FuglyDuck

Probably make more in clicks and adds than they can make buying and scraping a very limited amount of probably-not-actually-pure gold.

Certainly less work.

(Edit: this is the irregular reminder to crack addicts and meth heads- flocke cameras have copper you can sell.)

Yeah. if that's all that happened, you might have a point.

Ask yourself how they got the gold and how many children were enslaved for labor after the gold ran out, and how many were killed as 'object lessons' when people tried to resist. Just take a look at the Taino Genocide for an example of what I'm talking about. Spanish conquistadors were known to bash still-nursing infants to kill them. They fed natives to dogs. Burning a live and hanging weren't brutal enough, so they sometimes did both. At the same time.

sure diseases wiped out most natives. and they may not have known about it. but I wouldn't be shocked to find when they found out, they decided to make use of it. (I mean, we did.)

As bad as the Aztecs were… I’m not sure the Spanish were better

But she def. made a mistake of not distancing herself from Biden (which I can absolutely understand on a personal level).

oh yeah. that was a rock and a hard place. Either she distanced herself from biden, or she undermines him. I think the only way she could have gotten out of it was "Of course, with hindsight there are things I would have done differently. But right now I'm the vice president and I can't undermine the president; especially in ongoing negotiations." rather than "There's not a thing I would change"

Harris’s campaign was pretty well and truly fucked over by Biden, and it’s a miracle it was as close as it was.so props to Harris on that.

Also Clinton “gave” Harris her campaign strategist staff which is why they benched Walz and his “they’re weird”. I’m not sure if it was meaning to help or just out of spite, though.

Either way, the two campaigns were not the same.

Edit to add:

Clinton lost because she was a lousy candidate, and ran a campaign on rank condescension that alienated key voter blocks.

Harris lost because Biden basically fucked it over, she got handed an absolute disaster, and was in a position where she could either undermine what little Biden was trying to do with Netanyahu or alienate a different key voting block.

and yes, Biden absolutely would not have won.

none of this is to say that mysogyny didn't play a role, one would be an idiot to say otherwise, but ultimately, Harris did remarkably well given the shit show she was handed.

Mandate a full refund for everyone effective, then tack on a % fine on top of that. 10% seems reasonable.

(Chuckles in evil DM)

Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)

That's like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.

This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?

Because we like our unobtainium, okay?

Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)

So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.

I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)

(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)

Puffins are cuter, usually less, ahem, fragrant, too.

1. people are stupid and this is all just hypothetical
2. <you should read this one in Badge 502's voice>NO!

with those disclaimers... I suspect they were trying to make a mold of their poopchute and didn't think it all the way through. I'm not sure if that was then going to be directly used, or if it was going to be used as a negative for something else... but that's my guess.

are we sure we didn't confused for a giant piece of shit?

I guess it's a matter of perspective.

it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with "Solarians" who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter's orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they'd pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual's instructions were basically "tell the AI to update the blueprints." which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)