I feel the need to post a thousand words or so about anything on Wreck-Free Sunday

I know, most of you think I have something in mind when I sit down at my computer to write these things, but that only happens once in a blue moon (actually less often than that, blue moons happen about 3 times as often as I know what I’m going to write on Sunday).

So, yesterday was RPG day. We did the Palladium game that’s based in the present day. I’m still playing as Godwin Smythe, wealthy owner and CEO of a mid-level international logistics company and nascent Mage. My character owns both a Lambo, and a Hennessy Viper that he keeps in his condo at the Texas Motor Speedway (party house, 5 bedrooms for a choice of decor), and he has a fleet of delivery vans he can divert to in-game needs (ostensibly the fleet of trucks are backups to the front line delivery vehicles). His business is based at Alliance Airport which is basically across the street from TMS and the condo, so he can talk to his security people or grab a delivery truck just about anytime.

In yesterday’s game we reset back at the bombing of the bar in Denton, only this time instead of my character being found rummaging through the rubble looking for additional survivors, I used See Aura to determine the number of survivors not standing up to be zero, then beat feet out of the scene so as to not attract attention to having survived a blast that leveled a pre-WWII building. My character used Invisibility(superior) to hide the entire group and their trails to get away from the scene, and we then called my limo driver to come pick us up and take us back to the condo, where we worked with my security staff to discover that the bombing was part of a ritual to summon >something< that was probably Not Nice from some place that was ditto. We used satellite surveillance to find where this ritual was going to be held, and when we got close we used my magic sense as a mage to pinpoint the location. One of the party members was able to use one of his animal companions to scout the location out real-time so we didn’t go into this fight blind. As a mage I knew that at the point we were at >something< was going to come through even if we disrupted the summoning because the connection had already been made to that dimension, but if we disrupted the summoning it would be a whole lot less nasty than what was being summoned. Interesting thing was that because of the summoning all magic users’ spells were 3X as effective and delivered 3X damage or healing but only cost 1/3 normal casting costs, effectively raising all our magic users 20 or so levels for the duration of the summoning ad for 30 minutes after we disrupted it. This part is very important to the story.

We slipped in by using that invisibility thing again to get past the mundanes guarding the ritual, and set up a plan that would use our magic users fire control powers to distract the ritualists’ attention away from the circle where the head ritualist was doing the summoning. Remember that 3X effect during and 30 minutes after the ritual I mentioned? Well one party member was going to cast Pillar Of Fire as a distraction for the head ritualist in the center of the circle while I used Fuel Fire to cause the torches lighting the proceeding to distract the outer ritualists away from the circle. The pillar of fire that was only supposed to singe the head ritualist inside the circle while another party member tried to stab him, incinerated him, while my “distracting” torches set all the other ritualists’ hair on fire and caused them to run around like confused ants when someone uses a magnifying glass on a sunny day. An unfortunate side effect of the pillar of fire was setting the party member that was supposed to stab the head ritualist on fire as well from being too close to the pillar. This displeased him, to put it mildly. We managed to capture one minor ritualist and put out his burning hair and render him unconscious for questioning later. The creature that ended up coming through was just a gargoyle that went in the direction of OKC to rampage, so no big losses there except for innocent population. Sorry OKC!

Funny time, while maintaining our cover as “innocent anglers” who had nothing to do with the other events nearby one of the party members caught what would be a world record alligator gar (a common fish in NTX) had we not used magic to paralyze the fish when it rolled to the surface so we could land it. And had we not been playing a RPG instead of fishing IRL. 😉 This was a Grandfather Fish.

The Good News is that the process has been set in motion to get Wells Fargo away from the mortgage and pay off the mortgage the day after. Before the end of the month we will own our home outright, no mortgage, and we can start thinking about saving some money to pay for deferred maintenance like painting the outside and fixing the bathroom. The interesting thing is the loan we are setting up to remove WF is almost 2% lower APR than our current mortgage with WF and would be paid off 5 years quicker…

I’m using an old school method of doing design work on the Sprint T, I had some xeroxes made of some pictures from a magazine (Hot Rod Magazine 06/13, there was a photo montage that included the view I needed) of the body I want to use. I will draw in the structural members on the copy so that I can visualize where they should go.I will have to make some kind of demarcation in the copy that accentuates the actual interior dimensions of the body so I can know if the frame will actually connect directly to the body or only through the belly pan welded to the frame…

And that looks like enough words for today. Tomorrow is another day.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

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Running late because of making sure my house won’t get stolen by Wells Fargo, and the Feed

It’s just after 2100 as I begin this post because I had things to take care of during the day, then dinner, and filtering during dinner. It was very warm today, not what I would call “hot”, just 96°F for the high locally. One of the things I had to take care of was setting up things so that the money I’m getting from my Dad’s estate will ensure a roof over my head by taking Wells Fargo completely out of the situation. When we got our mortgage way those many years ago we got a good rate for the time, but we thought that because we were dealing with a financial institution that had been in existence since the late 1800s we were “safe”, compared to the situation when we first bought our house where our mortgage was sold multiple times as one bank after another failed following the Savings and Loan Debacle of the early ’90s and several times we had to fight to keep the house when the loan servicer went under and records were “lost”. Then there were the multiple foreclosures where Wells Fargo foreclosed on paid off mortgages because of a lack of current payments on the paid-off mortgage. Well, we are going to prevent that from happening… And I wore white after Labor Day!

Up first is more on the victim of that Seattle infrastructure-created wreck. Bicyclist killed fought ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and Cyclist killed in Seattle was ACLU lawyer I have said all I can say about this wreck, except I expect somebody to arrest the member of the Seattle City Council who delayed installing the barriers and separate signals that would have prevented this wreck and indirectly killing this cyclist. Since this was entirely predictable that someone would turn left across a cyclist going straight because of the scarcity of left-hand bike lanes and the fact that most people don’t look left when they are making a left turn from the furthest left lane for motor vehicles, that delay directly led to the death of this cyclist and in my mind becomes a criminal violation.

An OH cyclist is hospitalized by a hit-and-run driver. Bicyclist hurt in hit-skip crash in Montpelier Hit-from-behind protocols to avoid or reduce damages, and get the infrastructure “up to Dutch” to prevent.

This was either deliberate on the part of the driver, or someone really dropped the ball at the AL DMV eye test. Bicycle rider killed in crash As the link reads now there were 3 cyclists hit in this wreck, one killed, one hospitalized, and one that needs clean shorts. Hit-from-behind protocols for any good they could do, and obviously if the driver can’t get to the cyclists then he can’t hit them, which is entirely dependant on the infrastructure with the Dutch model having the best results so far for both protecting cyclists and getting more cyclists on the roads. Yeah, that is a very roundabout way of saying “up to Dutch”.

A CA cyclist is killed because somebody had too much to drink. Update: Huntington Beach bike rider killed by suspected drunk driver Hit from behind wreck really needs better LEO support as the driver has so far only been charged with misdemeanor DUI in spite of killing the cyclist and leaving the scene of the crime. Hit-from-behind protocols might have been useful in this wreck, getting the infrastructure “up to Dutch” would probably have prevented the wreck by keeping the drunk driver safely away from the victim.

Still in L.A. for a bit of lifestyle. Memorial ride to honor cyclist killed by sheriff’s deputy RIP Milt Olin.

Lifestyle from the Great White North. Family, friends of Darcy Allan Sheppard mark 5 years since cyclist’s death I would dearly love to see those videos where the driver of the weapon vehicle (quite literally in this case) was NOT using the car to beat the cyclist against mailboxes and other street furniture after the cyclist got up off the street to complain about getting run over from behind while waiting at a stop light, because all the videos I saw that is exactly what Michael Bryant was doing, using his vehicle as a blunt instrument to bludgeon the cyclist to death. But the Special Prosecutor assigned the case must have seen completely different videos than what we in the public saw.

More lifestyle from the entire country of Canada. Cyclist honours late-wife with cross-Canada ride The cyclist being remembered on this ride was killed scant miles from one end of this trail.

Lifestyle from the UK. Cyclist killed in Richmond Park crash was brilliant scientist who smuggled orchids

More lifestyle from the UK. Cyclists get on bikes for ride for dad killed in road smash I freaking HATE drunk drivers… not that this is unknown to my regular readers, what with the blood-thirsty demands that convicted DUI killers be chained to the steering wheels of their weapon vehicles right before they are fed through a car shredder together…

Infrastructure! news from the Great White North. Runner says speeding cyclists a city-wide problem The amazing cyclist, capable of going too fast and too slow at the same time and place!

Our Daily Ted. Morning Links: How to file a claim for pothole damage; La Habra rider injured crashing into street sign Not to be confused with Our Daily Tedd. El Goonish Shive

And something assisting electrically. New technology electrifies Tucson’s bicycle scene

And those were all the links that gave me fits or giggles today, mostly fits.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the unkillable badass Poet