#Cautionary

[bogleech]

SOMETIMES when collecting wood you may find the manner of wood which grows within meat from a beast!! They call it “meat wood” and the beast uses it to hold the meat up. A beast without meat wood can be called an octo,puss and is  very dangerous in the forest but luckuly you only find it in water, where it gets almost regularly wet and so too tired to danger, thats when people look at it and say “no meat wood!!! thats octo,puss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

[musicforwriters]

Lynx // Young Blood

She opened her arms, Her arms, to the world  The world threw her down to remind her  to open her ears, her ears, to the sound  The sound of the song would define her.

(Artist's Bandcamp)

[yesterdays-xkcd]

This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.

Cautionary [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Linux: A True Story: [Cueball talks on a cell phone.] Week One: Phone: Hey, it's your cousin. I got a new computer but don't want Windows. Can you help me install "Linux"? Cueball: Sure.

[Cueball's cousin sits in an office chair with her laptop on her lap. She is on the phone.] Week Two: Cousin: It says my XORG is broken. What's an "XORG"? Where can I look that up? Cueball: Hmm, lemme show you man pages.

[Cueball's cousin crouches on the floor with the laptop on her lap. She is still on the phone.] Week Six: Cousin: Due to auto-config issues, I'm leaving Ubuntu for Debian. Cueball: Uh. Cousin: Or Gentoo. Cueball: Uh oh.

[Cueball's cousin lies on her stomach with the laptop on the floor. On the floor are several pieces of paper and a book. Cueball stands to her left.] Week Twelve: Cueball: You haven't answered your phone in days. Cousin: Can't sleep. Must compile kernel. Cueball: I'm too late.

[Box with text:] Parents: talk to your kids about Linux... Before somebody else does.

[my-great-movie-01]

I really do not understand German children's books.

Der Struwwelpeter (1845)

[jennamoran]

Indomitable (1 of 2)

Link to the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG

Hi!

Today I’d like to talk about the Immortal Emptiness Arc for the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, Indomitable. It’s for characters whose abilities are unrighteous, death-tainted, Heaven-defying, or otherwise troubling in origin—but who refuse to be meek, refuse to suffer condemnation, refuse to surrender to even the most overwhelming of powers, and continue to hold their heads high in invincible, indomitable pride!

It’s pretty flexible, though, so if a few details up there are off the Arc might still be for you. ^_^

This Arc offers the following abilities:

Paralyzing Fear

Keen Nose (at Arc 1+)

Vitality Bonus (at Arc 1+)

Inhuman Strength (at Arc 2+)

Tribulation (at Arc 2+)

Inconspicuous Form (at Arc 2+)

Purification (at Arc 3+)

Perk Bonus (at Arc 4+)

Forge (at Arc 5)

In addition, Main Characters receive the power Immortality (pg. XX, CMWGE) while actively pursuing this Arc.

Choose your Curse

In some way you are outcast and wrong. In some way you are touched by the power of the Outside. It’s usually something you dwell on. It may make you alienated and mournful or it may make you preemptively defiantly angry at anyone who might judge you for it—but the distance it imposes between you and others is often on your mind. It would be fair to call it a curse . . . except . . .

. . . it’s not actually hurting you.

You’re like one of those vampires whose “dark curse” boils down to being immortal and awesome. Or maybe you’ve got a demon inside you, granting you all kinds of special abilities. It definitely feels very Curse-like but the violins informed people play for you will be pretty small.

Ultimately, the Curse’s effect comes into play through relevant Perks and an ability you get at Arc 2—the user-defined ability Tribulation which will let you bring misfortune to others through the medium of your Curse. If you don’t know what your Curse should be, try thinking ahead to the kind of tribulation you’ll want to inflict!

. . . what’s your Curse?

Abilities

Paralyzing Fear

Type: Miraculous Action Cost:

+0 MP—invoke Paralyzing Fear, 1/chapter

+1 MP—invoke Paralyzing Fear a second or later time per chapter

Invoke Paralyzing Fear to paralyze either a single target or all the targets of another mundane or miraculous action. Targets lose the ability to move, experience a feeling of suffocation, suffer intermittent hallucinations and nightmares, and have bursts of extreme emotion—dominated but not exclusively limited to fear. The targets are unable to escape voluntarily, but they have two options for involuntary escape that their player may declare freely: they collapse, drained, ending the effect on them, or they have an uncontrolled emotional outburst (e.g. a full-body shudder and scream) which ends the effect for all targets. Otherwise the effect lasts for as long as you sustain it.

You may combine this with a mundane or miraculous attack or invoke Paralyzing Fear on its own.

Arc 4. You may paralyze a cluster of targets, ranging up to “everyone in the neighborhood,” even without attaching this to another effect.

Keen Nose Arc 1+

Type: Miraculous Action Cost:

1 MP at Arc 1

0 MP at Arc 2+

Invoke Keen Nose and take a deep breath and you can get a bloodhound-level picture of the scents in the world around you. As long as you sustain the action and occasionally snuffle the air you can maintain this level of acuity indefinitely, potentially enabling you to operate in total darkness, track a lost student by smell, and identify someone as a sailor who's recently come in from Outside by the lingering scent on their skin.

If this isn’t the sense most suited for you, you can replace it with Keen Eyes, Keen Ears, or, with the HG’s permission, Keen Miscellaneous Sensory Organ:

Invoke Keen Eyes for night vision sharper than an owl’s, sight keener than an eagle’s, eyes tuned to the smallest details and the slightest hints of motion, and the ability to see some intangible quality like emotions, sins and goodness, or the rough subject of people’s thoughts as a colored mist around them.

Invoke Keen Ears for hearing acute enough to pick up the rumble of thunderstorms hundreds of miles away, hear the footsteps of a nearby beetle, make out every conversation in the neighborhood, and map out the world within forty or fifty feet of you just by listening to the echoes of little sounds that you make.

With the HG’s permission, you may choose Keen Miscellaneous Sensory Organ and detail the powers of some sensory organ other than your nose, eyes, or ears. You can supplement a weak sense with a minor extrasensory perception, e.g. augmenting taste so that when you eat a cooked meal you can see scenes from the life of the chef.

Vitality Bonus Arc 1+

Type: Special Cost: —

If you have a spare Perk slot for it, you receive a free level 1 Superior Vitality Perk. This is the corebook Superior Skill granting raw strength and power. (It may be possible to substitute a different Superior Trait; see box.)

Arc 2+. If you have a Superior Vitality Perk, it automatically powers up to your Arc’s Trait rating.

Inhuman Strength Arc 2+ Type: Miraculous Action [ with free Strike = Arc level ] Cost: —

You’re not just pretty strong—you’re stronger. Than, you know, everyone. Your strength may normally be pretty limited, you can’t drag the pyramids around or whatever, but it scales to direct opposition . . . and then exceeds it.

So if you’re in a tug-of-war with a titan who can move the planets?

Give you something heavy enough to brace against, and you. Will. Be. The. Stronger.

What this means is that mundane actions can’t directly oppose your strength. They can’t even redirect your force or divert it more than ten degrees off of true. It takes a miracle to outwrestle you, block one of your punches, or diminish your strength—and you can punch above your miraculous weight class, too, with free Strike equal to the Arc level.

At Superior Vitality 2-3, your immunity to mundane action is limited by your reference frame: if someone can move your whole body, that can effectively redirect your force. At Superior Vitality 4+, you can effectively brace against nothing, and tricks like that stop working.

BOX Other Inhuman Qualities

As a general rule, you can replace Superior Vitality and Inhuman Strength with some other quality, giving you inhuman . . . speed? Beauty? Tennis skill? Just about anything is possible, although the HG can veto choices that they think are too complicated or overpowered.

The way this works is, whatever quality you pick, that quality becomes miraculous::

 you receive a Superior (whatever) Skill Perk, starting at 1 and scaling up to the Arc level

and mundane actions can’t hamper or directly oppose your use of that ability, or redirect it by more than a modest amount.

If your virtue is something ineffable like Inhuman Brains or Inhuman Generalized Superiority, you’ll need to narrow it down until the above benefits make sense—e.g., in practice, Superior Intelligence 2 might make you 5-10x as good at absorbing and processing new information. Inhuman Intelligence might guarantee you victory at games of strategy and also protect you from having someone else force a particular strategy on you. Superior Generalized Superiority might make you better at the three most socially important contests in your social context, and Inhuman Generalized Superiority guarantee you the victory at them, whether those are “drag-racing, fashion, and looking cool while smoking” or “closing tickets, schmoozing management, and showing up on time.”

END BOX

[danskjavlarna]

From Funny Books for Boys and Girls, 1856.

My Strange & Unusual Site | Books | Videos | Music | Etsy

[ag3music-blog]

"A Cautionary Song" by The Decemberists.  I heart this song ever so much.  I love a great deal of their music, actually, but this, Mariner's Revenge Song, Engine Driver and I Had Dreamed I Was an Architect are my top four and the songs I keep in my cover music rotation.

I tried to give the song much more movement than the original by playing in three distinct styles, each growing more urgent as the song progresses to it's very painful revelation of what someone's mother is REALLY doing at night.

-AG3

Title: A Cautionary Song Original Artist: The Decemberists Style: Alternative Instrumentation: Guitar/Vocals Tuning: Standard NOTES:  I love this song.  As much as I hate the overuse of Colin Meloy's strange vibrato, it has a valid use on occasion to make things sound eerie.  I used it in this song, but in a very low-key type of way.  My concession to my fellow Decemberists fans, if you will.

[psychofreak-p]

BONES/PLSSENDBONES' SONGS ARE FINALLY ON SPOTIFY -- THIS IS A MIRACLE!!

I CAN FINALLY LISTEN TO CAUTIONARY, I KILLED JFK, WIRETAP AND THE QUICK BROWN FOX ON REPEAT AND NOT HAVING TO WAIT FOR A PODCAST TO UPLOAD THEM ANYMORE🔥🔥🔥🔥🙏🙏

[resistance765]

"A Cautionary Tale" - Goodnight Lenin

[danskjavlarna]

The whirlpool of speculation and the boulder of fortune, from Blasts from The Ram’s Horn, 1902

[jennamoran]

Goblin

Lykos Korošec woke to find his seven children slaughtered in their beds. He hunted Goblin, who had done it, and trapped him, but Goblin shed his skin and slipped away. Then for all Lykos' life Goblin haunted him, making faces from the distant roofs, leaving slime and rot about Lykos' house, snuffling at the entrance to his home in the middle of the night, and mixing poison with his salt. In the end, he tried to run away to another world, but failed; the ship went down, with all hands upon it, and Goblin fished up Lykos' corpse.

from the books of Mysteries

Today I’ve been working on stats for Goblin. I mean, in practice, he’s probably a quest or quest set, what matters about him is what it’s like when you deal with him, but I’m trying to make all these weird creatures that haunt the Far Roofs of Fortitude into playable characters just as a matter of game practice.

Goblin wound up needing this Arc that’s been floating around---

The Arc that Zöe Rosewood has that gives her ogre strength and a keen nose. So I tried to fill that Arc out.

I’m currently calling it Cautionary, short for “Monster from a Cautionary Tale.“

(It’s not complete, but I’ll give you a summary of what it does, which may change. Strength, a keen sense, minor powers, the ability to haunt an area, and a power mechanic that starts as magical girl style attacks and branches out into generic abilities. It wants to be Sickly Mystic based on quest miracles and Silver based on fictional characters who might pursue it.)

In the end, I’m pretty sure Goblin has access to Cautionary, Called Away, and Creature of Fable. Maybe either Sentimental or Specialist. I’m still trying to work out if that’s the Magister of the Dark set, the Warmain set, or if I’m being dumb in trying to make sure everything fits that pattern.

I wound up building Hedge the Fang with Alchemist, Called Away, Creature of Fable, and . . . Hedge the Fang didn’t really need anything more.

I guess it’s possible that they both have access to Cautionary, Called Away, Creature of Fable, and Alchemist, and that’s one power set . . .

But I can’t figure out if Goblin has any reason to use Alchemist for anything. Not everyone needs the power to rip spiritual pieces out of people. I mean, ripping someone’s heart or secrets out is a bit too easy for Cruelty, innit? Ripping out your kindness or compassion is probably parallel to what Hedge the Fang does. Maybe he rips out your luck. . . . or maybe I have trouble with this because one of them is a Magister of the Dark and the other is a Warmain.

Thinky thoughts.

[anonymousactornyc]

opening night

Opening night tonight for my second off-Broadway show.  I feel so blessed to be working in NYC.  Words cannot describe.

A year ago I was at one of the lowest points of my life.  My personal and professional life were both in the tank and things seemed bleak.  It was a very hard winter.

There are so many times I have felt at the bottom of the pile.  So many auditions have come and gone without a second glance from the auditors.  I have to remember that today's good fortune can be tomorrow's wish.  So, I hold on to it now and cherish it for what it is.  It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like what I have isn't enough.  Being driven is one thing, and being obsessive is another.

So, for now, I'm thankful, I'm drinking it in, and I can't wait for what is yet to come.

[roguetelemetry]

Florida Man panic buys gas, Hummer catches on fire

[danskjavlarna]

“This is your first warning.  I shan’t tell you again.”  A still from Dear Ladies, series one.