The only motive that makes sense is malice.

The people you're mad at couldn't be further removed from maritime transportation. Your typical tugboat worker in the US is second or third generation in their career and has a two digit IQ cuz most of them are from the likes of fucking Biloxi.

You got unusually, weirdly vitriolic in the reply.

Yes I am, because you're questioning the patriotism of the most deep red stupid people you could imagine. I guarantee you, no inland barge accident has ever, or WILL EVER, have any connection to the international cabal you're eagerly hounding.

Foreign container ships losing power? Yeah, maybe.

I tell you all this shit happens all the time, you refuse to believe me.

I go and dig up the hard data from the coast guard about how often it happens, and you refuse to believe that too.

I get that you're paranoid and looking for any reason to find a plot amid chaos, BUT AT LEAST BE FUCKING CONSISTENT ABOUT YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE NUMBERS.

On the scale between aircraft crashes and car crashes, believe it or not, river barge incidents fall a LOT closer to the CAR end of the spectrum. And it's usually no big deal because bridges are usually built for it. If it's such a big fucking deal to you, pick a side of the Mississippi and never cross it. But stop making this community look like a bunch of paranoid fucking idiots with the attention span of a twitch streamer.

How common is it for barges to come loose during flooding?

Lemme put it like this...

According to USCG data, between 1992 and 2001, there were 2,692 REPORTED commercial collisions with bridges or USACE managed locks and dams on navigable rivers.

That's an average of one collision every non-winter day of the year.

The AASHTO impact protection standards for bridge piers are deliberately designed to take a standard 35x195 barge drifting in the current of a 100 year flood.

I told you all last time:

Crazy barge shit happens all the fucking time. It's not new, it's not statistically anomalous. It's only observer bias because of Baltimore.

Here, here's a map of where they even get attention.

who do we blame

No one. To understand THIS you need to be familiar with Schopenhauer. When you say "blame" what you're really doing is conflating "justice" with "revenge". REVENGE is morally indefensible, it's a continuation of Cain's bloody cycle.

Justice is NOT about righting some cosmic scale that is set wrong by harmful acts.

The morally defensible objective of justice is to make moral laws as tangible and immutable as natural laws. The prohibition of murder should be as inexorable as gravity.

The person who kills, must die. Not for the sake of the dead but for the sake of the living who will see it done and know that for cause there is effect.

Justice is deterrence, not revenge.

On this there is one caveat that departs from liberalism, and that is that IT IS NOT NECESSARY FOR THE CONDEMNED TO ACTUALLY BE GUILTY. Only that they are perceived as guilty by the community and that justice is done swiftly and known to all.

Actually the WORST possible situation is not the conviction of the innocent, but rather the exoneration of someone everyone "knows" is guilty. When OJ Simpson was ruled innocent, it made the state look impotent and the law toothless. Blackstone's formulation is an insidious poison utterly assured to destroy the legitimacy of every Caesar who decides to adopt it.

Okay, well, imagine that your character's inventory and spell resolution is all handled client side and the server host (whoever it happens to be) just takes you client's data at face value; assuming it doesn't cause the game to crash to desktop, or more likely bluescreen because this was pre-Vista.

It was possible to put so many buffs on an item that simply moving your mouse over the item would cause the game to crash FROM DRAWING THE TOOLTIP POPUP.

Do you remember when hack accusations were just for the lulz?

Do you remember Open Battle.net?

continuity is important

Is it?

Or is it just that in western franchises quality seems to decline without it?

the issue I'm having is lore related because I loved New Vegas

"Canon is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae." -Leonard Nimoy

Compare the American attitude towards franchises, vs the Japanese attitude towards franchises.

So if your gonna come at me with

I haven't. At any point. Ever.

if you saw a sign or even met a "prophet" from god. telling you to do something like, kill children

That would be god testing ME to not immediately sucker punch them.

Remember, I'm Quaker. Part of our theology is that there is a tiny bit of god in everyone. EVERYONE. God CAN speak through anyone at any time. The impetus is on the listener to discern what is being heard.

"But how am I to know the good side from the bad?" -Luke Skywalker

"YOU WILL KNOW!" -Yoda (boiling quakerism down to its most fundamental)

Absolutely. A federal ban would be doubling down on the Burger Court's original mistake.

The issue is too divisive for a federal answer, for or against. Better left to the states, as the constitution intended.

The oldest Electronic Arts game I played was Earth Orbit Stations for the Apple IIe.

Save scumming was pretty much mandatory. EOS had a very evil RNG about how successful rocket launches would be. With budgeting and time restrictions being super tight, one launch fuckup could bring the whole house of cards down. Imagine kerbal but less of a lego set and more of a roguelike.

I'm told it is possible to accomplish the mars rescue mission without save hacking but I never pulled it off.

Dignitas Infinita

The name of the document translates to

DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY DIGGIDY

It's about time the Catholics woke up.

Wasn't that a pretty misleading stat, though?

Yes and no.

most of them "derailed" in the station at low speed

This much is true. BUT... a disproportionately high percentage of THOSE derails will be hazmat, BECAUSE safety derailleurs are required in hazmat terminals.

Most of the "in the wild" derails occur because of flash flood damage, or from rotted ties with bolted rail.

That one doesn't count.

Anyone who's lived along the Mississippi long enough knows barges get lose all the fuck time.

A month before Baltimore, a bunch of barges hit a bridge on the Ohio and nobody batted an eye. And that same week on the Mississippi three broke free and ran into the shallows by lock & dam 25. Crazy barge shit just happens. Across all the navigable US rivers there's probably one barge incident a week.

But I'm willing to grant you 2/2, because the NYC one fits the M.O. of the Baltimore incident.

I've always thought it's down to personal preference with that sort of thing.

Well this illustrates a difference between computer vs paper systems. "By doing" is inherently MECHANICALLY implementable in a computer based system (although a GM can approximate that by awarding skill improvements; but acts of GMing by fiat are their own discussion).

In a paper system "skills centric" is contrasted with "feats centric". A feat is a prescriptive action your character can take, whereas skills are typically a narrative mechanism. The player states their intent, the gamemaster evaluates the difficulty of that intent, and then a test is performed to see if the character has the skill to overcome the difficulty of achieving their intentions.

EVERY computer based system will lean into feats because evaluation of the complexity of achieving a narrative objective is not something a computer can do. It's in the realm of GM fiat.

I've been looking specifically at skill points and how they work as well as the 'skilling up' process. I always find myself drawn to the RPGs that are about skill points rather than levels

Alternity.

It's that simple. You can find the books in Trove. No system was more completely into the "everything is a skill" philosophy than OG Alternity (1998 edition; keep clear of the 2018 printing).

There are no feats, or abilities, and classes are only really defined by getting a discount on skills. Certain skills have feat-like components but these are only to clarify specific mechanical situations specific to the usage of that particular skill.

it amuses me they don't know that super earth is bad

https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#/media/File:Skubship_troopers.jpg

COMPUTER, REMOVE THE SKANK!

Number one, that's redact the skank, not remove the skank.

Of course sir. Sorry!

The outer bumper makes them look stronger than they really are. They look like a big steel box but inside there's just a minimal amount of ribbing that is only supposed to take forces straight on. They're designed so that if they get loose in a flood and hit something, they'll crumple and sink.

Except that anyone who lives around the big rivers knows crazy barge shit is an annual thing and bridge caissons are generally built strong enough to absorb a barge impact.

The barges themselves are pretty flimsy to begin with. They're only a little bit thicker than dumpsters and weigh in at 500 tons for the biggest ones. As you can see in this picture, they crumple like cardboard boxes.

words words words words words

Zankoku na tenshi no you ni, Shounen yo shinwa ni nare

In the US a lot of that is left to the discretion of the individual army corps of engineers districts to figure out for themselves.

In Green Bay, lake freighters can pass under the I-43 bridge and through downtown drawbridges without escort.

But just an hour north at Sturgeon Bay, they have to be met by a tug at Sherwood Point and guided in the last three miles.

everyone here is their own self-proclaimed hero

Y'see, this is where you're wrong.

Nah.

I think it's more likely that the NTSB will come up with more aggressive rules on when pilot tugs are required.