skeletorfw

Yup, it depends on the person but at least in my life many male friends are physically affectionate. Admittedly some of these are affectionate via general sparring, which started in our teens and never went away.

What? How in the world is that your conclusion from my point? Are you seriously advocating for mob vigilante justice systems? I agree in essence that these crimes are abhorrent and must stop, but what are you proposing as a functional justice system?

The question really is what do they need to be protected from? If they must be heavily protected from physical harm that certainly implies that there is a threat of grave physical harm to them on a regular basis. That doesn’t sound like a sweet life to me.

So here’s the rationale that is generally used: If you are in a country that utilises the death sentence then the only system that can decide that is the legal system. Vigilante justice, even when morally justified in the immediate, is not a rigorous or systematically moral justice system. Ergo if anyone is in danger of being killed then they must be protected, even if they are a terrible person, as they have not been sentenced to death (or even if they have, that sentence is not to be meted down by just some other random person).

If you are in a country with no death penalty, you as a society believe that no-one should ever be killed as retribution or as an example to others, thus the argument for protecting people from serious harm is obvious.

These same basic arguments apply for corporeal punishment.

Those who are believed to have committed horrific crimes such as those you mentioned will be in extreme danger because their crimes are fairly universally considered reprehensible (because they… You know… Are). The danger is that there is no perfect justice system. Miscarriages of justice do occur and whilst you may believe that actual perpetrators should be killed or maimed in prison, the risk is that innocent people may be subjected to a horrific and irreversible punishment for no crime at all. That is not acceptable to most people within most justice systems.

Yeah I think flat enough is the right phrase. Their bass is definitely lacking but with a well configured sub (I set the crossover at about 80Hz I think) you can compensate. My only feeling about producing with a sub is unless you’re in a very well acoustically treated room, it’s worth checking your mix on good headphones and a few sets of speakers to make sure your interesting sub bass parts are actually coming through nicely. They are good though to really work out what’s going on in the sub frequencies of your mix. Also makes it really obvious when those areas are getting muddy.

Honestly as far as cheap small monitors go, I really don’t mind the Eries. They’re not perfect for sure but they give a generally balanced sound and I paired them with a nice mackie sub to get pretty decent frequency coverage. Certainly perfectly decent for producing a variety of music and generally for listening to things.

I mean, just give them money?

Put it this way: getting a job is just one of many challenges facing homeless people.

For example, if you get a job but are already living absolutely hand-to-mouth, can you actually afford to have that first month of work with no money coming in on a day by day basis. If you cannot afford to even eat how will you make it to that first paycheck?

Even if you do, where will your job put that money? Many, many homeless people do not have a bank account, and what do you need to open a bank account? A home address and ID!

Were you fortunate enough to become homeless with a copy of your birth certificate or other form of ID? If not oh that’s not a problem sir, it’ll cost you £35, and then it’ll arrive by recorded delivery to your home address. Where was that again?

Pretty much no person is homeless by choice. Most are there by a combination of bad luck, violence, a lack of a social security net, mental illness, and many many other factors. Very few people would choose a life of danger and unprovoked violence. You wouldn’t want to be without a home, they don’t want to be without a home for the exact same reasons.

So in conclusion, it is the very basics of human decency to feel bad for them. I would urge you to go further and try to help them, whether that be by direct contribution, by volunteering, by donating to a housing charity, or something else.

As mentioned by foggy, jazz harmony (which I frankly suck at) or counterpoint are both the things which will give a formal understanding of this sort of thing.

That said I picked up a lot of it more from playing regularly with people who are much better than me at music. In the end if you immerse yourself in music that uses these ideas more regularly you start encountering strange chord notations and seeing patterns in why they are as they are. Finally it isn’t really a prescriptive thing, there will always be many ways to write the same chord, and it will usually be much of a muchness what is written vs what you actually play.

In the case above I’d probably always write it as a D because for someone trying to learn it quickly they’ll know what a D is more instinctively than a weird augmented minor.

Yeah definitely agreed here. The only ones I can come up with are horribly overwrought specifically to make it sensible. (like F#mD5 -> F#m -> F#mA5 where the C, C#, D is an implied run but like… Why)

Listen to the music man, he speaks the truth :)

That reads to me as a F#m with an augmented 5th. The notes of a simple tonic triad of D would be D F# A. Meanwhile an F#m would be F# A C#. If you augment that C# to a D and take the second inversion of the chord then you again get D F# A.

The actual reason you would write it like this would really depend on what you are doing musically in the piece more widely. If you were going F#m -> Bm through D as a passing chord, you could consider it as an F#m aug5, however this kinda would make more sense if the other parts of the piece implied that chord to be an F# chord.

In general don’t worry about it too much as often you don’t really mean the alternative representations that it suggests, but there is some fun music theory underlying this.

Honestly the first set of students coming in at undergrad after covid that I had were simultaneously wonderful and also felt about 2 years behind where they usually are socially. It was a bit of a struggle getting them to properly sit down and think. They did absolutely thrive when you got them going though (with some kinda more experimental pedagogy) so I do still have hope.

Yup, in my experience the best way to beat a rules lawyer is to be a better and funnier rulemaker.

So this sent me down an absolute rabbit hole. As a DM there’s a few ways I’d consider to stop this being entirely game-breaking:

• You could argue that the only thing strength before death shows is that you can activate strength before death between hitting 0 and getting knocked out. A wizard is no samurai. Therefore concentration spells are not allowed.
• You could argue that life steal requires life to steal, and as such you can’t life steal yourself.
• You could enforce the requirement of the figurine required for vampiric touch, then engineer a scenario to remove it at a critical moment and see if they realise.

Personally I would instead depart from RAW and point out a version of option 2, but a lenient one. Something like “you can do this but you are sapping your very essence to do it. Every time you do it, you permanently lose 10% of your HP” or “every time you do this you increase the number of death saving throws you must succeed before you die”. Or my personal favourite: “every time you do this you perturb the very laws of nature. Nature is rather fond of its laws and so decides to perturb you right back. Roll on this table to see what happens.” and make the table include the above alongside a few other things and maybe a roll on the wild magic table.

In the end I enjoy ingenuity but the role of DM gives you a lot of latitude to… handle… those who believe they found a loophole.