could be more fun than writing an original group of grim reapers as they navigate their own death and escort the recently deceased onto the next life while still trapped in this plane.
Harry Potter
Buddy cop aurors. That's all I got. I hope something in this ad caught someone's attention. Message me or email me and let's create something awesome together!
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c-is-for-circinate · 5 years ago
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Ok, if I’m going to keep proper DM records for D&D on this tumblr, I need to actually write them.
Being An Account of Game #1: In Which Several Youth Attend A Party, And Some Experimental Magic Has Less Than Optimal Results
[all game logs thus far]
The Setting:  It is a Thursday night in the city of Karna Vi, called by many the last surviving bastion of the Trava Empire in Highnorth.  In the mostly student-inhabited districts around the University Karnassa, scholars are working, resting, eating, hanging out--and having parties.
More excitingly, there’s a classics major party tonight.  And it’s not just any classics majors.  It’s the self-styled Young Pre-Glorians.  In a society mostly built on a relatively even mix of human, gnome, and dwarf citizens, where humans are the unnecessarily tall people who don’t live nearly long enough to ever get really good at rulership or scholarship (though gods know you won’t find a more versatile, intense group of people in any species you can name), this little cluster of classics majors includes two humans, two tieflings, and a half-orc, all living in one slightly shabby student apartment.  Every single one of them is going to be dead before they’re a hundred.  Every single one of them is obsessed with figuring out how things worked at least 2000-4000 years ago.  And they party like it.
Our NPC hosts for the evening include Peary (a bubblegum-pink tiefling who makes historically accurate bathtub gin, and reconstructs ancient crafting methods from diary fragments and scraps, and den-mothers all the rest of her roommates with constantly chipper affection); Athenasi (or Athen, a human cleric of the Church of Lost Things made entirely out of sticks and paleness, who buries himself in ancient records trying to reconstruct the specific rituals used to properly worship long-mislaid gods); Riva (an enormous half-orc sportsball player and also wizard who mostly only bothers using spells to light his bonfires and translate dead languages, intent on uncovering the distant origins of magic as written ritual); Lisha (a human who got briefly campus-notorious last year when she reconstructed an ancient power-binding ritual well enough to actually summon an archdemon who hasn’t been seen in three millennia and somewhat incidentally get herself warlock powers); and Wren (a dark-skinned, gray-haired tiefling who knows very nearly everything there is to know about the politics and power struggles spanning half a continent and seven centuries, 5,000 years ago, and does not particularly care to know anything else).
These five like hands-on experimentation and practical research.  They’ve thrown historically-accurate parties in celebration of a dozen ancient forgotten holidays, with Peary’s bathtub gin to really make it work.  There’s rumors about an invitational-only orgy last year.  In short, their parties are the place to be if you’re the kind of nerd who likes to study hard and party harder.  Which...does not quite describe our PCs, but it’s a fun party to be at anyway.
Marion the human paladin has spent enough afternoons pouring through ancient records with fellow church acolyte Athen that they can’t really turn down the invite, even if Athen’s insistence on “you need to talk to other live people more than once a week!” is ridiculous and hyperbolic anyway.  Kevin the elf barbarian has been a cornerstone of the University sportsball team for ten years straight, and would never turn down a party invite from a teammate, let alone a party that looks as promising as this one.  Kou the halfling bard, who spends so much time with the music-majors half the university forgets she isn’t one, got invited along with her bard friends to be the entertainment.  
Gnome rogue Reigenleif, of course, is the beer supply.  Reigenleif is always the beer supply.
It’s a Thursday night, and a four-bedroom apartment with attached rooftop deck is crowded full of graduate students eating cheese, drinking a dozen different kinds of alcohol, and arguing about history.  Life is, for the moment, good.
The Hooks:
One by one, each of our PCs--vaguely familiar to one another, in a nodding-acquaintance sort of way, though nothing like the friends they’ll be by the end of the week, let alone the eventual end of this campaign--finds themselves tugged into conversation with an acquaintance.
First (in-game time, though we played these way out of order thanks to a handy d4), before the party even begins, Reigenleif heads down into Old Town to pick up some beer.  It’s one neighborhood over from the district of ancient, pre-Imperial ruins and thousand-year-old buildings where the University and its denizens live, so most students don’t know to come this far for good, cheap beer in the first place.  (Of course, even if they did they wouldn’t know to go where Reigenleif’s going.)
Her destination is a small bakery owned by two dwarven brothers and a sister.  Out the front, they sell excellent bread, with a very nice additional line in cakes and cupcakes.  Out the back, the middle dwarven brother Milosh acts as middle management for a smuggling ring that’s known in the right, quiet corners for its ability to get just about anything for anyone, given the right place.  Reigenleif runs errands on his say-so on weekends, in between avoiding her own research and helping out with everybody else’s.  Buying a few kegs of decent ale that hasn’t been marked up for tax, and then reselling it to thirsty college students, has basically been paying her rent for the past two years.
“How’s the family?” Milosh asks, and, “how’s that school thing going?”
“Eh,” says Reigenleif, and, “school’s school,” and, “parents still want me to go straight,” which isn’t even a pun because every player at the table is so generally disinterested in heteronormativity that it’s too easy to even bother with.
“You know,” Milosh says, “you really want to do more of this and less of that, could be Anna’s got a job for you.”
Anna’s not a real person--she’s been the code name for the leader of the smuggling ring for over a century, and given that her so-called last name literally means ‘human’, probably if there ever was a real Anna Cheloveko, she’s long dead now.  An Anna job might be hard, but it’ll pay, and then some.
The job, Milosh explains, isn’t too complicated.  There’s a certain package that needs to get to the city of Ormiras, and then past Ormiras a week or so’s travel up into the local mountains.  The contents of the package don’t matter, but with the strictures on the large industrial teleportation circles downtown, it’s unlikely to pass through without comment.  A University student, on the other hand, looking to do some research in the library of another University, could use one of their teleportation circles without anybody raising an eyebrow at their research materials, now, couldn’t they?  Grab a few friends to head with you up into the mountains, and when you come back down, there’d definitely be a job waiting--back here in Karna Vi, or with some of Anna’s friends in Ormiras.
(Reigenleif and her player go on a digression about bags of holding, immovable rods, and other magical items attempting to pass through teleportation circles, and then the potential of measuring continental drift with immovable rods over a long enough period of time.  Milosh raises his eyebrows and wonders if maybe Reigenleif should stick with those University-types after all.  This is about to prove extremely indicative of Reigenleif’s entire character.)
With that offer in mind, Reigenleif heads off, six kegs of ale for thirsty college students in hand.  This would be tricky for the average human, let alone a three-foot gnome, but Milosh lets her borrow the Bag of Holding for the job.  It’s no real risk.  He knows where Reigenleif lives.  He knows where her parents live.  She’s good for it.
Second, an hour or two into the swing of the party, Kevin and Riva are out on the roof deck supervising a cluster of increasingly tipsy party guests as they climb onto each others’ shoulders and attempt to joust with a couple of sportsball sticks.  The pair of them are taller than any two gnomes stacked together.  They are taller than nearly any gnome on top of any dwarf here.  They are taller than most double-stacked dwarves.  They make good referees.
They’re cleaning up some good-natured bruises and spilled beer when Kevin’s friend Poppy finds him.  She’s a half-elf, and barely as tall as his bicep.  She has dark curly hair, and smudged-up makeup, and she is already drunk.
“Kevin,” she says.  “Kevin, Kevin, look.  Can I ask you a favor?  Can I beg you a favor?  Please?”
Poppy is in Kevin’s cohort in the art history department--they started with the same incoming class, ten years ago.  You don’t really graduate out of university, in the Nine Cities.  You study until you get hired into a professorship or government position, or you run out of money, take a lesser job, and quit.  Poppy’s dad is an elf, with plenty of resources to throw in her general direction.  She hasn’t run out of money yet.  Ten years is a lot longer for a half-elf like Poppy than it is for Kevin.
Poppy says, “if I don’t do something big, I will never get hired, ever.  I will never amount to anything.”  She says, “I know there are Glorian-era ruins on the Iris Peninsula that haven’t been found.  I know there’s something there.”  She says, “I know there are elven aesthetic motifs in Glorian-era Irissan fragments.  Seven hundred years before elves ever made it to this continent.  If I go, I can prove it.  It will matter.  It will mean something.”
“You grew up on Iris,” she says.  “And you’re good at hitting things.  Right?”
It’s been 512 years since the Elven Ascendancy broke their isolation and sailed forth into the world for the first time in six millennia.  Five centuries since the very first elves set foot on the continent of Nokomoris.  The Glorian Empire conquered half the Iris Peninsula, and was driven out, and collapsed, a thousand years ago.  Not a single soul under Glorian rule had ever even heard of elves.  And sure, elves live on the Iris Peninsula now--in the cities, like proper elves, in shining tall buildings with a lovely background view of the tangled wilderness where they never, ever go.  Elvish art in Glorian-era ruins?  It would upend everything anybody knew about history.  It would be huge.
“It would probably make my parents really happy if I tried to do a big art history thing instead of focusing on sportsball so much,” Kevin muses.  “Sure, I know people.  We can probably put an expedition together.  I bet my parents would be happy with that.”
(Kevin and his player do sound enthusiastic about the idea of getting some good research and publishable papers, which tells this DM a lot I didn’t already know about his priorities.  Sure, he likes sportsball, but getting an actual job in art history would make his parents happy.  Kevin says ‘that would probably make my parents happy’ like it’s the only long-term life goal he’s ever bothered assuming he probably needs.)
Third, Kou and her band take a set break.
Lio’s been switching between singing and rocking out on the zither, because even in a cluster of bards, Lio makes a good frontwoman.  She’s a tall dwarf, dark hair, dark clothes, dark eyeliner, dark everything.  She’s a star in the music department, a cornerstone of student activities committees, a manic pixie overachiever, a goth anarchist who knows exactly what’s wrong with the world today, the artificial urban-wilderness divide that’s been imposed on society in the new century, the problems of traditional religion and modern capitalism.  She’s a level 3 bard.  She’s got a townie boyfriend in one of the local guilds who doesn’t mind when she makes out with boys, girls, and everything else on offer at parties.  She is, without question, the coolest person Kou knows.
Lio is drinking water and also taking a couple of shots of Peary’s bathtub liquor, and Kou is hanging out and watching the party, and Lio sighs.
“You want to get out of here?” she asks.  “Not tonight, I mean--the whole University conspiracy.  Just go.”
“Yes,” Kou says, instantly on board without a single detail.  Her girlfriend has been gone for three weeks.  Her body is ready.  Her entire everything is ready.  “When?  Where’re we going?”
“We could totally make it as bandits out by Zakri,” Lio says.  “You know they’ve been doing all kinds of weird construction stuff along the main road between the two seas, trying to restart the canal project, and the main road’s been in shambles for months.  I have a total plan.  We could camp out along one of the smaller roads and take out caravans, be bandits, live like queens.  It’d be great.”
“Yes,” Kou says again.  “Absolutely.  I’m in.  I know some healing stuff, and I have a pocketknife.  Let’s do it.”
(Kou asks precisely zero questions about where, or how, or why, or even who, for the entire conversation.  I knew this would be the case by halfway through session 0, and I am delighted to be proven right.  Kou is ready for absolutely everything and absolutely nothing.  It’s going to be great.)
“Hmm, but we’d probably need more people,” Lio muses, in that way people do when they remember all the practical reasons they’re mostly joking about quitting their job and running away to live in the woods.  “Unless you know how to use a sword.”
“I know some people!” Kou says.  “Let me see who I can talk to.  We can totally do this.”
Fourth, Athen takes a break from circling around the party with an eye out for any serious injuries or alcohol poisoning risk to find Marion in the kitchen, eating cheese and arguing about historical probability and textual interpretation with Wren.  They’re having just about as much fun as an antisocial math nerd with a special interest in history can have at a party full of academics who also have a special interest in history--which is kind of a lot, come to think of it.
The party is loud and boisterous, so they head to Athen’s tiny closet of a bedroom to chat.  There’s something he needs to talk about, and Marion’s a good enough friend to listen.
“So you’ve been talking about doing some fieldwork,” Athen says.  “Have you thought about going west?”
Athen’s family lives west of Karna Vi, in the wide highland plains of the Highnorth, where there’s nothing for miles but cattle, a few sheep, a lot of rye and oats, and the occasional potato field.  In his grandfather’s day, they were part of the Trava Empire, and that was fine.  Theoretically their village doesn’t belong to anyone but themselves, now, and they farm as best they can, and sell what surplus they can at the closest big trade-town to someone who carts it into Karna Vi and sells it to city bakers and and housewives and leatherworkers, and it’s fine too, mostly, except for when it’s not.
Lately it’s not, so much.  The Uvencatra Empire in the western mountains has been making some motions towards marching eastward across the plains, and they’re eyeing the region Athen’s family is from next.  He’s concerned.  He’s really concerned.  He’s maybe about to drop out of school concerned.
“You know how to fight things,” Athen says.  “And maybe you’d find things over there, in the Western Orthodox church records.  I can go home and help heal people, but I don’t know how to protect them.”
“Oh, I am not the right member of my family for this,” Marion frets, and Athen frowns.
“Would any of the rest of them care?” he asks.
“Point,” Marion agrees.
(They’ve got a quiet monotone the whole time, slow to assemble sentences except when they start contemplating the actual possibilities of research within the Uvencatra Orthodox churches, spilling out hypotheses and jargon like water.  Marion’s player has degrees in anthropology.  Marion cares about Athen’s problems, but has no real thoughts about them.  Marion has thoughts about historical research.)
“Let me think about it,” Marion says, and the party goes on.
The Fight
By dawn, most of the party has cleared out, though not quite all of it.  A couple of failed Con saves mean that Kou is dozing in a chair in the living room, not quite with it enough to notice the rest of the band leaving, and Marion is passed out cold in Athen’s bed alone.  Reigenleif has spent most of the party hanging off to the side, watching people and occasionally scooping up anything that appears to maybe be a weapon that’s been carelessly left sitting around, tucking it into the Bag of Holding just to make sure this party doesn��t go sideways in a nasty way; she can’t leave until the kegs are given back over into her keeping, so she might as well help clean up.
Kevin, out on the deck, has not actually realized the party has ended yet.  He’s only just beginning to notice the lack of people as the first rays of sunlight creep over the city, and a very loud bang sounds from the top of the roof.
It jolts Kou dozily awake and Marion tumbles onto the floor in an instant.  Kevin and Reigenleif, already outside along with Riva, look up just in time to see the outlines of Wren and Lisha on the roof in the pale morning sun, alongside some billowing smoke and two cat-sized things skittering along the roof tiles in acid green.
Then Wren falls off the roof to the deck and takes so much damage in a ten-foot fall that her scrawny little NPC self ends up unconscious.  Then combat begins.
There’s a flutter and a flurry as the quasits on the roof hiss at everyone and skitter away.  Initiative is nobody’s friend, and fighting something ten feet above everyone’s head isn’t easy, but Reigenleif upends her entire bag of holding and sends a pile of belt knives, a couple of blunt-ended reproduction historical weapons, and a fancy letter opener skittering out over the desk, and hides behind a convenient barrel.  Riva grabs a sportsball stick.  Kou has enough movement to rush out onto the deck just in time to see Lisha fall; “Oh, fuck!” is now the official incantation for her Healing Word, and Wren is safe, although not very happy.
Kevin tries to intimidate the quasits, all six-foot-seven of burly elf growling directly at them, and it actually works on one.  The intimidated quasit instantly turns into a bat and swoops off through an open window into the living room to Get Away.  The other quasit, annoyed at the attempt, casts Fear on Kevin in retaliation.  It is super effective.
Marion makes it out to the living room, wearing no armor but carrying the heaviest candlestick she could grab, just in time to see an acid-green bat swoop through the window and start destroying things.  It’s very early and she is probably slightly hungover but also she’s a good researcher and knows what a quasit looks like, so she whacks it.  It bites her, poison and all--make that definitely pretty hungover.
Athen made it outside around the same time as Kou, and has been trying to heal people who need it as Riva tries to whack at a tiny demon on his roof, Kevin attempts to cower behind a gnome, and Reigenleif and Kou both throw things.  Kevin succeeds in a wisdom save after another round or two, and manages to do some good thwacking damage.  The quasit turns into a foot-long centipede in an attempt to escape, and skitters along the wall through the door into the house, before Kou Cutting Words’s it to death.
Lisha tries to jump off the roof to get down and help, and sprains her ankle.  Athen is already inside giving Marion a hand, and none of the PCs seem inclined to help.
Between Marion and Athen, the second quasit goes down relatively quickly.  The first one has already disappeared into nothingness, and the second one follows soon behind.  Marion lay-on-hands’es themself, and drinks some water, because they have utterly forgotten that quasits have venom at all and damn, this hangover.  The nauseous feeling passes after a minute or so, anyway.  Athen goes outside to heal Lisha, Peary appears from her own room wanting to know what the hell is going on out here, Kou is jumping between ‘I insulted it and it died and I’m real cool!’ and, ‘did my entire band just ditch me here because I fell asleep?’, and everything is equally as chaotic as it was in the middle of the fight, when the knock sounds on the door.
The Head of Campus Housing brought security with him, and he’s not happy.
The Aftermath
Marion pulls rank and some excellent persuasion checks to keep the entire set of Young Pre-Glorians from getting evicted right now, and everybody else in the room from being put on housing probation.  Marion lives with their parents on the other side of the city, or, more accurately, in the library--housing probation doesn’t mean much to them, but it does matter to everyone else.
Lisha, apparently, was attempting to use the limnal nature of sunrise, sitting over a party that both was and was not a party any longer, with people below who were drunk, and dreaming, and no longer drunk, on a day of particular celestial configuration, to do some magic experimentation, because obviously.  Wren wanted a familiar.  Lisha could totally use a ritualistic setup to cast a spell she isn’t high enough level for and doesn’t actually know, and also alter it to bind to somebody that isn’t even her, and make it work.  Maybe not today, but probably next time, right?
The PC’s are somewhat annoyed with Lisha, but also agree that the university just does not have enough ritual magic experimentation labs, and that really needs to be corrected.  They also figure that, housing probation or no, it’s maybe not a bad time to get out of town for a bit.  They’re good at fighting things together!  They’ve got some options!
They toss some ideas around--Kou’s option involves banditry, and Marion’s pretty sure they’re not allowed to do that, but Reigenleif’s has, like, three weeks in the mountains, and that sounds pretty awful too.  Athen and Poppy both need help, and they’re both friends--Kou doesn’t care where they go, and Reigenleif is up for whatever sounds interesting.  Poppy’s research trip sounds like a good way to make the university like them, which after this display might be particularly useful.
In the end, the decision comes down to Marion, who’s happy to help people but is mostly only considering either of these treks as a road to more god-research, to help define the variables to determine the maximum number of gods the Church of Lost Things still has to discover.  There’s a western orthodox church in the Uvencatra Empire, out past where Athen’s family lives, and they could have all sorts of records and knowledge that Marion doesn’t...but nobody knows what the hell is going on in the Iris Peninsula.  The entire place is apparently a forest, and that means people don’t travel it much for some reason?  It’s all sort of unclear and difficult to understand from this side of the continent.  So what the heck, Poppy’s thing it is.
Poppy is somewhat taken aback to be woken up slightly hungover at 10 AM by Kevin and also a random human knocking on her dorm room door to tell her that yes, they and two other people she’s never met are in for her expedition, and also can they leave tomorrow please?  But also sure.  Why not.  These things happen when you ask Kevin for help.  She’ll talk to her advisor to push those expedition grant funds through, and they’ll leave on Monday.  Maybe let’s have lunch or dinner this afternoon?  After Kevin and Marion sleep?
Reigenleif, meanwhile, takes Kou along to return the bag of holding and empty kegs to Milosh, in the hopes that having a highly charismatic good-persuasion bard along might just increase their chances of persuading Milosh to let them keep the Bag of Holding for this journey.  Little does she know that, while Kou is fun and delightful and good at persuasion, she’s also an awkward flailer who doesn’t entirely understand what they’re supposed to be convincing Milosh of in the first place, and has no proficiency in deception whatsoever.
The conversation stumbles and bobbles a bit, before Reigenleaf gets to the meat of the situation: they’re not going to Ormiras, but does Anna maybe need something delivered or picked up from another of the Nine Cities?  Perhaps something on Iris?  Like, say...
“Cloud Bay,” Reigenleif says, naming the only city on the Iris Peninsula she can remember at 7 AM on zero sleep, which is unfortunately not the same one Poppy mentioned to Kevin earlier.
“Cloud Bay?” Milosh says.  “Shitty weather and elves?  What’re you going there for?”
In an attempt to leverage her higher Deception score over Persuasion, Reigenleif starts to spin a relatively believable lie about engineering research and her own degree work.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t roll particularly well.  More fortunately, or perhaps more unfortunately still, Milosh doesn’t actually care ‘why Cloud Bay’, aside from as a rhetorical question, so it’s not particularly useful in any case.
“Look,” Milosh says.  “Let me talk to Anna about Cloud Bay.  Check back in tomorrow or Sunday, maybe we have a job for you there, maybe not.  A’right?”
They snag a couple of muffins on the way out.  Kou feels a little useless, but so be it.  Marion crashes in Kevin’s room, since he just needs a corner to meditate in anyway, and everyone naps until the meet-with-Poppy time in the evening.
The Campaign Plan
Poppy is just a little taken aback at the new crew she seems to’ve acquired, but she’s ready to go and they’re game, so, sure.  Let’s do this.
She elaborates a little on what she told Kevin, in some angles, and says less in others.  The Glorian Empire, as some of the party know better than others, stretched out from here in Karna Vi across most of the Attiks Sea and around the continent.  They sped the civilization in the Midlands, they spread the Eight Churches throughout the continent, they founded cities, they built roads.  They founded Port Charé on the coast of the heavily-forested Iris Peninsula and began to build in, cutting trees and building roads and forts and towns as they went.  Kera the Conqueror, famed emperor, oversaw the expansion across easily half of Iris, naming literally everything after himself as he went.
Iris was hard to conquer, and the Empire began to pull out not long after Kera died.  They left ruins and roads, and the people of Port Charé, who’d lived in this city for two centuries at this point and were not about to move back to the other side of the sea, even if this was going to be the only bastion of civilization for a thousand miles.  There was a working road to Ormiras.  They’d manage.
As for those ruins, deep into Iris--who knows what’s there?
Sober and in front of three strangers, Poppy doesn’t say anything about pre-Elven Incursion elven aesthetics.  It doesn’t really matter, because Kevin told everybody everything, but some things are just too historically improbable to admit you believe.
“So,” says Poppy.  “Are you in?  I can get grant funds and our travel paperwork Monday morning.  We circle into Port Charé and follow the roads as far as they go.  I have an old map, Imperial-era.  We can find things nobody’s seen in hundreds of years.”
The party doesn’t need to ask each other.  They’re in.  They all know they’re in.
Six months on an archaeological expedition in a forest for four city kids, three of whom have never seen anything more than a single ten-acre orchard in their lives?
Oh yeah.  Total piece of cake.
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theliberaltony · 5 years ago
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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight
The first thing I noticed when I walked into Michael Bloomberg’s campaign headquarters in downtown Los Angeles was the wall of terrariums. For one brief second I wondered, staring at the multitude of tiny, meticulously groomed succulents clustered on a bookshelf that ran almost half the length of a cavernous, industrial-chic loft, if I had somehow misstepped and stumbled into an Anthropologie. But there was the former New York mayor — or at least, a cutout of him, propped up across from a huge white wall plastered with campaign signs.
It was still early in the morning, but the Bloomberg bus had already pulled up outside to drop off a group of gun safety advocates who had been touring the state and talking to local leaders. Staffers were setting up for a private roundtable with a local prosecutor and a LA city council member who had recently endorsed Bloomberg, placing a “Bloomberg 2020” screen in front of a giant mural of a pink-skinned woman in sunglasses with rainbow hair, spelling out “LA” with her fingers. Still stunned by the opulence of the space, I asked Lys Mendez, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, where they had found so many terrariums. “Oh, it came this way,” she said, shrugging. “We had to ramp up in California so quickly — we just took the office space we could find.”
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
It’s hard to avoid thinking of Bloomberg’s bid as a kind of political science experiment — a test of whether an elderly, extraordinarily wealthy ex-Republican can run a competitive campaign almost entirely on the basis of his own advertising and a big, generously paid staff. That experiment will play out across the country this week, when Bloomberg will finally appear on the ballot after a bizarre campaign in which he entered the race late, skipped the four early states and focused instead on winning the trove of delegates that await on Super Tuesday.
And California is, in many ways, the maximal test of Bloomberg’s strategy. He’s invested a lot in other big Super Tuesday states like Texas, but California is the state where his dollars should carry him the furthest, because its media markets are so expensive and the state’s large, diverse population makes it hard to set up an effective ground game.
His spending spree has certainly gotten him somewhere in California. Bloomberg is now polling around 13 percent in California, according to our average, up from 4 percent in January. But Californians also love to tell you about the self-funded candidates who have tried — and failed — to spend their way into public office. Take Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Michael Huffington or Al Checchi. After this Tuesday, we’ll know whether Bloomberg will join that inglorious pantheon or whether California’s unexpected contribution to the Democratic nomination process is the elevation of a self-funded billionaire’s candidacy.
Right now, it seems like Bloomberg will finish in third or fourth place even though he has spent tens of millions of dollars in the state. But after seeing Bloomberg’s swanky office, I wanted to find out how ordinary Californians were feeling about his campaign. After spending several days talking to voters across Los Angeles, one thing became clear: Bloomberg’s spending has bought him notoriety, but hasn’t translated into widespread enthusiasm.
It’s hard to find a Californian who’s not aware of Bloomberg’s run, thanks to his advertising blitz in the state over the past few months. Since the beginning of the year, he’s spent more than $36 million on television advertising alone. “I’d describe it as a bombardment,” said Khalid Maznavi, 39, who is supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “He’s there whenever I turn on the radio or watch TV. And it’s been like that for weeks.”
Bloomberg has dominated the airwaves in California
The estimated amount of money each active Democratic presidential candidate spent on broadcast TV ads from Jan. 1 to Feb. 27, 2020, in California-based media markets, and the number of times their ads aired
Candidate Estimated Spending on TV Ads Number of Airings Michael Bloomberg $36,270,860 49,506 Bernie Sanders 5,540,490 10,246
Source: Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group
Fueled by Bloomberg’s bottomless fortune, the campaign has also quickly assembled an enormous outreach machine to reach California voters. According to research by FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist Joshua Darr, Bloomberg now has the biggest footprint in the state, with 25 field offices scattered across California — just barely topping Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has 23 field offices.1
His rapidly expanding team is well-compensated for its time. As recently as last week, his campaign was “urgently hiring” for organizers who would be paid $18 per hour, well above the state’s minimum wage. Bloomberg has also amassed a wide network of high-profile local supporters and endorsers — like San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Michael Tubbs, the millennial mayor of Stockton — even though Bloomberg is relatively new to California, having only opened his first office in the state two months ago.
But on the ground in Los Angeles, Bloomberg fans were surprisingly hard to find. Some of the glitzy events sponsored by the campaign were relatively sparsely attended, despite the lure of free food and drinks and even a live band. In many cases, the people at the events seemed to have been drawn more by curiosity than passion for Bloomberg’s message. At an event at a restaurant in Chinatown, Ed Choi, 44, told me that he had “kind of lost track” of the presidential primary after his first choice, Andrew Yang, dropped out. He was impressed that Bloomberg had taken the time to hold an event in Chinatown. “It’s the first time I’ve been to one of those, so that counts for something,” he said. But he said he was there with an open mind. “I just need to know more about where he stands on the issues.”
Paul Chen, a CPA who was schmoozing with one of the hosts of the Chinatown event, said that he hadn’t made up his mind yet either, but if he had to choose a candidate on the spot, it would be Biden. He dismissed Sanders with a sentiment that was widespread among attendees, who were largely local businesspeople. “I don’t like the way he’s all about everything being free,” Chen told me. But he added that he wasn’t yet convinced by Bloomberg either. “He’s got the financial backing, but I’m not sure he’ll be accepted by mainstream Democrats. That could be an issue.”
Each time I set off in search of Bloomberg supporters at events across Los Angeles, his press staff warned me to make sure I wasn’t talking to a campaign employee. Only volunteers were permitted to share their opinions with journalists. It was often a struggle to find someone who wasn’t paid to be there and willing to talk about their perspective on the record. Bloomberg’s campaign has recently hired hundreds of paid influencers to get out the word about his campaign on social media and via text message. And although people at candidate rallies or events are normally happy to chat with journalists, a surprising number of people refused to talk to me or let me use their names. One man nearly ran away when I said I was a reporter, saying he would never hear the end of it from his Sanders-supporting friends if word got out that he was considering Bloomberg.
By the time I did stumble upon a diehard Bloomberg fan, waiting outside a Los Angeles soccer stadium for a get-out-the-vote event, it felt like I had sighted a rare bird in the wild. Fabio Sabzevari, 25, told me with great enthusiasm that he had been volunteering in the Northridge office for two weeks. “It’s simple. I believe that he’s the moderate candidate who can win against Trump,” Sabzevari said. “And he’s got the resources to fight Trump’s multibillion-dollar disinformation machine. Who else in this race can do that?”
But Bloomberg’s ability to pour millions into his presidential bid was not a selling point for everyone. “It is mind-boggling to me that someone purporting to be acting under progressive ideals would be wasting millions and millions of dollars basically trying to force people to vote for him,” said Rhiannon Wilson, 22, a Sanders supporter. Wilson told me that her aversion to Bloomberg went well beyond his political stances. She said she was “disgusted” that he was trying to buy the nomination.
That attitude was far from unusual among the Californians I talked to. Tessie Borden, 53, who is supporting Warren, physically recoiled when I brought up Bloomberg. “I would not vote for that man. I think he’s a Republican plant,” she said. I asked her what she would do if he won the nomination. She shook her head a little and said, “I would write in Warren.”
Even if Bloomberg does overperform in California, that sentiment is one he’s likely to face in other states as the primary contest moves forward. Bloomberg is gambling that Democrats will be drawn to him because of his claim that he’s a candidate who can win. His spending spree is part of that appeal for some voters, who look at President Trump and wonder if he can only be defeated by another billionaire. But Bloomberg’s cash-fueled strategy also seems to be earning him genuine animosity in other corners of the Democratic base. And if his candidacy survives past Super Tuesday, it won’t be easy to convince those voters that he can be trusted.
Nathaniel Rakich contributed research.
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Given the fact that you're an actual brazilian lol I gotta ask: Did anyone believe two years ago that someone like Bolsonaro could win? Because I'm not an expert in brazilian politics but I'm really shocked, like we have a right wing president but he is like... a normal right wing asshole? As in he doesn't defend torture and so on. I guess I'm scared bc I see our countries as quite similar, I think Brasil is a little more conservative and you guys have more issues with crime but still similar.
This is really, really big, but I wanted to give you the full picture of what happened in my country. I hope it doesn’t happen on yours or any other country from Latin America (or anywhere, no one deserves it).
Honestly… it depends who you ask. His fans/electors have been yelling that Bolsonaro would be president for the good part of two, three years, but big part of the population didn’t take him seriously because he honestly sounds like a caricature. It’s hard to believe a person can be like this, and therefore people did not take him serious.
Big mistake, that was.
To give you a little context: during most of our democratic history (that isn’t very long), Brazil was ruled by right wing parties. We have several political parties in here, but the biggest one from the right wing side was PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira). The biggest political party on the left wing side is PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores).
Brazil was a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This was a horrible, bloody piece of our history, and we only started to have a democratic state after 1985. During the years that followed, in most of the elections the main dispute was between PT and PSDB, PT always losing until 2002, when Lula aka Luís Inácio Lula da Silva won for elections.
Lula ruled from 2002 to 2010; a presidential term on Brazil lasts for four years, but we have reelections and Lula won a second term in 2006.
His time as a president was marked for several things. There was several social projects for poor people, projects to fight famine, to give finantial help to people who received too low income, projects to help poor people get into universities. They were not perfect projects by any means but I can assure you that it made a HUGE difference for millions of people in this country.
Another thing that marked Lula’s time as a president was the corruption scandals.
You see, it’s not that Brazil didn’t have corruption before, because corruption is in this country’s bones. But it was during Lula’s time as a president that we came to know how big the proportions of this corruption was. This was called the ‘mensalão’; Lula claimed that he did not know about it (which I doubt very much), but people from all political parties were implicated, including from PT.
Lula was still very popular and loved by many people, but this was the first seeds of the so called anti-petismo, that would take much bigger proportions later.
After Lula, we had Dilma Rousseff, also from PT, supported by Lula; her first term was from 2010 and 2014.
Dilma had little experience for this charge, and her time as president showed it. Her term was very mediocre, and popular insatisfaction began to rise, especially because of the World Cup that happened here on 2014 - a LOT of money was spent on it, and often the planning was really bad.
More popular insatisfaction rising; the elites were never happy to have a left wing party on power, but now middle class people started to being deluded that they were elite and anti-petismo started to get bigger. Dilma still won reelections in 2014, but it was a close call with her oponent.
Now we have a very divided country. And during the World Cup there was plenty of jobs everywhere, but after it there was a huge wave of unemployment all over the nation, the economy was a shambles. Even MORE popular insatisfaction. Things getting ugly and uglier by minute.
I won’t give you all details because this is already getting ridiculous long and it is a very long story, but Dilma suffered an impeachment. She was not very competent, but that was bullshit and clearly a coup, because we have recorded audios of the right wing opposition plotting to get her out so they could put in power her vice, Michel Temer, a right wing politic.
So now that’s still our president, Michel Temer. Just two years on power, but boy, the man did so much of damage all around, and no one, not people sympathetic to the left nor people sympathetic to the right like the man.
More popular insatisfaction, all around now. No one is happy in this country; everyone wants a change.
Now, take Bolsonaro, this dumb piece of shit we just elected. The man have been a congressist for 27 years. In this time he aproved like, two projects. In several opportunities he voted against the rights of poor people. You may remember the video of him talking with Ellen Page or Stephen Fry and how horrible that was. No one would want a horrible AND incompetent man like that as a president, right?
Right?
Well. Brazil have a wide variation of people in our nation and most people have black relatives, but we’re still a very racist, misogynistic, homophobic country. This people started to enjoy Bolsonaro’s speeches because they identify with him. Their mentality was something like… we need to stop the corruption in this country, and Bolsonaro will do it! Never mind he says that gay people should be beaten. That his white son would never marry a black woman because he received good education. That police should straight up invade favelas and kill poor people. That he said to a woman that the only reason he wouldn’t rape her was because she was not worth raping. They don’t care if women and queer people, and black and poor people get hurt or killed in this process; our lives are a small price to pay for them.
Now I do believe that even if this planet is loaded with horrible awful people, there’s still more good than bad. There’s still more good people than not, and how could good people vote for this man?
The means they used to get these votes was mass manipulation. Very similar tactics that Trump used in this campaign; dozen, hundreds of fake news all around. While in US they used mainly Facebook for this means, in Brazil they used an app called WhatsApp, because not everyone has facebook on Brazil but everyone has a cellphone and uses this app for easy communication.
In these groups they exalted that Bolsonaro would end corruption, would be a ‘correct christian man’, would stop the ‘LGBT doutrination of children on schools’. He would save this country. Mito (mith) is how his fans call him, or Messias (his middle name), and they absoluted demonized the opposition.
Now Bolsonaro is extreme right wing; the centrists and the normal right wing assholes are another story. PSDB tried to launch a candidate with no sucess, and PT was planning to launch Lula again as a candidate… but Lula was arrested in april (another bullshit). If he was not, he might have won; at least all the surveys showed Lula was more popular than even Bolsonaro. Because of that, PT tried to launch Lula as candidate even from inside prison, and of course, it didn’t work out, so there was a huge delay in PT choosing a candidate.
Eventually, Fernando Haddad was chosen. He’s a professor, a good man; was mayor of São Paulo. Was a ministry in Lula’s term, helped to create several education projects. But he was also not very known - I didn’t even know him until like four months ago.
The fact that he was not very well known helped a lot the pro-Bolsonaro groups to demonize the man and his vice. Many fake news were made up about him, stuff like him trying to legalize paedophilia, that he he was going to give a ‘gay kit’ for kids in school and therefore incentive the erotization of children, that he was a rapist. That he was against traditional family, but Bolsonaro would save the Brazilian Family. All of this being spread in those WhatsApp groups with little to no fiscalization, being spread out by hateful people and by people who don’t have a good grasp in politics and believe everything they read.
There was also a great demonization of PT as a party - oh no, you can’t let PT back on power again, right? PT is corrupt! They stole us! Don’t you remember mensalão? They DESTROYED the country, they’re gonna do it AGAIN, they BROKE this country and tore it apart (anyone would thing we lived in some sort of paradise before), PT is gonna transform this country in a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP we’re gonna be the next Venezuela.
(I kid you not. I heard this last part from my father’s mouth last time I saw him. People really believed this)
Nevermind that PT was on power for 14 years and we didn’t become communists and if anything they appllied a more centrist line of ruling the leftist; we can’t let PT win. Bolsonaro will save this country.
Now another thing you need to understand is that Bolsonaro is DUMB. He’s dumb as fuck. In the first part of the elections he showed up to a few presidential debates and said horrible things like “Portugueses (our collonizers) never even set foot on Africa, Black people slavered themselves” that caused some popular outtrage. For that reason, in the second part of the elections he didn’t showed up in any debate, least he opened his mouth and people realize the kind of person they were trying to elect to represent them. Bolsonaro also suffered an attack in September (was stabbed in the belly), which helped to incentivate his popularity (after all, the man is a martyr now).
These were the main ingredients that elected Bolsonaro. Anti-petismo, misguided and ignorant people being led on in a flood of fake news, fascists that knew exactly who they were electing, a refusal to hear good arguments, since his supporters think that every piece of evidence we have of Bolsonaro being a piece of garbage was edited or taken out of context (it was not).
They also had a little help from their American friends; in this picture you can see Eduardo Bolsonaro (the son of the piece of shit, also a piece of shit himself) cozying up with Steve Bannon, the white supremacist from Trump’s presidential campaign, and give yesterday’s results, his tips sure seem to have worked here too.
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Edit: this article can also help you to understand a little the reasons of why he won:
Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign
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somewhere-in-the-dungeon · 7 years ago
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Day is a vestigial mode of time measurement
Prelude and definitions
There are a lot of ways to play tabletop RPGs.
Somebody out there is nodding their head, thinking about D&D 3.5 and 5e and Pathfinder and maybe even E6, but we can go broader. Some tables run entirely oneshots, games with no recurring characters from week to week. Some tables stick with one ruleset the entire time they’re together, others swap rules after each campaign, still others swap rules half a dozen times in a single story arc. Some tables are comprised of close friends and family, others of strangers who don’t interact apart from the game. Lately though, I’ve been thinking about one style of play in particular that I know a lot of people highly value: Indefinite duration, bounded, high-context campaigns in tables with low to negligible turnover and frequent regular sessions.
I just threw out a lot of jargon there and frankly half of that jargon are terms I’ve only really seen myself use, so what do I mean?
Indefinite duration games don’t know how long they’re going to last. They can’t tell you they’ll be done by June 16th, or after fifteen sessions.
Bounded games do actually (hypothetically) have a planned end. Some bounded games never actually reach their intended end, and all games eventually stop even if they’re unbounded. This is easiest to see in the shape of the arcs- take Avatar: The Last Airbender, which (from practically the first episode!) sets up a clear goal for the protagonists and has a discernible beginning, middle and end. If AtLA had gotten canceled after the first season, there would be a clear sense of something missing. Buffy The Vampire Slayer on the other hand could probably have run indefinitely, and Supernatural looks like it plans to.
High Context games are hard to explain to an outsider, as each session interrelates to the next. Marvel Netflix shows and the webserial Worm are high context- a random episode of Jessica Jones, shown to someone who hasn’t seen any others, makes relatively little sense because its character arcs are built up over many prior episodes. The TV show The Twilight Zone and the Redwall books are low context: sit down to any individual example of those, and you’ll be able to understand what’s going on just fine as there’s no connecting thread between them. High context games almost always require...
Low Turnover tables, where the same faces are there every session, and when a player joins that player is usually in for the long haul. Introducing new characters usually takes a few sessions or more to integrate into the group, and there’s almost always a unique story reason for them to join. A player leaving a low turnover table is usually given a grand sendoff if the departure can be predicted in advance, or becomes a strange plot hole if the departure is sudden.
Frequent sessions is a somewhat fuzzy term. Here, I’m using it to mean sessions that happen every week.
Regular sessions happen at the same time and day, like every friday night or every sunday morning.
Advantages
There are a lot of advantages to this setup. Bounded and indefinite games grant the GM a grand canvas on which to write their story; the tabletop versions of Lord of the Rings, Worm, and the Wheel of Time are all expansive tales that would not work if their length was constrained or their endings neutered. (A game can be long but still have a definite duration- I could design a campaign to run for exactly five hundred sessions- but I don’t think J. R. R. Tolkien could have told you from the start how many pages he would need for the Lord of the Rings. The tale, as they say, grew in the telling.) Characters can undergo great changes, and corruption or redemption can be woven into the story subtly.
High context and low turnover means that you can drop details into the early parts of the game and pay them off later in ways that would be blatant and obvious if done over the course of a single session. It is a strange experience to look back from Mount Doom and realize how far we are from the shire, and it is strange to return to Brockton Bay as Gold Morning rises.
Frequent sessions are needed both to keep the events of the story fresh in your player’s minds and to allow reaching the end of such a story- I would roughly estimate that the Exalted game that I was part of involved around three hundred sessions, played over the course of seven years! If it was once a month instead of once a week, we would have taken twenty five years to cover the same ground. Finally, if you are going to play every week, then it can be convenient to pick a day and time then stick to it, rather than renegotiating four or five schedules every week.
Disadvantages
The primary disadvantage is that this is an incredibly fragile setup.
When you are planning games over the course of nearly a decade, you will find the lives of the people involved change. The Exalted game of this form I was in started in the early years of my bachelor’s degree; we all graduated and scattered across four or five different states. Gaming online helps with distance, but people get married (granted, that one’s less of a problem if players marry each other or the GM) or change jobs (we lost a player to exhausting manual labor) or just change tastes. In sufficiently high context games, these changes are really hard on the game: A reveal near the end may be unintelligible or worse, unimportant to players who weren’t there in that college apartment five years ago when this all started. Missteps and gaps are hard to recover from.
You will also find the vagarencies of system will be a problem. In a long enough run, all outliers will happen eventually. Even if no players drop out, a string of terrible rolls can kill important characters. You may even come to find that every single original character has fallen and been replaced. Can the system even handle that much play and advancement? (D&D has a few shift changes between level 1 and level twenty, and then it just starts getting weird. A level 60 Wizard is essentially an incoherent concept in 3.5.) Errata will be released for your game: do you adopt it? What if an entire new edition of the system is released? Updating Dresden Files to Fate Core is perhaps sensible, Exalted 2e to 3e is a judgement call, but would D&D 4e to 5e make any sense?
Stories (at least in the western tradition) have beginnings, middles, and ends. Sub arcs of such a campaign can be longer than entire storylines in a shorter game, providing valuable opportunities to practice, but the fact remains that I’ve run more complete games of Paranoia than I’ve run complete games of Exalted. Practice is valuable, and long form games are hard for a GM to practice and perfect. Players also gain experience, and may find that a character has resolved their story or that they wish to make a new, more complex character.
This is hard, is what I’m saying.
Solutions
I’ve finished (. . .ish) one game like this where I was a player, and am moving into the end steps of another I’m running. I’m contemplating starting a new one once the game I’m running finishes. One of the greatest GMs I know swears by this format, and doesn’t want to do anything else. As hard a problem as this is, I would like to find solutions. Some issues can be solved by relaxing one of the requirements, but we’ll assume for now that these are ironclad.
Where do you get your players? Perhaps one of the more valuable things I get from occasionally running one-shots or short-throw games is finding new players, who I can evaluate and then consider for future longer games. It’s not just what they’re like while playing, but how often they show up to games or how they interact with other players. Crosstalk can also be a sneaky way to onboard players: Players talk about the games they’re in, and my S.O.’s Monsterhearts table has heard plenty of details about our Exalted and D&D games. That can be a place to draw new players who are excited about your game and who are already informed as to what’s been going on in your campaign.
Gaps and missed sessions are probably going to happen, but you can minimize the damage they do. Consider: what do you do if a single player can’t make it? If you shrug your shoulders and cancel for that week, you preserve the expectation and pressure on each player- but you also leave everyone else with an empty saturday night, one that perhaps they wish the could have made plans for. This can compound: Someone has a wedding to attend this week, and then next week you’re not in the right headspace to GM, then the next week someone’s power is out, and the week after that you find that a player has a date because “I didn’t think we’d wind up gaming that night.” The question isn’t “do I want to do this other thing or attend the game this week” it’s “how much do I value the other thing times the odds it actually happens, vs how much do I value the game times the odds it actually happens.” If the odds get bad enough, your game can be the highlight of your player’s week and still lose out.
Letting everyone know as early as possible is good, but you can also mitigate this by having something else to do that night; run a oneshot or a side campaign, play a videogame together or some Settlers of Catan, or even a social night where you sit around and shoot the breeze. Anything to prevent the train of thought that goes “oh, I guess Bob isn’t around so we aren’t gaming. Darn. Well, I guess I’ll spend the night alone- kinda wish I’d said yes to that cute date. Next time, maybe!” If you do this well enough, you can actually add people: In high school my table ate pizza and played Halo friday night if we didn’t have the numbers to play RPGs, and we wound up inviting a guy in the neighborhood over when we did. We found that he actually penciled in gaming at my place to his schedule every friday, and as long as he had that time set aside anyway did he want to learn to roll some dice? (He did, and still does, and is part of my monday night table.)
On that subject, how do you handle it when someone cancels? It’s best to give everyone as much information as you can as early as you can, because it lets them take advantage of the gap and prevents them feeling like they’re “losing” a night. (This is especially important if you game on a hotly contested timeslot: most people don’t have a lot competing for their Tuesday evenings, but a Friday Night is the centre of a lot of people’s social lives.) If you want that though, I think you need to be kind and understanding when you get that cancellation: if you get angry at people for missing, then they delay longer and longer to tell you (either in case circumstances change, or just putting off that anger) and you can’t give other people early warning. You probably don’t want people to come to view your game as an obligation, but feeling punished for lack of attendance can cause that to happen.
So, you’ve arranged things so that whether there’s a game or not, everyone looks forward to Sunday Night every week, and people tell you a couple of weeks in advance when they aren’t going to be able to be there. Why are your players hoping your game does run? In writing, there’s an idea of “the page turner” where each situation leads to a question of what happens next, and the reader can get sucked into wanting “one more chapter!” This effect can also be recognized in videogames (“one more turn!” *birdsong outside* “Gah, it’s morning!”) and even TV shows. I think it’s possible to make this happen in tabletop games. If you’ve got a tight plot full of twists and intrigue, you can get it the same way you do in writing. If you’ve got a mechanical system that’s genuinely *fun* to engage in, that can be a great too. (My Blades in the Dark table would often ask for a second heist right after we finished the ‘session’, because they wanted that next piece of Turf they’d just unlocked access to or because c’mon, we just need two more Rep to go up a Tier!)
We can do better than that though. I think a seriously underrecognized source of danger in long-running campaigns is a weak middle, where you spend a couple of sessions in a row building up or setting tone and it’s only afterwards that players look back and see the unfolding tale as compelling. A question I ask myself after each night as part of my usual evaluation is “what made this session great?” The kinds of answers vary depending on the group and the system, but if there isn’t an answer then that’s the sort of thing I try very hard to fix! When I sit down to plan a session, I think about something cool that I can make sure is in there. Don’t get me wrong, ‘filler’ episodes do have an important purpose sometimes- they connect with the day to day parts of your character’s lives, they let you sneak in setup and Chekov’s Guns, they give a chance to roleplay and let characters bounce off each other, heck Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine is basically a game built around filler episodes- but keep your eye on the ball. What do your players love doing, or love telling stories about afterwards? Is there a reason you can’t do more of that next session?
I know when the long Exalted game that closed up recently was shifting into endgame, a big reveal came that. . . well, it landed, and we noticed, but it took far longer to percolate and had to be spelled out more than I know our GM wanted. The pacing of tabletop games, even played every week, is different than the pacing of a book. I read Worm (a simply enormous web serial) over the course of years as each week a couple of chapters were released, and the twist caught me by surprise. I know someone who read it over the course of a month or so, because they got into it once it had already concluded and they saw it coming a mile ahead of time. If a player gets blindsided by something that was telegraphed and set up, pause, and consider whether it was set up four years ago. Something I’ve taken to doing to combat this is writing down, at the end of each session, a paragraph about what happened. 
I’ve found this is helpful for me as a GM, but also really helpful for the players as we resume after a break. (Plus, it’s cool to read!) Even if you have a full log of what’s happened (a text log because you play via chat, or a video archive because you record sessions) people can scan the summary faster than they can look through an entire log. This helps catch new people up, this is a good tool for clarifying my thoughts as a GM, this is a neat place to screw with your players (someday, I am going to run a Cosmic Horror long form game, and my players are going to trust the summaries I’ve written, and I am going to weave an elegant lie into that record, and this is going to work even though I said I was going to do this right here.) and hey, you can even end each summary with a question that hypes up what happens next.
Compromises
If your vision of how you want to run your game is absolutely how your games must be run- Indefinite duration, bounded, high-context campaigns in tables with low to negligible turnover and frequent regular sessions- then this is where we part ways for a bit. Do a search for “concluding thoughts” and we’ll catch back up below. If you think you could budge a bit on those requirements though, or if you just want to see me go through the exercise, so be it, and fall on. I think there are tremendous gains to be made by removing even one of these requirements.
Finite Duration. I’ve been dating my S.O. for six years now. We’ve been asked more times than I can count “so, when is he going to pop the question?” and I’ve been deflecting the question with less and less grace and good humour as things go on. The truth is, I think about swearing a holy vow to be with them “til death do us part” and I think about value drift, and I think about how I am actually deeply transhumanist and how I plan to live to see the last star go out, and I think about the fact that sweet light there are seven billion people on this planet and I find around a billion of them to be hot, and about how zero and one are not probabilities, and I can’t bring myself to do it. And then I think about how I do want to be with them in five years, and in ten, and how I do want to settle down and find a house that fits us both and raise children and see them off and still love each other, and how I could swear to be with them for that many years.
My saturday night D&D group just fell apart, and for a moment towards the end I thought about swearing, with all the force of an oath, to be there and ready every single saturday until it concluded in an attempt to forestall this. And I thought, very clearly, “that could mean never having a weekend vacation or a saturday night date for the rest of my life, you know how this GM likes long stories.” So I didn’t commit, and maybe I should have. But if I could have looked and seen an end date, I would have felt much better about making that commitment. A finite duration campaign can draw a stronger and more reasoned commitment than an indefinite one.
Unbounded. You know what’s a great book series? Redwall. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a sucker for castles and badass swords. (Though ya know, those are both great.) One of the great things about Redwall is it could have kept going forever. A Redwall campaign could go arc after arc, and have clean places to step out or step back in, and still come together. Someday I want to run a game with the progression like Redwall-> Mossflower -> Martin the Warrior -> The Legend of Luke and it will be awesome. You know what else is great? Mythbusters. I mean, every episode works all on its own, and that makes it really tempting to binge watch. That feeling of no commitment that works out to being stronger than any promise of a sixteen season masterpiece.
An Unbounded game provides a real bulwark against mid-act duldroms. If every session or every arc is going to be basically like this, then everyone involved can get their acts together about making “basically like this” be awesome. One of my greater lightbulb moments came from discussing Star Wars, when someone pointed out that you can in fact kill Darth Maul one night, General Grievous the night after, and Count Dooku after that and there’s nothing stopping you from lining up another kickass saber dual and sith lord every session after that. We don’t need to spend a whole session talking about how much we hate sand.
Low-Context. I wanted to come up with something for everything on this list, but honestly, just swapping to low-context and not changing anything else doesn’t seem to give you any benefit that I can see. It might be prefered by some people, but more often high-context is an advantage you get from the other components being in place.
High Turnover. If you have solutions in place for maintaining the high-context capabilities of your players even with high turnover, then high turnover (or even the capacity for it!) can help ameliorate the issues of this general form of campaign marvelously. If it is straightforward and not at all unexpected for a player to drop out for a few months and then resume, or for a new player to join for a while before leaving, then you can give each player the benefits of a finite campaign while still reaping the benefits of having long timescales or ongoing plots. Taken to the extreme, a game like Blades in the Dark can operate with a completely new roster of players every single night and still work, the adventures of the crew as a whole only glimpsed in part by each player but still represented in the tapestry of stories they tell. It offers a way for a table to mix and match expectations- perhaps two players are always there every night, and the other two seats are filled by a rotating array of sidekicks and accomplices. (This is fitting for the superhero genre, but of course the same format can be used by anything from pirates to westerns to a dungeon crawl.)
Infrequent Sessions. Momentum in storytelling is important, but so are the many other demands on most of our time. A full time job, chores and appointments and exercise and socializing outside of gaming and any number of things eat into our free time. Heck, sometimes even if you love the table and love the game you want a break for a week. Longer gaps between games give more space to the other things in our lives, and they also make sharing high priority timeslots much easier. Friday Night Magic has a lot of overlap with the D&D crowd and a schedule that suggested playing every Friday might eventually compete with that- but offer every other Friday, and suddenly people can have both the things they want in their lives. Just by alternating weeks, you can take the pressure off by opening up that timeslot for other things some of the time to things that can’t or won’t move.
And you know what? I think there’s a lot of unexplored design space around very infrequent sessions. I got into a brief discussion last year around an important ritual I attend exactly once a year, where someone pointed out that part of its special feeling came from scarcity and a once-a-week event wouldn’t be able to capture that. They were right, and I agreed at the time that an RPG wouldn’t be capable of replicating an emotional space. Having thought about it more, I find I want to test that. About once a month me and my significant other go out on a nice date, dressed up just a little, and luxuriate in each other’s company- you know, the company that is lying around on the couch watching TV or reading a book the other twenty nine days of the month. If we went out on the town every weekend, it would stop being special. 
In my scheming ambition, I think about what a once-a-year game of Ten Candles would feel like, or how about setting aside a weekend twice a year to get together with my polycule and play through Emily Boss’s Romance Trilogy? Those aren’t high context games and they lack the kind of continuity that these games treasure I suppose, so how about a campaign of Nobilis, played only every Autumn and Spring Solstice? Even on a more mundane atmosphere, Ars Magica is mildly infamous for the most relevant timescale being Seasons- I think I would enjoy a game of Ars that met once a Season, and that advanced in step with the passing of real years.
Momentum is important. So is gravitas.
Irregular sessions. “Every tuesday night” can actually be hard to schedule around. It’s great on paper, and it has the virtue of simplicity, but it turns out sometimes dear old aunt Maude is visiting for the first time in years and she’ll be arriving Tuesday evening, or it’s Tuesday and you really want to game but your boss is hounding you about getting that report filed by tomorrow morning’s meeting or else.  Holidays wreck gaming schedules for that exact reason- a whole avalanche of important arrivals and departures and preparations. I think Irregular sessions actually aren’t as hard to arrange as the reputation suggests. Google Calendar, Doodle.com, and old fashioned spreadsheets can make picking a day relatively painless if you do it at the start of the week. Maybe you’ll settle on the same day week after week- but this gives a built in place to check in with the rest of the group if something comes up and you’ll be out of town that day, without feeling like you’re dislodging everyone’s expectations. Or you can be even less formal, and whenever the GM is in the mood they can ping everyone via a group text or a messaging app with a simple question: “Hey, I wanna game tonight, who’s free at six tonight?” Who knows, maybe you’ll find you can actually play more often than you thought!
Concluding Thoughts
There it is. A detailed description of a particular approach to games, some thoughts on issues that I have with that approach, and some plausible alterations that could be made. All along with waaay more words than any reasonable person would probably use on the subject.
There have to be a thousand variations on this hobby, and I believe all of them have something interesting to learn from. For those who love that big, sprawling game and can make it work, more power to you. As for me, I’m going to tinker, and I’m going to study, and maybe I’ll someday settle on that- but I doubt it.
I want to make it clear that I don’t think this kind of game is bad, but I think it might be incompatible with where I’m at these days. Maybe someday, when I have everything else settled and secured, I could return to it- but even then, I think I’d want to be at least one step away from it in a direction that gave an option for more freedom. For those who love this style, if you can, can you tell me what it is you love about it that wouldn’t survive a modification? What is it at the heart of your gaming style?
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orbemnews · 4 years ago
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What Would It Take to Vaccinate the World Against Covid? In delivering vaccines, pharmaceutical companies aided by monumental government investments have given humanity a miraculous shot at liberation from the worst pandemic in a century. But wealthy countries have captured an overwhelming share of the benefit. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population. Vaccine manufacturers assert that a fix is already at hand as they aggressively expand production lines and contract with counterparts around the world to yield billions of additional doses. Each month, 400 million to 500 million doses of the vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are now being produced, according to an American official with knowledge of global supply. But the world is nowhere close to having enough. About 11 billion shots are needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, the rough threshold needed for herd immunity, researchers at Duke University estimate. Yet, so far, only a small fraction of that has been produced. While global production is difficult to measure, the analytics firm Airfinity estimates the total so far at 1.7 billion doses. The problem is that many raw materials and key equipment remain in short supply. And the global need for vaccines might prove far greater than currently estimated, given that the coronavirus presents a moving target: If dangerous new variants emerge, requiring booster shots and reformulated vaccines, demand could dramatically increase, intensifying the imperative for every country to lock up supply for its own people. The only way around the zero-sum competition for doses is to greatly expand the global supply of vaccines. On that point, nearly everyone agrees. But what is the fastest way to make that happen? On that question, divisions remain stark, undermining collective efforts to end the pandemic. Some health experts argue that the only way to avert catastrophe is to force drug giants to relax their grip on their secrets and enlist many more manufacturers in making vaccines. In place of the existing arrangement — in which drug companies set up partnerships on their terms, while setting the prices of their vaccines — world leaders could compel or persuade the industry to cooperate with more companies to yield additional doses at rates affordable to poor countries. Those advocating such intervention have focused on two primary approaches: waiving patents to allow many more manufacturers to copy existing vaccines, and requiring the pharmaceutical companies to transfer their technology — that is, help other manufacturers learn to replicate their products. The World Trade Organization — the de facto referee in international trade disputes — is the venue for negotiations on how to proceed. But the institution operates by consensus, and so far, there is none. The Biden administration recently joined more than 100 countries in asking the W.T.O. to partially set aside vaccine patents. But the European Union has signaled its intent to oppose waivers and support only voluntary tech transfers, essentially taking the same position as the pharmaceutical industry, whose aggressive lobbying has heavily shaped the rules in its favor. Some experts warn that revoking intellectual property rules could disrupt the industry, slowing its efforts to deliver vaccines — like reorganizing the fire department amid an inferno. “We need them to scale up and deliver,” said Simon J. Evenett, an expert on trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. “We have this huge production ramp up. Nothing should get in the way to threaten it.” Others counter that trusting the pharmaceutical industry to provide the world with vaccines helped create the current chasm between vaccine haves and have-nots. The world should not put poorer countries “in this position of essentially having to go begging, or waiting for donations of small amounts of vaccine,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, senior scientific liaison to the Covid-19 Prevention Network. “The model of charity is, I think, an unacceptable model.” In this fractious atmosphere, the W.T.O.’s leaders are crafting their proceedings less as a push to formally change the rules than as a negotiation that will persuade national governments and the global pharmaceutical industry to agree on a unified plan — ideally in the next few months. The Europeans are banking on the notion that the vaccine makers, fearing patent waivers, will eventually agree to the transfers, especially if the world’s richest countries throw money their way to make sharing know-how more palatable. Many public health experts say that patent waivers will have no meaningful effect unless vaccine makers also share their manufacturing methods. Waivers are akin to publishing a complex recipe; tech transfer is like sending a master chef to someone’s kitchen to teach them how to cook the dish. “If you’re to manufacture vaccines, you need several things to work at the same time,” the W.T.O. director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, told journalists recently. “If there is no transfer of technology, it won’t work.” Even with waivers, technology transfers and expanded access to raw materials, experts say it would take about six months for more drug makers to start churning out vaccines. The only short-term fix, they and European leaders say, is for wealthy countries — especially the United States — to donate and export more of their stock to the rest of the world. The European Union allowed the export of hundreds of millions of doses, as many as it kept at home, while the United States held fast to its supply. But boosting donations and exports entails risk. India shipped out more than 60 million doses this year, including donations, before halting vaccine exports a month ago. Now, as a wave of death ravages the largely unvaccinated Indian population, the government is drawing fire at home for having let go of doses. The details of any plan to boost vaccinations worldwide may matter less than revamping the incentives that have produced the status quo. Wealthy countries, especially in the West, have monopolized most of the supply of vaccines not through happenstance, but as a result of economic and political realities. Companies like Pfizer and Moderna have logged billions of dollars in revenue by selling most of their doses to deep-pocketed governments in North America and Europe. The deals left too few doses available for Covax, a multilateral partnership created to funnel vaccines to low- and middle-income nations at relatively low prices. While the partnership has been hampered by multiple problems — most recently India’s blocking exports amid its own crisis — the snapping up of doses by rich countries was a crucial blow. “We as high-income countries made sure the market was lopsided,” said Mark Eccleston-Turner, an expert on international law and infectious diseases at Keele University in England. “The fundamental problem is that the system is broken, but it’s broken in our favor.” Changing that calculus may depend on persuading wealthy countries that allowing the pandemic to rage on in much of the world poses universal risks by allowing variants to take hold, forcing the world into an endless cycle of pharmaceutical catch-up. “It needs to be global leaders functioning as a unit, to say that vaccine is a form of global security,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, a global health expert at Harvard Medical School. She suggested that the G7, the group of leading economies, could lead such a campaign and finance it when the members convene in England next month. The argument over Covid vaccines harkens back to the debate over access to antiretroviral drugs for H.I.V. in the 1990s. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first powerful H.I.V. drug therapy in 1995, resulting in a plunge in deaths in the United States and Europe, where people could afford the therapy. But deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia continued to climb. In 2001, the W.T.O. ruled that countries could allow local companies to break patents for domestic use given an urgent need. The ruling is still in place. But without technology transfers, few local drug makers would be able to quickly replicate vaccines. In 2003, the W.T.O. took a crucial further step for H.I.V. drugs, waiving patents and allowing low-income countries to import generic versions manufactured in Thailand, South Africa and India, helping contain the epidemic. With Covid, the request for a patent waiver has come from the South African and Indian governments, which are seeking to engineer a repeat of that history. In opposing the initiative, the pharmaceutical industry has reprised the argument it made decades ago: Any weakening of intellectual property, or I.P., protection discourages the investment that yields lifesaving innovation. “The only reason why we have vaccines right now was because there was a vibrant private sector,” said Dr. Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, speaking in a recent interview. “The vibrancy of the private sector, the lifeblood, is the I.P. protection.” But in producing vaccines, the private sector harnessed research financed by taxpayers in the United States, Germany and other wealthy nations. Pfizer expects to sell $26 billion worth of Covid vaccines this year; Moderna forecasts that its sales of Covid vaccines will exceed $19 billion for 2021. History also challenges industry claims that blanket global patent rights are a requirement for the creation of new medicines. Until the mid-1990s, drug makers could patent their products only in the wealthiest markets, while negotiating licenses that allowed companies in other parts of the world to make generic versions. Even in that era, drug companies continued to innovate. And they continued to prosper even with the later waivers on H.I.V. drugs. “At the time, it rattled a lot of people, like ‘How could you do that? It’s going to destroy the pharmaceutical industry,’” recalled Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic. “It didn’t destroy them at all. They continue to make billions of dollars.” Leaders in the wealthiest Western nations have endorsed more equitable distribution of vaccines for this latest scourge. But the imperative to ensure ample supplies for their own nations has won out as the virus killed hundreds of thousands of their own people, devastated economies, and sowed despair. The drug companies have also promised more support for poorer nations. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been the primary supply for Covax, and the company says it has sold its doses at a nonprofit price. In January, Pfizer announced that it was joining Covax, agreeing to contribute 40 million doses at a not-for-profit price. So far only 1.25 million of those doses have been shipped out, less than what Pfizer produces in a single day. Whether the world possesses enough underused and suitable factories to quickly boost supply and bridge the inequities is a fiercely debated question. During a vaccine summit convened by the W.T.O. last month, the body heard testimony that manufacturers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Senegal and Indonesia all have capacity that could be quickly deployed to produce Covid vaccines. One Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma, which focuses on cancer drugs, has already agreed to supply 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to Bolivia — if it gains legal permission and technological know-how from Johnson & Johnson. But even major companies like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have stumbled, falling short of production targets. And producing the new class of mRNA vaccines, like those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is complicated. Where pharmaceutical companies have struck deals with partners, the pace of production has frequently disappointed. “Even with voluntary licensing and technology transfer, it’s not easy to make complex vaccines,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. Much of the global capacity for vaccine manufacturing is already being used to produce other lifesaving inoculations, he added. But other health experts accuse major pharmaceutical companies of exaggerating the manufacturing challenges to protect their monopoly power, and implying that developing countries lack the acumen to master sophisticated techniques is “an offensive and a racist notion,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University. With no clear path forward, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala, the W.T.O. director-general, expressed hope that the Indian and South African patent-waiver proposal can be a starting point for dialogue. “I believe we can come to a pragmatic outcome,” she said. “The disparity is just too much.” Peter S. Goodman reported from London, Apoorva Mandavilli from New York, Rebecca Robbins from Bellingham, Wash., and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Noah Weiland contributed reporting from New York. Source link Orbem News #Covid #Vaccinate #World
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kingofthenorth49 · 4 years ago
Text
the world as we thought we know it
Ed. Note -- As I wrote this blog this morning, yet another Ontario family is moving into my neighbourhood, escaping the clutches of a tyrannical woke Ontario (their words, not mine) for the peace of the east coast. I’m pretty sure when this all shakes out this town is going to be radically changed for years to come, but here’s to hoping. - Jim
I know, ya’ll think my tinfoil hat is on too tight these days. Maybe it is, and maybe that’s not a bad thing, but at this point does it even matter, we are watching a train wreck of epic proportions and no one seems to care. It’s like the words from Trooper’s Santa Maria, “But nobody moved, from where they were laying, cause nobody really cared”. I guess Netflix and Chill means more than I had thought.
I was watching (listening) to Scott Adams last evening as I do every few nights and for those who don’t know Scott, He’s the guy who draws Dilbert, and hosts a daily vlog (or whatever the kids are calling them these days) which I enjoy, as there are few left leaning types I can really listen too, and he’s one of the best. We don’t often agree, but the past few nights he and I have been in lockstep on a few things, and that’s very rare but interesting when it happens. Last night however it was something he said about midway through his podcast that really caught my attention. He started out by saying that as you get pulled “behind the curtain” (a showbiz reference I guess) you get to see/learn things that most of the world doesn’t, as if the elites really do run the world (hint: they do) and he teased the crowd by saying something to the effect that he learned something this week that’s bigger than any news story, something so large it would shift people’s minds completely. He went on to say that he couldn’t say what it was because they’d come after him, but that people should question more of what they see and hear. He framed it in the context that people would not even believe the truth if they heard it.
I agree 100%. I believe the average person on this planet now is so afraid, confused, and polarized that they don’t know which way is up, hell just the fact that the world rolled over so quickly makes me sad, but it wasn’t unexpected. We are weak, soft, entitled humans.
As much as you want to deny it, we are in the world’s largest Psyops experiment right now. Governments are pushing the boundaries of human endurance, and we are beginning to turn on one another, whether it’s for not wearing a government mandated facial shaming device when outside your home, or if your neighbours son, fresh home from out-of-province school is out on the patio on his tablet chatting with his best girl when he’s suppose to be self isolating in the basement chained to the wall and fed with a stick.
Disclaimer: Yes, it’s a particularly bad flu. Yes, people will die from it. Yes we should be cautious and prevent catastrophe.
Speaking of being cautious, what is up with the average person beating down their neighbours in the rush to get an experimental unapproved chemical concoction thrust into their arms? WTF dude?
I’ll never understand that mentality. Yes, vaccines save lives and can stop the spread of viruses. Yes vaccines form part of any strategy to manage a pandemic, but it’s just one part. The idea that people are lining up 9 months after a vaccine is started into development for a “new” coronavirus and calling for a mandate to compel every human to take this vaccine is absurd.
It’s madness.
First of all, the concoction they are jabbing into your arms at 0.5 mg/dose isn’t even technically a vaccine. The CDC states a vaccine is “a product that stimulates a Peron’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease. It also defines Immunity as part of the vaccination process to say you can be exposed to the disease without becoming infected.
The current “vaccines” do neither. You can still become sick, and you can still spread it, there are several examples from Washington State, Florida, and Pennsylvania right now where fully vaccinated individuals now have the Coronavirus.
So why get the jab if you can still get it (albeit not be as sick) but you can still spread it? Why are we on a full out campaign war on “getting the jab” followed closely by “vaccination passports”.
It’s about control. It’s about gaining your compliance when told to do something. It’s about stripping your freedoms away all the while you feel like you don’t need them anyway.
I posted a video on social media yesterday of a Pastor of a Calgary church on Good Friday telling a bunch of Calgary police to leave the property and not come back without a warrant. He was very passionate in his calls for them to leave, and believe me when I say that video made me feel great despite the insults he was hurling at my brother’s and sister’s who were sent there to bring justice to the community.
Watch the video, it does a heart good.
Why? Because we have something called the Bill of Rights, and despite the fact it’s “granted” by our “government” it’s the only thing that holds this country together under one set of guiding principles, and despite some doctors proclamation of doom and gloom, people have the right to practice religion, they have freedom of speech, and security of the person and property. Our forefathers fought and died for those rights and we should be a bit more like the Pastor in preserving them. He’s a Polish pastor, who knows what happens when a government is allowed to run unchecked and what happens to the population when it does, and he wasn’t having any of it.
But the more telling story isn’t his fire and brimstone sermon aimed at the poor police (I bet his Good Friday sermon was off the charts!), it was what the police did next.
They left. As Monty Python would sing with a minstrel or two, “They turned their tails and ran they did, they turned their tails and ran and hid). Sorry, but the police don’t just leave when a crime has been committed, or they feel a crime will be committed by the parties in question. He literally shouted them away. Why did they leave?
Likely for a couple reasons. One, they didn’t want to be there in the first place. They were following orders or were dispatched to the church because some politician or Karen felt there were too many people practicing their religion on the holiest of days in the church. Two, they knew there were no grounds to be there because of the recent court ruling that freed the other Alberta pastor who was jailed for holding religious services, remember him? In Canada we jail religious leaders.
Say that again real slow. In Canada, we jail human beings who bring comfort and relief to those who need it in the name of a higher power under a constitutionally protected provision of religious freedoms. Or at least we used to. Now we are no better than the backwater republics we shamed as the former leader of the free world.
So if they knew the courts were not going to support them, why bother? That’s a great question.
I’m not even a religious person, we had Chinese (am I allowed to say that?) food for supper Easter Sunday, but I will fight for your right to practice yours just as hard as I’ll fight against any government mandating forced vaccinations or passports against freedoms.
Over a year ago we were told it was 15-days to “bend the curve” to get back to the “new normal” and such and now look at us a year later at the hands of a government run amok led by over-jealous reality tv stars who haven’t the first clue how to govern and couldn’t stick a hot poker in a snow bank to save their lives.
Folks we are rolling over at an alarming rate and accepting the removal of our rights and freedoms under suspicious circumstances, and you can “tin foil hat” me all day long, I don’t care. Things don’t add up, there’s too many red flags flying and yet as a society we simply want to turn to those “in charge” and say “Please sir, may I have some more”.
They say you won’t miss it until it’s gone and I firmly believe this to be true, especially when it comes to things like mobility rights. Imagine now if they do require vaccinations before you can travel, work, shop etc., (especially ones that provide no protection to others and only minimize your symptoms). We haven’t even talked about those who’ve died, or those who have had their lives changed forever from the initial side effects of the vaccines.
Yes, I said initial. What will happen a year from now as the COV-SARS-19 virus continues to produce hundreds of variants a day (despite what they want you to focus on like some B.1.1.3 etc.) and you come to find out in that rush to get jabs in the arms that the vaccination of the older population first drives the virus into the younger people who then start getting sicker than they originally did because the virus is morphing to stay alive. That’s right, things like Antibody Dependant Enhancement[1] can occur when you start messing with the human bodies abilities to fight off disease naturally as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.
All I’d ask is for you to do your research and have informed consent before you get the jab, and don’t shame others’ who chose not to for their own personal reasons. Like me. I won’t be getting the jab because there’s no compelling reason for me to do so at this time. I’m relatively  healthy (Yes, I’m obese so I fall into that risk category) but I have no real heath issues aside from the extra weight I carry around, and I know how to protect myself from the virus, so I’m choosing not to get vaccinated. I. Or people like me, shouldn’t be shamed because our beliefs are different from yours, and the solution doesn’t solve the problem, you only think it does because that’s what you are being told. \
Make your own decision and live with it. If I get the COVID and get sick enough (4% of my age category) to be hospitalized, so be it. I’ll take my chances on that versus being forced to have a chemical injected into my body that will do Gawd knows what to my immune system or any other system for that matter.
The other thing that just baffles me is how people actually believe the flu was eradicated this year. Sorry, are you serious? Do you think every single person in Canada was so diligent at washing their hands that we had no flu season this year?
I should have been a real estate salesperson in Florida selling swampland to tourists. Actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea for the next phase.
Anyway, wash your hands, stay socially distant, stay home if you’re sick, and wear a government mandated facial shaming device so you can conform and not be publically humiliated by Karen at Costco as you go to give your Easter offerings to the commerce Gods when you aren’t allowed to go to church to pray to whatever God the constitutions protects your right to bow to.
Get it yet?
Jim Out.
[1] Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID-19 vaccines worsening clinical disease, Timothy Cardoza, Ronald Veazey
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moonwalkertrance · 7 years ago
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After Mueller’s Indictments, an Interview With a Mole Who Was Inside Russia’s Pro-Trump Troll Factory
Since 2015 Lyudmila Savchuk and her Internet World team have been running their own investigation of the Factory’s methods. They wonder what took Mueller so long.
MOSCOW—When Lyudmila Savchuk read the U.S. federal grand jury indictment of 13 Russians accused of interfering in the the 2016 U.S. elections and other crimes, including bank fraud and identity theft, she was disappointed. All of those named by Special Counsel Robert Mueller were connected to the Internet Research Agency, also known by its infamous sobriquet the Troll Factory. Savchuk used to work there, and Mueller’s list, she said, should include hundreds of people.
“I am super excited to see the indictment, but for now 13 trolls sounds like a joke,” Savchuk told The Daily Beast on Sunday, after she read and studied the  37-page document.
Since 2015 Savchuk and her Internet World team of 15 anti-trolling experts have been running their own investigation of the Factory’s methods. They’ve looked at the way it hired “bot drivers” to create slanted or completely fictitious posts that automated networks could spread like wildfire across social media, and they’ve studied the campaigns and projects of the Troll Factory on both social networks and pro-Kremlin media.
So, they had a pretty good idea from the moment they read about the indictments and saw initial reactions what the Kremlin’s line would be: as Savchuk put it, “To laugh and mock the U.S. investigation.”
And that theme, as it happened, also was picked up by U.S. President Trump.
First he suggested, in a classic Trumpian non sequitur, that if the FBI had wasted its time on the Russia investigation it might have stopped a deranged teenager from murdering 17 people at a Florida high school. Then Trump claimed he never said Russia did not meddle in the U.S. elections, only that his campaign had not colluded with them. Then this:
“If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S.,” Trump tweeted, as if there were any question about that in the judgment of his own intelligence services and, indeed, of his own chief of staff, “then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”
That was early Sunday morning, Mar-a-Lago time, and by then, the Russians had indeed set the tone.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was quick off the mark on Friday, posting on her Facebook page, “Turns out, there’ve been 13 people, in the opinion of the US Justice Department. 13 people interfered in the US elections? 13 against billions budgets of special agencies? Against intelligence and counterespionage, against the newest technologies? Absurd? – Yes.”
Aleksey Pushkov, a Russian senator wrote on Twitter of Mueller’s work: “The mountain gave birth to a Nano-mouse and now they try to fill it up with air, to turn into a terrifying mouse.”
In fact, nothing about the new indictments suggests that they represent the end of Mueller’s investigation. Nothing about them excludes further indictments related to collusion by Trump campaign officials, several of whom are now actively cooperating with Mueller’s team. And nothing about the ongoing investigation of substantial allegations against Russian government agencies, including the foreign intelligence service, SVR, the domestic state security, FSB, and military intelligence, GRU, all of which allegedly have participated in operations meant to impact the U.S. elections.
The Troll Factory, for instance, is not alleged to have played any role in the hacking of Democratic National Committee and related e-mails, many of which were then disseminated through WikiLeaks. Those critical operations were the work of other players allegedly backed by the Kremlin.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov may have had all this in mind on Saturday when he tried to dismiss the indictments as "just blather," noting that U.S. officials “can publish anything, and we see those indictments multiplying, the statements multiplying.”
“The existence and operations of the so-called Internet Research Agency had been well established in a number of investigative reports well before the American elections.”
“There should be nothing funny here for the Kremlin’s guys,” Yulia Latynina, an independent political analyst, told The Daily Beast. “They should know that even if they use a rusty weapon to attack a foreign state, even if they fail at their efforts, they would get punished.”
Observers from the Russian opposition welcomed Mueller’s action, but wondered why it had taken the U.S. so long to harvest what they saw as pretty low hanging fruit. The existence and operations of the so-called Internet Research Agency had been well established in a number of investigative reports well before the American elections.
In the summer of 2015, the New York Times Magazine published an extensive report on the Internet Research Agency’s dirty tricks in the United States, including a social media campaign to spread panic in Texas about a non-existent terror attack. Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny put out his video investigation of Russian trolls in August 2015. And just last October RBC magazine published a 5,000 word report on the troll factory that laid out in considerable detail how it tried to influence the U.S. race for the presidency with a budget of $2.2 million and 100 people (not 13).
Savchuk and the information she had gathered at the Internet Research Agency figured in several reports. She published her articles in Novaya Gazetaand other independent newspapers, and she said she would be happy to talk to Mueller’s investigators, but, so far, he hasn’t been in touch.
It was just about three years ago that Savchuk, an investigative journalist,  volunteered to become a mole at the Factory. Her Internet World team watched it from outside, taking photos and videos of hundreds of employees walking out of the four-storey building every day at 9 p.m., while a new shift crowded by the entrance, ready to walk inside and sit shoulder to shoulder at their tightly lined up desks, composing posts on fake accounts until six in the morning.
The Factory, at that time, was operating from a four-storey building in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg at 55 Savushkina Avenue, but earlier this month it moved into a seven-storey business center with multiple exits. So now it is harder for the observers to count and identify the Factory’s employees.  
“The bot farm is working today. Thousands of people are involved in the propaganda machine attacking U.S. and European Union democracy. I believe there is more than just one building,” Savchuk told The Daily Beast. “There must be trolls in the United States, too, but in Russia we have cheap labor, people happy to work as slaves for a miserable fee.”
In 2015, there was a security camera over Savchuk’s desk, she said, watching as she wrote “casual posts about Ukraine and other international affairs.” The special project she was assigned to work on was the LiveJournal blog of a fortune teller that is still up on the Web.
Savchuk said that every employee at the Factory reported to “a tall, bald guy named Oleg Vasilyev,” she was surprised not to find Vasilyev on the Mueller’s list. The former mole said she had known a few of the Troll Factory Thirteen, including Gleb Vasilchenko, Mikhail Bystrov and Mikhail Burchik. And when she checked Facebook friends of people from the indictment list she found Sergei Karlov and Robert Bovda, who also were “men I saw at the Factory.”
She said she does not remember two women from the Internet Research Agency, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva,  who allegedly traveled to the United States in 2014 to gather intelligence for their operations. But the indictment notes that both had left the agency by the end of that year, before Savchuk started there.
“Her critics call her “traitor,” an agent for the CIA and the State Department.”
The agency promised to pay Savchuk around $700 a month, but the activist managed to keep her job there for only two and a half months, until the day her employers discovered her secret, that she was a journalist with an agenda, and attacked her for being, to say the least, an insincere troll.
Later, Savchuk took the Factory to court for not signing any work agreement with her and for not paying her salary for one and a half months of work.
“I won the hearing only because the court system was not prepared to defend the Factory on labor disputes,” Savchuk explained to The Daily Beast. “But that court hearing helped our investigation a lot: two official representatives of the Internet Research Agency showed up at the court—that was how we knew that the Factory existed on official papers.”
The only document the Factory wanted Savchuk to sign was a secrecy agreement, obliging her not to describe the nature of her work even to her friends and close relatives. But that she was not about to do.
Ugly messages have been bombarding the journalist ever since her last day at the bot farm. Her critics call her “traitor,” an agent for the CIA and the State Department. Meanwhile, fans of Russian President Vladimir Putin, of whom there are many, seem to think the way social media are manipulated in his favor is just fine.
“Even my mother’s friend was shaking her head on hearing about the secret Factory where people write pro-Putin posts around the clock: ‘What an honorable job it must have been to be supporting the president at such difficult time!’”
Before getting a job at the factory Savchuk researched the biography of its owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, known in the media world as “Putin’s cook” because much of his fortune was made from a catering business given enormous government contracts. That’s why the indictment included two Prigozhin’s companies besides the troll factory:  Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering.
Part of the document describes Prigozhin’s broader disinformation campaign as the Lakhda Project.
Lakhda is the name of the Saint Petersburg suburb where Prigozhin built his Troll Factories. “Prigozhin’s villa is also in the same area,” Savchuk told The Daily Beast. “Lakhda seems to be Prigozhin’s favorite word.”
Maybe that’s because it is a long way from the prison where Prigozhin spent nine years in the waning days of the Soviet Union before emerging to open a hot dog stand, become a Putin buddy, and make billions. “Prigozhin’s criminal past seems to be cloudy,” said Savchuk. “It requires deeper investigation.”
Back in 2015 Savchuk was one of the oldest employees at the Troll Factory. Most were in their mid-20s.  All the Factory needed from its employees was some ability to write well, and there were teachers of Russian and English for those who could not compose sentences in well-articulated troll.
Posters on the walls listed themes of propaganda subjects, which changed from day to day. “The USA and the E.U. were always at the top, as Russia’s main enemies,” Savchuk recalled.
“I would like to see every tiniest troll punished, so everybody, even those who carry a tripod for the Factory’s camera men realized that they will have to take responsibility for distorting reality.”
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orbemnews · 4 years ago
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What Would It Take to Vaccinate the World Against Covid? In delivering vaccines, pharmaceutical companies aided by monumental government investments have given humanity a miraculous shot at liberation from the worst pandemic in a century. But wealthy countries have captured an overwhelming share of the benefit. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population. Vaccine manufacturers assert that a fix is already at hand as they aggressively expand production lines and contract with counterparts around the world to yield billions of additional doses. Each month, 400 million to 500 million doses of the vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are now being produced, according to an American official with knowledge of global supply. But the world is nowhere close to having enough. About 11 billion shots are needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, the rough threshold needed for herd immunity, researchers at Duke University estimate. Yet, so far, only a small fraction of that has been produced. While global production is difficult to measure, the analytics firm Airfinity estimates the total so far at 1.7 billion doses. The problem is that many raw materials and key equipment remain in short supply. And the global need for vaccines might prove far greater than currently estimated, given that the coronavirus presents a moving target: If dangerous new variants emerge, requiring booster shots and reformulated vaccines, demand could dramatically increase, intensifying the imperative for every country to lock up supply for its own people. The only way around the zero-sum competition for doses is to greatly expand the global supply of vaccines. On that point, nearly everyone agrees. But what is the fastest way to make that happen? On that question, divisions remain stark, undermining collective efforts to end the pandemic. Some health experts argue that the only way to avert catastrophe is to force drug giants to relax their grip on their secrets and enlist many more manufacturers in making vaccines. In place of the existing arrangement — in which drug companies set up partnerships on their terms, while setting the prices of their vaccines — world leaders could compel or persuade the industry to cooperate with more companies to yield additional doses at rates affordable to poor countries. Those advocating such intervention have focused on two primary approaches: waiving patents to allow many more manufacturers to copy existing vaccines, and requiring the pharmaceutical companies to transfer their technology — that is, help other manufacturers learn to replicate their products. The World Trade Organization — the de facto referee in international trade disputes — is the venue for negotiations on how to proceed. But the institution operates by consensus, and so far, there is none. The Biden administration recently joined more than 100 countries in asking the W.T.O. to partially set aside vaccine patents. But the European Union has signaled its intent to oppose waivers and support only voluntary tech transfers, essentially taking the same position as the pharmaceutical industry, whose aggressive lobbying has heavily shaped the rules in its favor. Some experts warn that revoking intellectual property rules could disrupt the industry, slowing its efforts to deliver vaccines — like reorganizing the fire department amid an inferno. “We need them to scale up and deliver,” said Simon J. Evenett, an expert on trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. “We have this huge production ramp up. Nothing should get in the way to threaten it.” Others counter that trusting the pharmaceutical industry to provide the world with vaccines helped create the current chasm between vaccine haves and have-nots. The world should not put poorer countries “in this position of essentially having to go begging, or waiting for donations of small amounts of vaccine,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, senior scientific liaison to the Covid-19 Prevention Network. “The model of charity is, I think, an unacceptable model.” In this fractious atmosphere, the W.T.O.’s leaders are crafting their proceedings less as a push to formally change the rules than as a negotiation that will persuade national governments and the global pharmaceutical industry to agree on a unified plan — ideally in the next few months. The Europeans are banking on the notion that the vaccine makers, fearing patent waivers, will eventually agree to the transfers, especially if the world’s richest countries throw money their way to make sharing know-how more palatable. Many public health experts say that patent waivers will have no meaningful effect unless vaccine makers also share their manufacturing methods. Waivers are akin to publishing a complex recipe; tech transfer is like sending a master chef to someone’s kitchen to teach them how to cook the dish. “If you’re to manufacture vaccines, you need several things to work at the same time,” the W.T.O. director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, told journalists recently. “If there is no transfer of technology, it won’t work.” Even with waivers, technology transfers and expanded access to raw materials, experts say it would take about six months for more drug makers to start churning out vaccines. The only short-term fix, they and European leaders say, is for wealthy countries — especially the United States — to donate and export more of their stock to the rest of the world. The European Union allowed the export of hundreds of millions of doses, as many as it kept at home, while the United States held fast to its supply. But boosting donations and exports entails risk. India shipped out more than 60 million doses this year, including donations, before halting vaccine exports a month ago. Now, as a wave of death ravages the largely unvaccinated Indian population, the government is drawing fire at home for having let go of doses. The details of any plan to boost vaccinations worldwide may matter less than revamping the incentives that have produced the status quo. Wealthy countries, especially in the West, have monopolized most of the supply of vaccines not through happenstance, but as a result of economic and political realities. Companies like Pfizer and Moderna have logged billions of dollars in revenue by selling most of their doses to deep-pocketed governments in North America and Europe. The deals left too few doses available for Covax, a multilateral partnership created to funnel vaccines to low- and middle-income nations at relatively low prices. While the partnership has been hampered by multiple problems — most recently India’s blocking exports amid its own crisis — the snapping up of doses by rich countries was a crucial blow. “We as high-income countries made sure the market was lopsided,” said Mark Eccleston-Turner, an expert on international law and infectious diseases at Keele University in England. “The fundamental problem is that the system is broken, but it’s broken in our favor.” Changing that calculus may depend on persuading wealthy countries that allowing the pandemic to rage on in much of the world poses universal risks by allowing variants to take hold, forcing the world into an endless cycle of pharmaceutical catch-up. “It needs to be global leaders functioning as a unit, to say that vaccine is a form of global security,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, a global health expert at Harvard Medical School. She suggested that the G7, the group of leading economies, could lead such a campaign and finance it when the members convene in England next month. The argument over Covid vaccines harkens back to the debate over access to antiretroviral drugs for H.I.V. in the 1990s. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first powerful H.I.V. drug therapy in 1995, resulting in a plunge in deaths in the United States and Europe, where people could afford the therapy. But deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia continued to climb. In 2001, the W.T.O. ruled that countries could allow local companies to break patents for domestic use given an urgent need. The ruling is still in place. But without technology transfers, few local drug makers would be able to quickly replicate vaccines. In 2003, the W.T.O. took a crucial further step for H.I.V. drugs, waiving patents and allowing low-income countries to import generic versions manufactured in Thailand, South Africa and India, helping contain the epidemic. With Covid, the request for a patent waiver has come from the South African and Indian governments, which are seeking to engineer a repeat of that history. In opposing the initiative, the pharmaceutical industry has reprised the argument it made decades ago: Any weakening of intellectual property, or I.P., protection discourages the investment that yields lifesaving innovation. “The only reason why we have vaccines right now was because there was a vibrant private sector,” said Dr. Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, speaking in a recent interview. “The vibrancy of the private sector, the lifeblood, is the I.P. protection.” But in producing vaccines, the private sector harnessed research financed by taxpayers in the United States, Germany and other wealthy nations. Pfizer expects to sell $26 billion worth of Covid vaccines this year; Moderna forecasts that its sales of Covid vaccines will exceed $19 billion for 2021. History also challenges industry claims that blanket global patent rights are a requirement for the creation of new medicines. Until the mid-1990s, drug makers could patent their products only in the wealthiest markets, while negotiating licenses that allowed companies in other parts of the world to make generic versions. Even in that era, drug companies continued to innovate. And they continued to prosper even with the later waivers on H.I.V. drugs. “At the time, it rattled a lot of people, like ‘How could you do that? It’s going to destroy the pharmaceutical industry,’” recalled Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic. “It didn’t destroy them at all. They continue to make billions of dollars.” Leaders in the wealthiest Western nations have endorsed more equitable distribution of vaccines for this latest scourge. But the imperative to ensure ample supplies for their own nations has won out as the virus killed hundreds of thousands of their own people, devastated economies, and sowed despair. The drug companies have also promised more support for poorer nations. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been the primary supply for Covax, and the company says it has sold its doses at a nonprofit price. In January, Pfizer announced that it was joining Covax, agreeing to contribute 40 million doses at a not-for-profit price. So far only 1.25 million of those doses have been shipped out, less than what Pfizer produces in a single day. Whether the world possesses enough underused and suitable factories to quickly boost supply and bridge the inequities is a fiercely debated question. During a vaccine summit convened by the W.T.O. last month, the body heard testimony that manufacturers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Senegal and Indonesia all have capacity that could be quickly deployed to produce Covid vaccines. One Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma, which focuses on cancer drugs, has already agreed to supply 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to Bolivia — if it gains legal permission and technological know-how from Johnson & Johnson. But even major companies like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have stumbled, falling short of production targets. And producing the new class of mRNA vaccines, like those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is complicated. Where pharmaceutical companies have struck deals with partners, the pace of production has frequently disappointed. “Even with voluntary licensing and technology transfer, it’s not easy to make complex vaccines,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. Much of the global capacity for vaccine manufacturing is already being used to produce other lifesaving inoculations, he added. But other health experts accuse major pharmaceutical companies of exaggerating the manufacturing challenges to protect their monopoly power, and implying that developing countries lack the acumen to master sophisticated techniques is “an offensive and a racist notion,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University. With no clear path forward, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala, the W.T.O. director-general, expressed hope that the Indian and South African patent-waiver proposal can be a starting point for dialogue. “I believe we can come to a pragmatic outcome,” she said. “The disparity is just too much.” Peter S. Goodman reported from London, Apoorva Mandavilli from New York, Rebecca Robbins from Bellingham, Wash., and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Noah Weiland contributed reporting from New York. Source link Orbem News #Covid #Vaccinate #World
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