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You are some kind of literary revenant, Ice.
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Mar 31, 2020 04:27
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vorebane posted:You are some kind of literary revenant, Ice. Just a bit. I'm currently in lockdown, sipping on Gatorade and Everclear, but not so much that I lose my will to write. And so with the time and the focus, I can really hammer out a lot. Also a serious chunk of this was written already. I'd sort of hoped that the Everclear would last longer, but I may need to order more and I don't know how. I do not want to run out of alcohol as I'll be in my house a lot. Dr Subterfuge posted:I'd completely forgotten that we're still dealing with the fallout of that video going online. Wait till Jayvon hears that Fuzzy's whole group is making a magic club. (Literally the third time I've mentioned it today but it seems relevant!) Yeah, Jayvon was definitely going to do some digging. At the end of the last book during the Pinchface fight, Kenji called Fuzzy away specifically from Jayvon for a favor and she immediately gets into a fight with a toxic spirit of fire and a toxic shaman is defeated, but there's no details and no trideo feed in an electronics shop. That's really weird. So he put two and two together and though other people don't have the whole story and neither does he, he has more of the story than others and other people are asking him questions about if Fuzzy also defeated a toxic shaman all by herself because he's her current employer. Fuzzy being on the island for a week has let the story cool down a bit and it's getting lost in constant noise of the protests, but it's not going away. The rich kids want to squeeze out the prestige from her, but she's not someone that they can casually gently caress with either, especially if she single-handedly took down a toxic fire spirit and a toxic shaman. I'm trying to remember the gifts off the top of my head and I'll have to check back for that. quote:I like the mix of Jayvon here. He's knowledgable but he's not perfect. I really want to see him deck someone with a fully functional body. I like Jayvon too. He's someone from a kind of Southern revivalist aristocratic culture. A place where honor culture is alive and instead of backstabbing and scheming, if a person feels slighted and are within a certain social rank of one another, a duel can be issued where two people or their seconds can literally shoot and stab one another in ritual combat, box if it's a friendly bout or wrestle if they're kids to indoctrinate them into the culture. So the fact that Jayvon occasionally talks poo poo to people but on the other is exceedingly polite means that he was active in that dueling culture and in that Southern culture at the same time. And he had a lot of HTRT training (think third generation special forces, hello child soldiers) from a young age to back him up. While there is some subterfuge and backstabbing in Southern culture, getting caught reduces social status far worse than getting your rear end kicked in a duel would be because if you make a good showing, your prestige doesn't drop as much as say, getting beaten by a child, pissing yourself and taking what would be today a crippling wound. So people rise and fall not just based on how good of an earner or manager they are in that corporate culture, but on how they comport themselves in a highly martial, violent honor culture. And his values reflect that culture. And in typical teenage fashion, he rebelled against that culture and was ground up by it and humbled. So now he's literally as far away from the South in North America as he could be without going to say, Alaska. On top of that, he was in full VR simulation for over a year, he's just out for about a month now and he's still adjusting while not being able to go back to life as it was before due to his new body and outlook on life. So while he's not tech savvy like Sasha, he's incredibly social media savvy and used to being connected to the matrix literally 24/7, 365 days a year. He's the product of some world building that I did for fun a while back. Part of me wants to write an adventure for Shadowrun that is a decades old barbecue feud between barbecue masters where shadowrunners involve themselves in the depraved and decadent lifestyle of the Southern aristocracy while getting into the game and metagame behind dueling. It would be somewhat like the episode "Shindig" from Firefly so your average Shadowrun player may have understand some of it. And the idea of actual corporate nobility as well as regular nobility shooting and stabbing one another pleases me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shindig_(Firefly) Add in the new embrace of antifascism, which we still haven't explored yet through him and you have Jayvon. I didn't want Jayvon to feel like a Mary Sue or Gary Stu, but someone who is complicated and enmeshed in the culture that he comes from and is having a hard time fitting in because The South literally rose again and became its own nation and he's from it. So while he may act strange sometimes, it's wrapped up in an actual idea rather than just throwing darts at the board. -- So I mentioned quantum locking. Jayvon's body is basically a network of superconductors, supercooled air and wireless nerve endings under a layer of artificial skin. His limbs actually aren't touching the main body, but are locked in place. And while this application of science is high tech, quantum locking is a real thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA His limbs are basically locked in a magnetic field and are moved by his torso despite never actually touching his torso. Instead they are magnetically locked in 3D space and are moved by that magnet either by just moving around normally (check the video) as well as articulated via the limbs themselves moving independently of the body through wireless signals that come from the main body. Normally you can't just detach a limb in Shadowrun unless it's specifically made to do that, but Jayvon's body, if the skin (not real skin) was exposed, would have small spaces between the limbs. He's an overengineered mess. I wanted to push existing science. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 04:46
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I really like the Jayvon diction I've known he's from the south but I think that's the first time my internal voice for him actually had an accent.
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Mar 31, 2020 05:04
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The part with Fuzzy attempting to lie just broke me. Too adorable. Huge bonding with Jayvon here since you don't get this deep without engendering stronger emotions about the person in question. This is again another face-desk moment regarding Julian. Fuzzy shouldn't be finding this stuff out from Jayvon, this secret of theirs is way too big for him to be this hands-off regarding it. Literally everyone and everything involved here is at risk.
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Mar 31, 2020 05:08
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This is a stupid comment on my part, but in your mind, what are evil Fuzzy & evil Sasha up to the mirror universe where they joined up with Ares. ToS/TNG/ds9 I always enjoyed the one off episodes with villainous versions of familiar characters, it is kind of an overdone cliche, but it is nice to know where characters could have gone.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:00
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MinutePirateBug posted:This is a stupid comment on my part, but in your mind, what are evil Fuzzy & evil Sasha up to the mirror universe where they joined up with Ares. ToS/TNG/ds9 I always enjoyed the one off episodes with villainous versions of familiar characters, it is kind of an overdone cliche, but it is nice to know where characters could have gone. Evil Fuzzy probably got shot, possibly killed. Definitely dropped out of school. Might have went back home. Sasha basically becomes Kendra and gets worked over by Marie. The Troupe becomes her new family.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:04
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Julie and Fuzzy - Monday, August 19th, 2075 – Noon – Blake Island Julie’s beach combing garbage bag knocked against her hip. For the last three hours she’d used her walking stick’s grabber attachment and occasionally her levitation spell to pull garbage from the beach. This was also while experimenting with her levitation spell to make herself light enough to walk across normally difficult terrain, as it was high tide and the beaches where she was walking were rocky. It was a full hike and she was stretching herself physically. Some physical exercise was sorely needed, prescribed even by Devin and her Doctor's office was basically empty. Too many cancellations. Today Krupa was volunteering to get some practical experience under Devin by doing health and wellness checkups among the community, which Julie didn't need practice doing, leaving Julie without any responsibilities for an entire day in what felt like… “Months?” she asked herself as she frowned, “No, I had days off. Wait, I had that first responder class. Does psychiatric care count as a day off?” It was in this moment of reflection that she understood something very important. “I should really try and have a day off now and again,” she said, to no one. This had been why she’d empowered Chip with more knowledge and spells. So he could take over during nights at Touristville and take care of the needs of those living there. To take the load off her as well as Devin unless something serious happened. To share the load. Today, she realized, was her first day off in a long time. The big, greasy meal had actually had helped her feel better after her exhaustion from yesterday. She’d even grabbed two reagents, two otherwise ordinary looking rocks from the beach, which she would later add to her modest pile of magical materials. They were important for summoning, reducing drain from rituals, were useful for creating magical focuses, for… Head down and thinking, she came out of her reverie sometime later. Her feet had carried her all the way to Mr. Peters’ cabin. Surprised how she’d lost track of time. Undaunted, she dropped off the trash in the usual place and walked back to her cabin with the intent of doing some light reading on reagents. On the way back, she ran into Fuzzy, who looked glum and covered in sweat. Her hands were in the pockets of her sweatshirt and her eyes were downcast. “Hey Fuzzy,” said Julie. Fuzzy looked up and flashed Julie a weary smile. “Hey.” “Long day?” Fuzzy only shrugged. “Want to get lunch?” asked Julie. Fuzzy hesitated, briefly clutched at her stomach and reversed course with Julie, walking alongside her. Together, they walked towards the lunch room. It was open, but empty of people. Table after table without any students at all, chairs neatly stacked in the corner. There was a sign that said, “Meals Here” attached to a fridge that had been dragged out, standing alone, humming softly. Upon opening the fridge, the food was simple with vegetarian options and non. Julie grabbed a soy-burger with soy fries, a salad purely out of guilt and some soy milk. The salad stood out as the only real food on her plate, the rest not as processed soy food kept for a long time and there was no one to cook. The fare reminded her of middle school, minus the salad of course, of her old life where her family was poor and the schools were poor and the meals reflected that. For her own part, Fuzzy piled food on her plate high with a mix of meat, vegetables, soy fries and a bottle of Fizzychug soda. Meals were separated onto other plates and microwaved. Julie almost only got some hot sauce so her burger and fries wouldn’t be plain. No calories to speak of. Then, with reluctance, she grabbed some ranch dressing for her salad. Low-fat of course. “Want some sauce?” asked Julie. “Sure.” “What kind?” “Whatever you got.” Julie frowned, trying to remember what Fuzzy normally ate. Then she remembered, it was that regular, full fat ranch dressing. Julie envied that Fuzzy was able to eat that. They sat down at their normal outside table, across from one another, food steaming. It was a nice day, perfect temperature, salt air on a slight breeze, sun shining just enough, air clean. Julie began to eat. There wasn’t a lot on her plate, but after three hours of hiking she was hungry and the hot sauce made her bland burger and fries delicious and the ranch, while it made her feel a little guilty about her weight, did taste good. She was half way through her meal before Julie realized that something was wrong. Fuzzy wasn’t eating her food. It was piled high, still steaming a little and Fuzzy was just staring at it. No, not at it. She seemed to be staring through it. “You okay?” asked Julie. Fuzzy shrugged again. “Aren't you hungry?” As if reminded, Fuzzy grabbed her fork and speared a piece of chicken, dipped it in her sauce and took a bite. The effort was mechanical and she did nothing more than stare at her food again after that bite, but now with a fork in her hand. Normally she’d be tearing into her food, but not today. Something was definitely wrong. “Didn’t sleep?” asked Julie. “Slept too much,” she said. With nothing more forthcoming, Julie tried again, attempting to gently coax out what was eating at Fuzzy. Normally she did this for Kenji when he was in one of his moods, not for Fuzzy, but she was determined to try anyway. She was even tempted to take a look at Fuzzy in the astral to gauge how she was feeling, but she didn’t want to invade her privacy. Not without exhausting all other options first at least. While Julie was contemplating what to do and what to say next, Fuzzy hiccuped. No, it was a hitch in her throat. It was then that tears started appearing at the corners of Fuzzy’s eyes and within short order, she began silently crying while staring through her food. This caught Julie off guard. She had never, ever seen Fuzzy cry before. Not once. “What’s wrong?” asked Julie, in her gentlest voice. Fuzzy didn’t answer at once and it took minutes of more coaxing. Not so many questions that it would put her off and a tentative touch on the top of her hand, feather light. That changed into held hands, a gentle touch to affirm that she was there. She didn’t prod, she didn’t poke, at least not overmuch, she hoped, she was just there in case Fuzzy wanted to talk. Then eventually, minutes later, food thoroughly cold, she did. “I don’t want to complain,” was what Fuzzy eventually wrung out of herself. “I don’t mind,” soothed Julie, “Remember when I had all of those bad days at the end of the school year? You did this for me. You listened.” This was just after she’d admitted that she’d had a vision and internally winced that she might remind Fuzzy of the fact that in her vision, Sasha had killed herself. Julie winced, sure that this was going to make things worse, Fuzzy didn’t seem to remember this in the moment. Crisis averted, though she mentally berated herself. Instead, Fuzzy nodded and wiped her face hard on her sweatshirt with her free hand. “I don’t know where to start,” was what Fuzzy said next. “Try the beginning. Whatever is bothering you.” More tears fell. More time passed. “I miss Sasha…” Her voice was so soft and there was such pain and longing that Julie’s heart hurt for her. “I’m so sorry.” Technically they did see each other at meals, but Sasha was sensitive to the astral and Fuzzy had been constantly hunting and killing animals. Death lingered on a person. It tended to fade, but Fuzzy’s job made it difficult for them to be together. “She can’t even look at me,” said Fuzzy, “I’ve been hunting and she can feel the death on me and she can’t look. She wants to and she tries, but it only hurts her. It won’t stop until I stop, but it’s all I’m good at.” Julie briefly released Fuzzy’s hand and moved from one side of the table to the other, giving Fuzzy a hug. Fuzzy embraced Julie and cried all the harder. It was an old story. Work kept loved ones apart. Even though Fuzzy and Sasha saw one another daily, they couldn’t be together. “I got ahead,” said Fuzzy, with a hard sniff, “I worked so hard and I was able to take a break and get a night off so I could be...I dunno...Clean? And then Kenji comes into my cabin and bleeds everywhere. I don’t blame him, but…” Fuzzy bit her lip hard in guilt- In shame. “It was supposed to be your time with Sasha, right?” asked Julie. As Julie pulled Fuzzy into the hug, she nodded into Julie’s shoulder. “I miss her…” Julie stroked her hair and Fuzzy allowed this. It made Fuzzy cry harder, which Julie felt like was a good thing. Best to get all of the pain out now. “It’s no one’s fault,” said Julie, “The job will be done soon and you can be with her again, right?” It was odd. Julie understood that her faith did not really approve of homosexual relationships, but she did. It was hard to reconcile her faith and her feelings and Devin had never given her a satisfactory answer on how to do that the few times that she asked. “Yeah…” “Okay.” “And I can’t stop,” groaned Fuzzy, “My dad took in a bunch of new people at the house. I mean, there was room since some of the kids got adopted out.” “Marco, right?” asked Julie. Fuzzy nodded and sniffed hard. “Yeah. But these are women and most of them don’t know the jobs,” she said, “And there’s only so much work. Only so much food. And also...Other problems. Even with my help it'll be a lean winter. I’m sending everything home. I don’t take anything. Not even scraps for Puppy or Fluffy. I sometimes catch a few birds for them, but that doesn’t help with Sasha either. Deer meat and fur sells for a lot and Tek is transporting them up to Puyallup for pickup, so transport isn't eating me alive because he gets paid and likes driving my truck. But then they work on it and then it goes to market.” Fuzzy’s breath started to stabilize and the hug became more of a lean. “Deer is supposed to be expensive and it is, but I thought I'd get more,” she explained, “If I take days off, my family doesn’t get enough work with all the new hands and they’re not trained. There's waste getting them trained. Not a lot, but enough. My dad took in too many people and I’m trying to keep them busy so they can get ahead.” “But you can’t get ahead.” Fuzzy shook her head, rubbing her face against Julie’s shoulder. “Maybe? I don't know. I’m so tired,” she said, “I mean, I get naps. I get an hour here, three there, sometimes five. That was nice. I haven’t had a full eight hours of sleep in a while. And when I try to sleep, I stay up with worry. I was rested up today, but I was almost late to train Jayvon and I had to sprint to get there and skipped breakfast. Chip gave me a protein bar and Jayvon gave me his lunch and it was so nice. And then he said something…” Julie’s face darkened. “Something mean?” she asked, quietly. “No...Just...He’s nice. Talks too much, but he means well,” she said. Julie smiled again, nodding, still hugging her friend. “Then what?” “I’m going to be a ball and I don’t want to be one.” Julie blinked. “What?” “A ball.” “I don’t...I mean I hear you, but I don’t understand.” Fuzzy sighed heavily. “Jayvon told me that the wealthy students are going to want to...Be around me?” she asked, unsure herself, “I defeated a toxic spirit and they’re going to want um...Prestige? I don’t know how it works. They’re going to want to give me stuff and have me hang around them so they can get it from me. I don’t...My family needs the money. I'm making a lot, but it's not enough and I can’t…” Julie felt Fuzzy’s fingers fidget against her back and squirmed as she was accidentally tickled. “Could you maybe...?” asked Julie. “Sorry…” Fuzzy tried to pull away, but Julie didn’t let it happen. What came next out of Fuzzy, a sob or a giggle, she wasn’t sure. Maybe both. “It’s fine…” said Julie, “Go on.” Fuzzy groaned. "Rich people are going to want to mess with me and I can't stop it," she said with a sigh, "They're going to ask me about the uh...The toxic fire spirit I defeated. And people are asking if maybe I took on the toxic mage." Julie's eyes widened. "Oh." "Yeah." "Oh poo poo." "Yeah!" said Fuzzy, "And I'm not a good liar." "I'm not either," fretted Julie, "I guess I'll call Julian later about it." "Kay." The conversation lapsed into silence for a moment before Fuzzy's anxiety bubbled up once more, returning to a different topic. “It’s just…” sighed Fuzzy, “Too many people, too many bellies, not enough training." "At home?" "Yeah. The hunters have to range further out for longer to get meat and that’s dangerous and I’m just here getting easy kills. If I don’t work, they risk themselves more than usual. Dad said that some land got opened up to the east towards Carbonado since a gang that used to be there got wiped out by another gang.” Fuzzy screwed up her face in anger, which Julie couldn’t see. The tenor of her voice changed though. Angry. “The Chulos,” she spat. “Chulos?” asked Julie. “It’s Spanish for pimps,” said Fuzzy. That was when she pulled away, eyes beginning to swell and she stared down at her food. Though Julie’s hand was still on her shoulder. “They got wiped out, but the girls were left behind,” she growled, “They’re all...Strung out. Most on Bliss. Dad lost a lot of time helping them detox." Julie frowned. Bliss was a form of heroin that encouraged feelings of euphoria in the user. Highly addictive. Not something she'd dealt with in Touristville, thankfully, but Devin had quietly talked about addicts before and later after she ran into them. "Dad has been having a hard time getting them off the stuff for a while. Some left. Some leave and come back high. Some stay. The ones that stayed are clean, but it’s a mess. Girls only went to the Chulos if they had nowhere else to go and they weren’t allowed to leave. I’m just glad that the other gang didn’t want them.” Julie’s stomach turned and suddenly she wasn’t so hungry anymore. “That’s horrible,” whispered Julie. “That’s Puyallup,” sighed Fuzzy. “Really?” “Yeah, it's bad out there,” she said, “This...This place is paradise. Before I came here, I thought trees were scrubby and thin. The grass is brown instead of green. That ash on the ground was how everywhere was. That deer were too good to be true, because their mouths were the wrong shape to have a lot of sharp teeth in them. And when I was told later that everywhere used to be like this, not forest, but nature...I just.” Fuzzy poked around at her food with her for. Not eating yet, but at least showing some interest. “I feel like something was stolen from me.” Julie sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “It’s why I pick up trash on the beach.” “That’s not enough though.” “It’s what I can do,” said Julie, “I can’t save the world, but I can make my little part better.” Fuzzy smiled at that. Just a little one, but it was there. “I like that.” “You could do it with me. Mr. Peters gives out focuses if you fill enough bags.” Fuzzy thought about it, frowned and shook her head. “That sounds okay, but that’s your thing and I’m also really busy right now,” she said, “If I want to do something, I want it to be different and I want to do it right.” Julie nodded and thought about it, then made her offer. "Want some advice?" asked Julie. Empathy was good. It made her friend feel good, but they were practical people. Empathy alone wouldn't get her out of her situation. And so Julie started to think about how best to lighten the load for her friend. CYOA Time Been a while since we've done this. So Fuzzy has a number of problems. And they've all piled up and dealing with most of them is outside of her skillset and she's having a bad time. 1. Too many mouths, untrained hands. There are a bunch of new mouths to feed at home since another gang and totally not Diego the Piper with a horde of flesh eating rats and bomb rats wiped out Big Dredge and his Chulos. Many of the prostitutes came to live with him at The Club because despite being scary, he's got a good reputation and the kids could use some women in their lives. But their skills aren't bent towards butchering, tanning and tailoring and they're still not trained. They're used to working on their back and Diego does not want that for them anymore for moral and practical reasons. Women are bigger than kids and take more input to feed and sending out women who are identifiable as women alone and into Puyallup as hunters is not an option. It's a scary place. People generally know not to touch the kids, but getting the word out not to touch the women would require a lot more effort, meaning setting even more people on fire and drowning them in rats. It's a big undertaking and a big hassle when he's busy at home. 2. Time. Fuzzy is working twelve to sixteen hour days. Training with Jayvon only takes about two hours and hunting time is variable. But butchering a kill, even for someone as practiced as her, still takes an hour and a half under ideal conditions, twenty more minutes to vacuum seal it, twenty minutes to clean up and twenty minutes to transport it (she borrowed an old ATV, that's off-screen). So two and a half to three hours per kill not including the actual hunting part and she's hunting two a day. Fuzzy is strong, but she's only got so many hours in the day. 3. Her relationship. Sasha won't look at Fuzzy for about eight hours after a kill, more if it was a bad death. She's sensitive to death and though it doesn't linger, Fuzzy can't have alone time with Sasha unless she specifically plans around it. They occasionally do have time when Fuzzy is in dreams, but they literally only see one another when they sleep if that. Both Fuzzy and Sasha are lonely as a result. During the summer, this was less problematic because Fuzzy would only hunt at night and most of that death would be off her by morning and they could do stuff before she went off to martial arts practice with Manny. 4. The idle rich. The rich are going to want to use her in their games of prestige and the person who is the absolute worst at lying is going to get questions very soon about possibly defeating a toxic shaman. That's going to bring a lot of attention and a lot of scrutiny that she doesn't want. 5. Exhaustion. Fuzzy is increasingly emotionally and physically exhausted, meaning that she can't really adapt to new situations and she can only work so hard even if she had more hours in the day. Even if she could learn to lie, she can't right now. She's too tired to learn new skills. Fuzzy has access to... 1. Money. She's still got about 100k in the bank after buying her dad's old truck and Jayvon is paying her, but she doesn't get the 40k from him all at once. While that sounds like a lot, she was planning on spending that on tuition for Sasha, but now she's looking homeward. Despite being a white, blonde haired, blue eyed girl, her work ethic is traditional Latinx. She's sending money home and she's sending most of it to keep her family alive. She's the person with the best job at the moment, but when you're providing for that many people, large amounts of money for personal use get stretched thin. 2. The idle rich. If she does get outed as having defeated a toxic shaman, or even if she doesn't and it's just the toxic spirit of fire, she's going to be showered in gifts and favors as the idle rich want to basically extract prestige from her in their games. This is a hazardous game to play. 3. Transportation. Tek is doing the transport thing and getting the deer meat, hide, bones, etc to the edge of Puyallup and is using her truck to do it while also doing work on the truck. That meat is picked up by Diego and his son. So that's taken care of. Tek doesn't even need fuel because the truck runs on food waste and the bones of her kills.  4. Her friends and contacts. Fuzzy has access to some contacts, but unlike Kenji has been hunting for wealthy contacts, she's been making friends. For labor, she can ask Tek for help. Touristville thinks the world of her. Her big contact is Peter Duro, the deputy ambassador from the Salish to the Seattle Metroplex, but she really only has his ear. They're acquaintances at best and if she asks for stuff, he'll want stuff back to make it worth his time. 5. The deer. The profit on the deer is about 2k each after shipping and labor and while the pork products could be sold in Touristville, venison is prestige food. Only so much can be sold there. Vension could be sold in limited quantities over time in restaurants like the Big Rhino and the bones and inferior cuts will definitely get scooped up because meat is meat. Better markets and therefore better prices could be found, but Diego and Fuzzy are busy. 6. Hunting grounds. Fuzzy still has about twenty deer left to kill from her original bag limit. Fuzzy has been invited by the Salish to go to Council Island, formerly Mercer Island, located in the middle of the Seattle Metroplex. Besides being where the Salish as well as other tribes have their embassies to the Seattle Metroplex, it's also a nature reserve. She could continue to hunt there and pick up more game, but she's not sure about limits. It's bigger than Blake Island, but she's not going to get sole hunting rights like on Blake Island and will be subject to stricter bag limits. Still, it's something. -- Simply put, this situation isn't sustainable. Fuzzy is a hard worker, but she's too busy and too tired to devote time to think about what to do next. Due to the sheer number of mouths at home, Diego is expecting shortfalls sometime in winter during the lean season when game is scarce. That can be extended if Fuzzy spends her own money, but Fuzzy doesn't have a steady source of income and Diego may not accept more to keep from straining her too much. There are limits to how much he'll ask of his adopted daughter. Now that Julie has soothed Fuzzy emotionally through empathy, she's thinking about how to help Fuzzy in practical ways. And after good rolls, Fuzzy is receptive to help. -- I roll composure for Fuzzy and Julie. Julie rolls a 5. She’s a rock and I’ll give her a +2 roll for something coming up as that’s a crit. Fuzzy rolls a 0. She’s not dealing well at all. I roll etiquette. 5 v 3. Not opposed, it’s just how everyone is dealing. Julie is empathetic in the moment and Fuzzy is scared and exhausted, but not lashing out or angry. She cries instead. These are problems that she can't punch her way out of and working is only keeping her family afloat, not ahead. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 18:38
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Julie should point out that Fuzzy can honestly say she didn't take down the toxic shaman. Not that anyone else needs to know, but Min Yun's alcohol spirit gets most of that credit, with minor assists from Julian and Julie's summons. As far as actually dealing with the prestige seekers, Fuzzy needs to strategize with Kenji and Jayvon about how to best ride out the heat, and Julie should talk to Julian like she said. And for providing for Fuzzy's family, Fuzzy alone might not be able to use any good contacts in the Underground, but Julie and Fuzzy together might? Also, I'm not sure if Julie would know to think of this, but I think Sasha wants to be able to pay her own tuition? Is that anywhere close to happening, or at least partially happening? If they both share in the tuition goal it might make things easier on both of them and free up some of the reserves for Fuzzy's family.
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Apr 3, 2020 23:32
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Well it's clear to see why Fuzzy is just jammed, that kind of workload is just murder. Kind of a theme of the original three, they all used their entry into Blake Island to bite off way more than they can chew. Fuzzy supporting her family, Julie her entire community, and Kenji being pulled out of his depths in his political shenanigans. It seems to be a reasonably positive impact for Tek at least, Fuzzy is providing him good and honest work. Given that she hasn't killed a deer yet today, Fuzzy should see if she can spend some time with Sasha. Her schedule already got messed up today, but she can get some positive effect out of it at least. If they can talk in person, they may be able to arrange a schedule that works out better. Fuzzy legitimately needs help with the hunting though. I just don't have any idea who could be pulled into it. Start a hunting club....? It's not like the idle rich really cares about the corpses other than trophies. Yeah, that's playing with an inferno though. I had a terrible idea in that Fuzzy and Julie could see if any of the women could move to Touristville. Unfortunately, the logistics of that are just awful (Tek driving over some addict-prostitutes.... hey dad, meet my new friends!) and Touristville doesn't exactly have a lot of work for their own population already.
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Apr 4, 2020 01:13
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I was thinking that Fuzzy is kind of wasting her skills just hunting deer maybe it's time to graduate to more tricky game maybe of the magical nature she doesn't necessarily have to kill them if she catches them then she can still spend time with Sasha. and it would be a good way to make money and maybe sell some to the curious rich people.
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Apr 4, 2020 01:18
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steelninja posted:I was thinking that Fuzzy is kind of wasting her skills just hunting deer maybe it's time to graduate to more tricky game maybe of the magical nature she doesn't necessarily have to kill them if she catches them then she can still spend time with Sasha. and it would be a good way to make money and maybe sell some to the curious rich people. She should totally pivot to bounty hunting, with Sasha as tech support. More lucrative and with the right nonlethal weapons means no blood on her hands
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Apr 4, 2020 01:29
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I like the idea to switching towards bounty non kills but is there any in world process to cleanse aura quickly? Or something that will constantly mask her aura like Kenji did with dust?
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Apr 4, 2020 01:51
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Is there a reason why Sasha isn't using those glasses that block her aura vision? I swear those existed in some earlier update Fakeedit: yeah, checked it: Ice Phisherman posted:"I couldn't tell. He had a hoodie on and was quiet," said Fuzzy. "What's with your glasses? I can barely see your eyes and what I can see looks huge."
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Apr 4, 2020 02:41
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sheep-dodger posted:Is there a reason why Sasha isn't using those glasses that block her aura vision? I swear those existed in some earlier update The glasses do work. She can't wear them out in public because they're distinctive and she could get made for her condition. But it definitely blocks that sight part of the astral. On the other hand, and I think I've implied this, and if not I'm sorry, but the astral is also about feeling if it's strong enough. Misery and death make Sasha ill. She can't get close to the ACHE for example without getting extremely ill and going inside would probably kill her or drive her insane. She's too sensitive and can't turn that sensitivity off. Fuzzy killing animals, even if it's just for food and not out of malice, leaves a mark on her for a while. It's uncomfortable to be around for Sasha when Fuzzy has come off a hunt. It won't hurt her and can deal with it, but she doesn't want to stare into that temporary imprint left on Fuzzy. If Sasha had actually killed that deer allllllll the way back in book one, she might actually be adapted to this and be able to deal. But the thread treated her well and so she's really only learning any kind of toughness within the last book or two. It's part of her personality. If I haven't stated this explicitly, I'll remark on it in the next update. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 02:55
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I'm now seeing Sasha and Fuzzy running a successful Bounty hunting operation with Kenji marketing it as the new reality series Fuzz: The Bounty Hunter
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Apr 4, 2020 03:03
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Julian's relaxing at home thinking I'm glad the kids are keeping a low profile turns on the trid See's the new show starts laughing hysterically.
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Apr 4, 2020 03:14
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I agree that if deer aren’t paying well enough it’s time to pivot to hunting more dangerous game.
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Apr 4, 2020 07:16
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I don't see how bounty hunting would work. Just logistically, Fuzzy couldn't do it on her own, Julie and Kenji don't have any free time, and Julian breathing down their necks is going to make it next to impossible to pull off.
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Apr 4, 2020 14:28
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That's why I was thinking that Fuzzy could like hunt and capture magical creatures and Sasha could do like OverWatch with like a little drone maybe with some tranquilizer bullets just in case she needs help. But she would still want one or two people physically there for backup maybe some of the older kids from her home. Edit but I was just thinking I don't know if there's endangered species Acts or rules on where she could hunt them.
steelninja fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 15:25
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quote:Julie should point out that Fuzzy can honestly say she didn't take down the toxic shaman. Not that anyone else needs to know, but Min Yun's alcohol spirit gets most of that credit, with minor assists from Julian and Julie's summons. As far as actually dealing with the prestige seekers, Fuzzy needs to strategize with Kenji and Jayvon about how to best ride out the heat, and Julie should talk to Julian like she said. This would be something of a lie of omission. I think for someone like Kenji it would work, but "technically correct is the best kind of correct" isn't something that would work for Fuzzy. I like the idea, it's going in and it'll just bounce off Fuzzy. quote:Also, I'm not sure if Julie would know to think of this, but I think Sasha wants to be able to pay her own tuition? Is that anywhere close to happening, or at least partially happening? If they both share in the tuition goal it might make things easier on both of them and free up some of the reserves for Fuzzy's family. So Sasha is spending money. She was able to keep the stock she had and sold it off, netting about 150,000k. Enough for next year's tuition as this year's tuition was paid early. She's been spending that though on creating her cyberdeck/terminal. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But I expect her to get to about 50k before she stops. She's also big into recycling and is making these razor thin computer parts found in commlinks, harvesting what she can, sending the rest through the recycler along with raw materials and making bigger, cheaper, more powerful parts because she's not worrying about bulk. Imagine it today as someone being basically unable to make a super thin laptop. That's beyond the skill of most people and you need specialized materials, expertise and machines to do so. But if you have the knowhow, you can make a tower PC and you can make a good one if you don't mind the bulk. Someone with decking skills and a good deck will always be able to find work and they'll be able to make money at it. She'll need a fake SIN to pass muster, but that's down the road. Also she can give herself an intelligence boost that most other deckers pay out the rear end with cyberware/bioware for. She's still developing her skills, but Sasha is going to be able to make money on her own by getting a normal job with a fake identity and can compete with the competent if she boosts her intelligence. Keldulas posted:Well it's clear to see why Fuzzy is just jammed, that kind of workload is just murder. It's not just the physical work. It's the physical work plus worry about her family plus guilt for not being in danger like they are plus knowing it'll run out plus isolation from Sasha. Any of these should could deal with alone, maybe even two or three. But it's too much for her at present. quote:It seems to be a reasonably positive impact for Tek at least, Fuzzy is providing him good and honest work. Tek is currently fixing up the truck and driving around a no poo poo Mad Max style truck is going to turn heads. Not min max, not medium max, Mad Max, the devil rat skulls on the front whistling when he picks up speed, running on food scraps and bones, riding into Valhalla, shiny and chrome. He's probably going to get pulled over more than his fair share under normal circumstances, but he doesn't rate at the moment due to the protests and gang wars. So for once he won't be pulled over for driving while being a ork. Everything he's doing is legal and he does have a legal SIN and is doing work. It's pretty positive and he's got a job doing deliveries like dad. Also he gets to impress the girls with "his" badass truck. quote:Given that she hasn't killed a deer yet today, Fuzzy should see if she can spend some time with Sasha. Her schedule already got messed up today, but she can get some positive effect out of it at least. If they can talk in person, they may be able to arrange a schedule that works out better. Sasha just took a pill that made her pass out in order to deal with her anxiety. Technically she can wake up, but she'll probably feel like she has cotton between the ears. If Fuzzy figures this out, she could try and sleep, visit Sasha and get some night hunting done. So we'll see what happens. quote:I had a terrible idea in that Fuzzy and Julie could see if any of the women could move to Touristville. Unfortunately, the logistics of that are just awful (Tek driving over some addict-prostitutes.... hey dad, meet my new friends!) and Touristville doesn't exactly have a lot of work for their own population already. This at the moment would really only be available for the orks and trolls. It's doable, but it would be transferring problems from one place to another. Better equipped to handle it, sure, but not well equipped. steelninja posted:I was thinking that Fuzzy is kind of wasting her skills just hunting deer maybe it's time to graduate to more tricky game maybe of the magical nature she doesn't necessarily have to kill them if she catches them then she can still spend time with Sasha. and it would be a good way to make money and maybe sell some to the curious rich people. She really is wasted in terms of skill on deer and even pigs. They don't offer any challenge to her and her biggest problem is that they take time to butcher. If she can find the animals, they're lucrative, but there's no thrill. Due to her improved reflexes she can keep pace with most animals. She's not super fast exactly, but she can run perfectly and run for a long time due to her conditioning. In technical terms, her initiative passes/combat turns give her more time to run and she can outpace anything that's not as fast as her. Hunting awakened animals is way, WAY more lucrative, but also actually dangerous. Out in the barrens and the wilds, there are awakened animals who tend to be either huge or can cast magic or both. The most common awakened animal would be something we're already familiar with, which would be the devil rat. They weight up to ten pounds each, about the size of a small dog and tend to either be solo or run in packs of up to thirty. They're not eaten because they're carriers for disease. They're harvested for reagents (magic fuel, basically) and their exceptionally tough hide. So Fuzzy could go home and hunt devil rats again and if she grabs enough of them, she could make a decent amount of money because they breed like rats and they're made of money and there are always more of them. A pack of devil rats would be a challenge to Fuzzy, but she would most likely win or at least escape. Or what's probably smarter is to lay out traps instead of going toe to toe with a devil rat horde. If she were feeling up to it, she could also try her hand at something like a barghast (we saw the puppies in book four) or a hellhound. Packs would be out of the question though and they tend to run in packs. That's full on run away territory. HiHo ChiRho posted:She should totally pivot to bounty hunting, with Sasha as tech support. More lucrative and with the right nonlethal weapons means no blood on her hands Bounty hunting is trickier because she'd need to be part of a team as she lacks certain skills. Anything she'd be doing would be unlicensed too because she's still a minor or she'd need a fake SIN and a license, but people are way more dangerous than devil rats. Unlicensed work is unlikely to pay well. I have some ideas in that vein though later on in the story. steelninja posted:That's why I was thinking that Fuzzy could like hunt and capture magical creatures and Sasha could do like OverWatch with like a little drone maybe with some tranquilizer bullets just in case she needs help. But she would still want one or two people physically there for backup maybe some of the older kids from her home. However, if persuaded, she absolutely could pick up some basic drone pilot/rigger skills as well as the gunnery skill. She has the jack of all trades skill and can pick up new skills cheap at low levels. Sasha could pick up the MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone for 5k, mount some weapons on it and go hunt game with Fuzzy serving as tracker. I'm seeing some differences in the books for if weapon mounts are restricted or forbidden though, because you can buy drones with weapon mounts that are restricted, but the mounts themselves are forbidden. So I'm going to err on the restricted side because rule of cool, so technically, you could get a permit to create your very own mini-attack chopper because the state is broken and we've got to civillian models of military weapons to meet the projected profits this quarter, even to teenagers.  The big investment would be the rigger control console, which allows for drone piloting at all. Sasha could build one, but it would take time. Or she could buy one, but they get expensive. And she'd need to probably dump it at Diego's, set up a wireless node so she could reliably connect to it and operate it through her cyberdeck. Fuzzy acts as tracker, Sasha works as pilot and gunner and Fuzzy hauls back the kills. It would be an expensive setup, but hunting awakened creatures is something that Diego's kids are not equipped to do and getting rid of them would probably be a boon for anyone who goes outside as well as being pretty lucrative. East Puyallup is sparsely populated and there would be a fair number of awakened creatures out there as well as normal wildlife. And to keep from overpenetrating with large rounds which would ruin the kill, I think that you could have a situation where you could use remotely piloted mini-attack helicopters armed with crossbows to hunt down magical rats in the ruins of Puyallup for the magical bushmeat trade. Peak Shadowrun right there. It could also be adapted so the kids have extra support out on their hunts, maybe even not needing the kids to go out at all, which would be ideal. It's a neat idea. I'll give it some thought. Depends if it would add or subtract from the narrative. I'm not sure yet. There's definitely at least a short story there where Fuzzy and Sasha use the roto-drone as a proof of concept to convince Diego to try a different style of hunting to keep the kids safe and possibly indoors. quote:Edit but I was just thinking I don't know if there's endangered species Acts or rules on where she could hunt them. Out in the barrens, there is not only no endangered species act, but some awakened animals will hunt people. They're pests at best, deadly at worst, but some of them are basically made out of money. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 19:53
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Ice Phisherman posted:Sasha just took a pill that made her pass out in order to deal with her anxiety. Technically she can wake up, but she'll probably feel like she has cotton between the ears. If Fuzzy figures this out, she could try and sleep, visit Sasha and get some night hunting done. So we'll see what happens. Mainly the suggestion is stemming from what Fuzzy and Julie know. They knows Fuzzy doesn't have death on her right now and don't know that Sasha did that. However, that won't look good because they don't know that the danger from the Sasha suicide prediction has passed as far as those direct circumstances goes.
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Apr 5, 2020 02:48
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Ice Phisherman posted:CYOA Time Been a while since I've had time and energy to really sit down and smash out a wall of effortpost for this thread! Good to see you back, Ice. So, as with most other things in Shadowrun, the problem is capitalism. Venison is a premium product. We need to turn it, as efficiently as possible, into a subsistence product. While we'd like to feed the tribe in Puyallup like Fuzzy gets to eat now, first we have to keep them eating, at all. Unfortunately, as I understand it, the supply chain looks like this: 1 - Deer meet Fuzzy, get turned into venison. 2 - Venison goes to Puyallup for more processing. 3 - Processed venison goes to Touristville for final processing and gets turned into money. 4 - Diego turns food into money for the Puyallup tribe to eat. Ice Phisherman posted:Deer meat and hides get processed at The Club and get sold at Touristville for good prices which draws in Tourists. It's not pig so it's more niche, but it's better than nothing. Fuzzy gets a comfortable hide blanket, a pair of boots and a coat. Fluffy gets scraps of the fat (deer fat doesn't taste good to people) and Puppy gets scraps and bones/horns to chew on. Touristville's south end gets all the bones they want to make stock for the shop Diego helped open in Touristville's south end that's just called "REAL MEAT" where it serves what it says on the tin. There's real meat on the menu and it's cheap. Just don't ask what it is. Deerskin coats and boots go up for sale in Touristville's west end. Venison goes for sale in the north end and to a lesser extent in the east end. It turns out that Touristville not having to pay taxes makes up for the fact that they don't charge as much. Plus Diego just doesn't like the government and not giving tax money to them even if he could make a little more selling elsewhere appeals to him. #3 and (more importantly) #4 are the problem here. Wherever Diego's buying food, they've got people to pay, machines to maintain, miscellaneous overhead to cover, and profits to take home. Worse is if he's not big enough (and he's definitely not big enough) to deal directly with the soy/algae/kelp companies, because then he's paying a middleman, and he has to cover costs and profits for them too. Every step you're removed from the production, you gain a little convenience and lose a little efficiency. This was fine when before the population exploded. To make matters worse, venison is a limited resource - we have only about 20 deer left, and then belts have to get even tighter. Ideally we want a long-term sustainable solution. Some of the kids may get adopted out and some of the women may learn new skills and professions and start new lives, but that's a long time in the future. Short-term improvement: can Diego talk to his buyers in Touristville about trading meat and bones directly for other food? He should be able to get appreciably better terms, because: 1 - Inventory conversion (turning low-value inventory like soy and kelp products into high-value inventory) is a good deal for them. They won't give him credit in straight-from-the-supplier wholesale costs, but they can take a thinner margin. This is why secondhand stores (and used bookshops where you can find them) will often give you two prices for your trade-ins, a higher one for store credit and a lower one for cash. 2 - As we've seen lately out here in the real world, cash flow is king. Big and even medium-size businesses usually pay their suppliers on a net-30 or net-60 basis (HUGE businesses can get away with net-90 or longer) - they don't pay their suppliers until, ideally, the goods are already sold and their profits are already taken. Diego's presumably getting paid nuyen on the barrelhead. If they can defer the actual cash-flow cost of paying him to the future, that's a better deal for them, and he can get a better deal in turn. This is frequently why high-quality vegetables are often super cheap in Chinatowns - a lot of the old-fashioned small grocers there pay cash up front for their produce, while supermarkets want net-30/net-60 terms, and farmers or distributors are willing to send a pickup truck of their freshest every day if that means maintaining a steady supply of cash coming in. The hides and fur don't work quite so well with this, because I don't know that the buyers have anything we want on any regular basis. So we still get some cash. Cash is important, because we're going to talk about capital improvements next. How do we fix things long-term? How do we build infrastructure? We have a lot of hands who aren't doing anything productive now and can't do the dangerous work of hunting, but that doesn't mean they can't be useful elsewhere. Can we trim our dependence on the supply chain even more, or maybe use some of this money to start a project that will let us feed it more? We have land down there. We can't grow anything on it directly (the soil's blighted), but we've got space, we've got electricity, and we've got reasonably drinkable water. Maybe we can get some hydroponic or aquaponic setups and put the women to work tending them? Then we can have fresh vegetables to supplement the wasteland meat from the hunting kids, or we can trade it (see point above) for soy/kelp/algae/etc food.  Four-inch PVC pipe costs about $16/10 feet, so you can make a four-tier, four pipes per tier, twenty-foot-long super-sized version of the hobby kit above for... let's call it $750 in pipe, pumps, support material, and miscellaneous small parts. Round it up to $1000 and you can wire in some red-and-blue growth lights and improve your efficiency (get me talking sometime about the insane tech curve of LED lights and the driving forces behind that). It's got a ground footprint about half the size of an F250 truck. Fortunately, as with many things in Shadowrun, the answer is also capitalism! But a democratic, smaller-scale kind of capitalism. Barack Obama posted:Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? Arugula and butter lettuce (both popular hydroponic crops) mature from seed in 45-55 days. Zucchini would take some doing, but zucchini plants will give you an absurd amount of produce and mature in the same time. Maybe we can stick a one or two stations onto each end of a rack with climbing trellises for them. But plants don't have to spend the entire time in the pipes - your first three weeks or so are spent in a series of small trays, getting bigger as they need the room and nutrients. So on just one of these racks, assuming a middling 9 inches of pipe per plant, we can supply a bit better than 100 plants (real fresh vegetables!) to market every week, plus zucchini. Broccoli and kale take a while longer, 75-100 days depending on variety (same-ish 3-week growing period), so I think they have to wait until we have four or five racks, and we can dedicate some space on each rack to add variety to each harvest. Stagger things a little bit so you never have a growing tray empty and idle. That keeps you moving until you can turn this into a self-sustaining loop. Get enough racks going and we can start growing to eat, rather than to sell, and tell me that's not a nice upgrade to quality of life in the Barrens. Ideally we can get here before Fuzzy hits her hunting limit. Aquaponics (raising fish alongside the vegetables) doesn't really become practical until we're up and running at scale (and might never be; I haven't done the estimates), but that helps bring the running costs of the system down and adds another sideline of food or income. To start you might be able to raise some crawfish in the tubes. Either way you can help trim waste by turning dead/decaying plant roots and food waste (such as you have it) into edible protein, and the fish waste gets recycled into supplemental plant fertilizer (not enough on its own, no matter what the houseplant-over-a-betta-bowl people will tell you). There's a little bit of handwaving, future-projection, and willing suspension of disbelief here, which only really work because of the peculiar market forces in Shadowrun. You're not going to be able to compete with the enormous scale efficiencies of the kelp beds or krill farms or the soy and algae megafarms. It's questionable whether you can even compete with real-world conventional agriculture. In our world, today, the only common hydroponic crops you'll find in the grocery store are butter lettuce and sometimes tomatoes (tomatoes mostly because pest control gets a lot easier indoors). But in the superdystopia surrounding Blake Island, it works a lot better because the closest analogue is probably hydroponic pot, where legal problems introduce an enormous price distortion. Real fresh vegetables (and maybe occasional fruit) of any provenance are going to carry a similar premium in the Shadowrun world, and most people live in ultra-dense cities where space is precious and expensive. Even dedicated foodie hobbyists are likely to have, at most, a little tabletop hobby unit that lets them eat a real fresh vegetable once or twice a week. But out in the Barrens, there's space to spare if you can hold on to it. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 21:09
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Any improvement that is made to the house increases the risk of the house being attacked by gangers though. Sure, Diego can keep the orphans save on the back of his reputation as long as it's mostly some orphans and old sewing machines, but as you increase quality of living and invest capital you also raise the interest of gangers that are stupid and greedy enough to take their chances, and Diego isn't going to be able to keep them safe on his lonesome if he's not the first one to strike.
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Apr 5, 2020 22:09
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The answer to that is to hide the inflow and outflow of capital. Right now that's happening with the Mad Max truck, which could presumably be used to bing in hydroponics a bit at a time. If the number of deliveries doesn't change that doesn't bring any more heat than they already have. The only way you'd really be able to tell is if it's obvious from the outside they are growing things or if the traffic increases. Long term I suppose there's the risk that Diego's people will actually look decently nourished from the fresh food, which might make them a target.
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Apr 5, 2020 22:49
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sheep-dodger posted:Any improvement that is made to the house increases the risk of the house being attacked by gangers though. Sure, Diego can keep the orphans save on the back of his reputation as long as it's mostly some orphans and old sewing machines, but as you increase quality of living and invest capital you also raise the interest of gangers that are stupid and greedy enough to take their chances, and Diego isn't going to be able to keep them safe on his lonesome if he's not the first one to strike. As long as you do it in small steps to avoid immediate attention like we got last time (and there's no point in doing it in large batches all at once; you build up tiers and racks as you have plants to put in 'em), I'm not sure we're actually talking about anything that makes them more attractive a target than the fundamental value of having an old country club building on top of a hill. At the end of the day it's just a ton of PVC pipe, some pumps, and a lot of airstones and plastic tubing. If you just want to steal the food or profits, it's likely easier to stage a raid on the Petrowski farm down the way; even by the most optimistic estimates of 25x-50x land efficiency in commercial hydroponics systems, they'll be orders of magnitude larger. The real value of your fancy indoor garden is that it puts you on a track to self sufficiency; it puts your vulnerable hands to work in a reasonably safe and efficient way, turning your short-term cash windfalls (venison sales) into long-term supplies of petty cash crops and supplemental food of good quality. The gangers are probably already aware of who those are, where they went, and what they want out of them (not farm labor, hydroponic or otherwise). Can we fit enough inside the building to feed everyone? I don't know; how many mouths are we trying to feed?
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Apr 6, 2020 00:05
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Secrecy is not going to work for long, there's people coming and going from Casa de Diego, so I'd expect knowledge about anything we set up to spread before long. And yeah, it might not be a very sophisticated or expensive system, but clearly setting up something like this is beyond the ability of most groups in the area, or they would have something similar themselves, so it'll still be attractive for anyone greedy or hungry enough.
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Apr 6, 2020 08:34
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Yond Cassius posted:Can we fit enough inside the building to feed everyone? I don't know; how many mouths are we trying to feed? At the moment, they're trying to feed roughly 30 children, 20 former prostitutes, Diego, his son, his son's wife (counted among the former prostitutes) and pretty soon, a new kid as the new wife is heavily pregnant. They're all basically on the squatter lifestyle, which is 500 per month per person. That means that you have a bunch of people eating pretty crap food and are food insecure, sharing a limited number of bathrooms, power sometimes works, matrix access is spotty, etc. They might be in the low lifestyle tier if not for the fact that they're living now fifty people to a single building. It's incredibly cramped. They are well defended, meaning that they have a wall of trash that circles the place, clear sight lines as it's a former golf course so nothing can sneak up on them and best of all, nothing is there that's worth stealing. It's just a crazy wizard and his kids on top of a hill. There's nothing there worth taking. So they get the remote quality as well. So they're remarkably safe at home despite being in the least populous area of the Puyallup Barrens, which is a pretty dangerous place. I can't really say what running costs would be, but at the moment they're in the red due to the new mouths. Fuzzy's hunting boosts that back into the black, but that's only temporary. That's more narrative at the moment, but it serves. Hydroponics and aquaponics could absolutely work, especially if they're not selling it and only using it for subsistence. It would need to be hidden though. Water gets basically everywhere since it rains so much so most new homes don't have a basement. A 50k nuyen facility for farming could be snuck in and installed underground anyway, which would solve the food shortfall and give the idle hands something to do. Also in the long run, the kids are going to look better fed and that's going to raise suspicion, but that's a later problem, not a now problem. Power would be a problem, but it could probably be managed. Putting greens, fruit and fish on the menu would be a huge deal. Most people in Shadowrun flat out do not eat real food. Eating real food would be a luxury, but selling it would be dangerous as it would likely attract attention. Eating it would be sub-optimal, but hey, fresh tilapia. That said... sheep-dodger posted:Secrecy is not going to work for long, there's people coming and going from Casa de Diego, so I'd expect knowledge about anything we set up to spread before long. This is the problem. When you're living in a dangerous situation with people, one of the most important questions is "Can I trust you?" In fact, it's probably the most important question after getting your immediate food, water and shelter because having extra people you can trust and rely on helps you secure food, water and shelter in the long term as well as safety. And what you have are a number of traumatized, ex-heroin addicts, some of whom are slipping in and out of their current living situation because Diego is trying to get them to stay rather than getting chewed up by the barrens. If someone leaves and runs their mouth about new construction, or worse, growing food, people are going to show up either begging or armed. And once that gets out, everyone is going to know that Casa de Rat has a sweet setup and only a few defenders. The social situation needs to be solved first and that's probably going to be a hard talk about being in or out just to start. The people who leave and try to come back are going to be told to stay away and will be left behind. Then continuing the process of integrating everyone who is living there and that's going to take time. Only when trust is really established can they actually start safely building and growing food. Realistically, Diego would probably need to call in people that he raised and then got into stable living conditions back to the house, find out which ones still respect him and start a careful dialogue about bringing back in people who would be willing to defend the place. That means going from squatting in a clubhouse to setting up an enclave. That comes with new risks and would mean a change in their lives. People are going to be reluctant to mess with Diego at the moment because he just wiped out an entire gang and all of the locals know it. That unwillingness to mess with him gets reevaluated in the light that he has actual stuff to take when that becomes known. When he stops being the crazy wizard with his kids sitting on nothing to being the crazy wizard and his kids sitting on a pile of food. Bringing new people in, many of whom aren't trusted, can't yet work and can't defend themselves is a serious burden and it necessitates committing to a new way of life or cutting off the people that Diego has first freed and then made himself responsible for and then casting them back out into the world to live or die if they're not completely on board with the new way of things. Unless Diego gets rid of the former prostitutes, or at least most of them, he can't go back to his old way of life. But the new way of life will mean new dangers and need more inputs that he doesn't have. It'll mean calling in even more people and integrating them, finding defenders, buying weapons, building places for everyone to live, increasing access to sanitation and water, which means even more food needed, better defenses which will attract more attention. Kids can't go out to hunt like they used to because now they'll be targets for kidnapping. It's all really ugly. The barrens have a different kind of moral and political calculus because if you have any kind of capital, you need to be able to defend it. You need to be lean and present a credible threat to anyone who will take what you have and then occasionally prove that you'll follow through with violence if tested. Looking weak or fat means you'll get attacked and if you get attacked, you might lose. Capitalism requires a system in which there is an ever-present credible threat to defend property of those unable or unwilling to defend it as well as those people in the first place. That system simply doesn't function if that threat doesn't exist. They do sell their products and do have to interact with that economic system, but that system of protection that allows for that system to thrive does not exist where they live. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 16:40
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Julie and Fuzzy - Monday, August 19th, 2075 – Noon – Blake Island Fuzzy was cried out. Her eyes were swollen from tears and vigorously wiped by her shirt sleeves and she was feeling much better. Julie had held her tongue until now about how to solve her problems. They were both practical people and so this meant empathy first and then problem solving, because Fuzzy really did have problems. “Want some help with this?” asked Julie, sometime later. Fuzzy shrugged, but the look and feel of defeat was no longer there at least. “Whatever you got,” she said. Julie nodded and stroked her chin. “So let’s start with the food problem,” she said, “Too many people, not enough work, right?” “Yeah.” “Well, we have money since the um...Thing,” she said, and pinched her cheek covertly, “Maybe think about what you can do with it. I remember one of my neighbors had an indoor farm when I was little. A little aquaponic setup. Fish and veggies and all that. It was expensive to set up, but saved him money in the long run. It fit in his garage and fed his family basically every other…” Fuzzy was already shaking her head. “I already thought of that. Dad did too,” said Fuzzy, “Growing stuff at least. We can’t have it.” “Why not?” “It’s Puyallup. If you’re sitting on anything important, people are going to want it,” she explained, “Either they’ll come begging or they’ll come with guns.” “You could hide it,” said Julie, “Maybe underground.” “Nope. It’ll get out.” “How?” Fuzzy shrugged helplessly and poked at her food with her fork. “Always does. Someone says something. Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, but the secret always gets out. Even if it’s months from now when a well fed hunter goes out and people notice. Right now, dad is providing a safe place for a lot of the former prostitutes to eat and sleep, but they’re in and out of the house. They can’t come back high and he’s talking about cutting off the ones who come and go, but that’s going to take time.” Julie thought about that, frowning. “Okay…” “It’s ugly, but if they’re off drugs and addicted, they’ll steal,” she said, “They’re the ones most likely to talk. The other ones? The ones who are staying and trying to work? It’s going to take time to get them to accept it as home.” “What does that have to do with anything?” Fuzzy sighed and shook her head. “That means that there’s food and shelter in one place,” she explained, “And there’s a stream nearby. It’s not safe to drink and dad has to treat it, but people still will drink it if they have to. So that’s food, shelter and water all in one place. If you have that in Puyallup, people will want it. There’s no police. You have to defend it. Dad can only defend the place if people don’t want it. Can't be done safely.” That’s when Julie began to understand. If some greenhouse, grow house, hydroponic farm or factory farm was set up in Seattle, it would be a new business venture or if it was a garage setup or better, it would be the envy of all. That’s as far as it would ever go though. Many of her former neighbors resented the setup that her old neighbors had, even though they’d scraped for years to put real food on the table. Like putting solar panels on their house, it was a long term investment. But if the place was lawless... “Being the envy of all in a lawless place makes you a target," having walked the logic forward. “Yep,” said Fuzzy, and added with some approval, “You got that faster than most people.” “Prison did that to me,” said Julie, wryly, “You have to protect what you own.” Fuzzy nodded along in agreement. “Dad is considering asking the Petrowski farmers to put up a place on their farm,” she said, “Dad gets along with them and we trade meat for produce, but it wouldn’t really be our equipment since it would be on their land. If relations got bad or times got tough for the Petrowskis, they might keep it and not give anything.” “This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be,” said Julie, with a sigh. “Mhm.” There was a pause as Julie considered what to say next and decided she’d do better if she knew how many people Fuzzy had to help provide for. “Hey, how many people are at your home right now?” asked Julie. Fuzzy hesitated, her eyes wary, but not suspicious. After a good, long while, she spoke. “You can’t tell,” she said. “Tell what?” asked Julie, misunderstanding, “You don’t know?” “No,” she said, firmly, “You can’t tell other people how many people there are there.” Julie’s opened her mouth in a small O, suddenly in understanding. Then placed a hand over her heart. “I will not tell anyone,” she promised. Fuzzy considered, nodded once and lowered her voice. “Thirty kids, Diego’s family, his son, Iggy, Iggy’s wife, Mary, her newborn and the twenty women,” she whispered, “Dad says out of the twenty, five will most likely stay, but it could be ten.” Julie leaned in, lowering her voice in response. “Will the food problems go away if it’s just five?” Fuzzy shook her head. “No, they need work. It won’t be as bad, but everyone works so everyone eats and we need to find something for them to do. If everyone stayed, we’d be out of food before winter.” “Oh…” Julie felt bad. “What happens to the other ten?” Fuzzy shrugged and looked away. “Find new pimps, sell sex again,” she said, darkly, “Bliss is nasty. Dad said it was how the Chulos kept control.” Julie had seen bliss used while she was in prison and read about it. It was a catch-all name for a certain blend of heroin and mild psychoactives which created euphoria. Bliss was horrifically addictive and the drug of choice for people who wanted to alter their perceptions of life. Bliss was a way to live your best life now matter how bad things got. “People get addicted fast and stay addicted,” continued Fuzzy, “Maybe we keep ten if we really work on helping them, but it’ll most likely be less than that. Five will stick it out. Maybe a few less, maybe a few more. Dad said that he could use an extra hand or two with the kids, but that was Mary's job. Five to ten is too many.” Julie leaned hard against the picnic table and sighed. “I met a few addicts while I was in psych,” said Julie, “A lot in prison too. Or people who dried out and adapted to life inside. They were the scary ones. For them, prison was an improvement off the streets. Prison is supposed to be punishment, but what happens if life is so awful that three hots and a cot is better?” Fuzzy shrugged. “Don’t know.” Again the conversation lulled, though it had been from the sudden tangent that Julie took it on. It was obvious that Fuzzy was done with that line of talk. She kept poking at her pile of food while Julie contemplated. Then as Julie thought about it, she thought back to Touristville on Sunday and smiled. “Hey, Touristville buys food in bulk,” she said, “What about you?” “Bulk?” “Yeah, bulk. They get price reductions because they buy direct,” she explained, “No middleman.” Fuzzy paused in thought, pulled out her commlink and tapped that out. “Can fifty people buy in bulk?” she asked. “Don’t know,” said Julie, “Maybe ask Sasha. Or I could ask if whoever buys food in Touristville could tack on fifty extra people.” Fuzzy smiled and tapped on her commlink some more. “That’s something,” she said, “Maybe it could work.” “Maybe,” she agreed, “Maybe you could put that…” Julie was about to say to put a farming facility in Touristville, a bigger one, like she’d seen in her neighbor’s garage. But then she remembered the upcoming election and what a mess that would be if Touristville got annexed. Not just for the business venture, but for anything that wasn't strictly legal. Only Julie's doctor's office and the pharmacy were legally recognized property. The rest wasn't. In fact, Touristville could very well radically change if it got annexed. It might disappear altogether which made Julie distinctly uncomfortable. “Hmm?” asked Fuzzy, as she finished typing. “Nothing,” said Julie. Though this did bring back up thoughts from earlier. Asking about dentistry. Something she couldn’t do in Touristville with her current setup. She wondered if she could legally set up some sort of dentistry drone in her doctor’s office and considered having another look at the legal agreement that had given her the doctor’s office in the first place. After all, she’d gotten it legally, purchased by Marco and then it had been expanded after the fiasco with Minuet though Horizon Group's influence on the city. She might be able to expand it again. Julie waved these thoughts away. Now wasn't the time. “Okay, that’s a lot to think about,” said Julie, “Next problem. You’re hunting a lot.” Fuzzy nodded glumly. “Normally it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I have to process it all by myself,” she explained, “Hunt, clean, butcher, haul, clean area.” “How long does that take?” asked Julie. “Butchering alone takes me two hours,” she explained, “It’d be less if I were bigger, but I’m not. I make it up with speed. I try to keep it all under three hours, but the deer have been moving to the far side of the island and some have been swimming to different islands.” “To get away from you.” Fuzzy grinned smugly, but it broke apart into weariness. “Handling one kill a day is okay, but two takes it out of me, especially after training Jayvon. I’ve figured out that I need to sleep between hunts and after training or it’ll take me way more than four hours for a hunt. I’ll just want to pass out.” “What’s the big hold-up?” asked Julie. “Honestly?” asked Fuzzy, “Finding them. They’re not hard to find, but they’re harder to find. I’m killing the slow learners. That leaves the rest.” Julie spluttered out a giggle and immediately felt bad. “Maybe…” began Julie, “Start a club?” “With who?” Julie thought about it. She didn't want to join one. Kenji probably wouldn't. Sasha...No. Unable to think of anyone, she groped for answers. “Uh...The rest of the students? A few of them are probably hunters.” “They won’t share,” said Fuzzy, dismissively, “Or they’ll make it seem like it’s a big deal to share and act big about it. I’m trying to stay away from them as much as possible, remember?” “Yeeeah,” sighed Julie, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” “These are my jobs. I said I’ll do them so I’m going to do them. Maybe I’m doing too much, but that means I’ll just have to learn to do less next time. The best way to deal is to push through and finish.” “I can respect that,” said Julie, “Okay, what about all of this uh...Having rich people fawn over you?” “Jayvon is helping me and Kenji is going to make sure that it’s good,” she said, “Maybe then they can figure something out.” “Maybe,” sighed Julie, “The social stuff is not my specialty.” “Mine neither,” grumped Fuzzy, “And I’m too tired to learn.” “Noted. So what about new hunting grounds? You’re going to run out of deer, right?” Fuzzy idly toyed with her commlink, hands fidgeting nervously. “Right,” she said, “Once I finish up here I’ll see what I can hunt on Council Island. After that I don’t know. Most hunting grounds are expensive and they charge for the day and they charge per kill. I might make money if I hunted the less popular animals, but not a whole lot. Mr. Peters says that I can hunt a few Grouse to feed to Fluffy, but not too many. Also Sasha doesn’t want me to hunt the raccoons.” “They’re so cute though!” “I know,” complained Fuzzy, “I picked up Puppy because he was too cute and too scrawny to kill. I already feel bad about the deer because they can’t fight back and can only swim off the island. Most won’t. It’s too easy. I don't get the same thrill anymore.” Julie strained her mind for something that Fuzzy could hunt, but came up with nothing. This wasn’t her specialty either. “I don’t suppose you could hunt in Puyallup?” asked Julie, reluctantly. “For what?” asked Fuzzy, “Dogs? Rats? Crows? No one pays for that unless you’re desperate. Devil rat hide is useful for armor…” “Wait, yeah, you used to have those devil rat clothes, right?” “Gave them back to dad,” she said, “They outgrew me. Some other hunter is probably wearing it now.” “You know they’re good for reagents, right? Awakened animals?” she asked, “Devil rats are awakened. I mean, they’re also full of nasty diseases, but I figure you have a way to check for that." “Dad does, yeah. I’d normally try to trap them and jab them with this pokey thing that would go green or red. If it was red, I abandon the trap and kill the rat. Green was good. Hunting them might work or it might draw thirty more. Going down under a horde of rats the size of small dogs is a bad way to go.” Fuzzy and Julie both shuddered. “Still,” said Julie, “Maybe try your hand at some awakened creatures. It doesn’t sound like regular animals offer any challenge anymore. No thrill, right?” “I don’t know anything about that other than devil rats,” she said, “Well, I got chased by a hellhound once. Also I held barghest puppies during my internship at Ares.” This made Fuzzy pause and a slow smile spread across her face. “I want a hellhound leather jacket now,” she said, her tone resolved, “They’re in Puyallup. I want one.” Suddenly Julie was a lot more dubious about the prospect. “They breathe fire, Fuzzy.” This only seemed to make Fuzzy more excited. “There are usually a few awakened creatures that make the hunters at home nervous,” she explained, “I could clear a few out. Take a spirit or two with me just in case.” Fuzzy idly brushed the shoulder of an imaginary jacket. “Hellhound leather jacket!” she exclaimed, “Fun and profitable. Thanks, Julie!” Dissuading Fuzzy didn't seem like an option and so Julie didn't try. “Any time,” sighed Julie. Fuzzy’s appetite returned and though the food was cold, she ate with gusto. Julie on the other hand pushed food around her plate, eating only a little. “Speaking of jackets, are you ready for the ritual tomorrow?” asked Julie. Kenji had insisted on wearing smoking jackets for the party afterwards, made by Fuzzy’s dad. “Yep,” she said, “I’ll hunt tonight, but not in the morning, so Sasha will be okay around me. We’ll give gifts, do the ritual thing and have a party. Maybe a hunt afterwards. I’ve got to catch up.” A thrill of excitement and nervousness ran through Julie. Tomorrow she was going to ask any spirit mentor who showed up for advice. They weren’t trying to get a specific spirit mentor, instead seeing who wanted to show up. “It’s going to be an all day, life changing event,” said Julie, “Also it’s going to leave you drained. Are you sure about a hunt?” “When has that ever stopped me from working?” “This morning?” Fuzzy shot Julie a cool look and then suddenly, her face burst into a wide smile. Quick as could be, Fuzzy began shoveling food down so fast that Julie worried she might get hit. “What’s the rush?” asked Julie, leaning back a little. Fuzzy didn’t stop until she was done, which probably wasn’t the best idea as the food had been piled high. Not for the first time, Julie envied Fuzzy’s metabolism. “I haven’t gone hunting yet and Sasha is awake!” said Fuzzy, in almost a squeal, “I want to go see her!” “Maybe get a shower first,” said Julie. Julie hadn't complained, but Fuzzy did smell. This dampened Fuzzy’s spirits a little, but not enough to end her excitement. Instead she pushed her plate away, stood on her seat on the bench and posed. “I’m going to spend time with my girlfriend, I’m going to feed my family and I’m going to get myself a hellhound leather jacket!” exclaimed Fuzzy, “Yeah! Thanks Julie!” Fuzzy vaulted over the table in a standing jump and began to run and then quickly turned around. “Get my plate?” she asked. Julie waved her off. “Go,” she said, “Go and be happy.” Fuzzy waved back and began to jog. Julie sighed, wondering if she’d done more harm than good.
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Apr 7, 2020 04:53
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I'm imagining a leather jacket, but with a hellhound mouth hoodie. Like the headpiece part of this outfit. And lo, Fuzzy began her quest for the Ubisoft DLC armor. -- Can't really fit in bounty hunting, but I can fit in something like it later on.
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Apr 7, 2020 04:57
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Solid compromise, so the awakened hides will sell better than the deer hides but I thought only the excess meat was staying in touristville, couldn't they just cut into the venison profit and bring more meat home instead of selling all of it?
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Apr 7, 2020 05:11
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Furhatworld.com for inspiration. https://www.furhatworld.com/coyote-fur-mountain-man-hat-full-coyote-pelt-p-331.html
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Apr 7, 2020 05:15
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Toughy posted:Solid compromise, so the awakened hides will sell better than the deer hides but I thought only the excess meat was staying in touristville, couldn't they just cut into the venison profit and bring more meat home instead of selling all of it? The excess meat at the moment is only being sold in Touristville and a few other limited places, which is not the greatest market for it. Pigs are the meat of the people. Venison is a luxury meat. Also it's not just the hides, though someone will pay top dollar for a quality hell hound hide. There's also a lot of reagents in awakened creatures and those can be sold.
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Apr 7, 2020 05:22
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Ice Phisherman posted:At the moment, they're trying to feed roughly 30 children, 20 former prostitutes, Diego, his son, his son's wife (counted among the former prostitutes) and pretty soon, a new kid as the new wife is heavily pregnant. OK, that's a bit bigger and denser than I was thinking originally, and less commitment from the newcomers than I would like. It's meaningfully big enough to run into the trust problem, and close-packed enough that it takes some options off the table. I thought we had more space available from earlier construction/retrofit after Sasha's visit. Ice Phisherman posted:Hydroponics and aquaponics could absolutely work, especially if they're not selling it and only using it for subsistence. It would need to be hidden though. Water gets basically everywhere since it rains so much so most new homes don't have a basement. A 50k nuyen facility for farming could be snuck in and installed underground anyway, which would solve the food shortfall and give the idle hands something to do. Also in the long run, the kids are going to look better fed and that's going to raise suspicion, but that's a later problem, not a now problem. Power would be a problem, but it could probably be managed. Fish would be a logistical problem at this scale, even on a "once a week" basis. A tilapia takes 6 months to mature to minimum harvesting size (~1 pound), and at that size they live in ~3 gallons of properly oxygenated water (on average, once you get a decent number of them). The fish get bigger with longer growing time, up to about 2-3 pounds at the one-year mark, but this just increases the logistical problems when secrecy is part of the equation. More sophisticated support equipment lets you pack them in denser, but that's its own problem. The meat yield on them is about 50% (gutted, scaled, and beheaded - you can eat some choice pieces off the head and make broth out of the rest, but the pieces are tiny and the broth doesn't count here). You need a couple different tanks because at that density the mature fish will totally kill fry and juveniles, but those can be a lot smaller. Adjusting a bit, let's say you have a target harvest of 30 fish/week (a quarter pound of fish for everyone, once a week). That's 100 gallons, a tank about three feet by four feet by eighteen inches deep. It's about the same commitment as a kid's sleeping berth. You need ~25 of them. It's going to smell. Even if we say the little ones can live in smaller tanks to save space (raise the fry in hydroponics tubes?), we're not looking at much less than 20, footprint-wise. If you can stack them double-decker, then you're talking about the same space as 5 whole racks of greenery (as described before). Triple-stacking makes weight a concern (those 100-gallon tanks will weigh about 900 pounds apiece). 5 racks of greenery provides one "fast vegetable slot" (lettuces, cabbages, arugula, bok choy, anything with that ~50-day maturity time) of food per person per day, plus some room for "slow vegetables" (broccoli, kale, etc). In the early stages it's probably best to sell what vegetables you can along with Fuzzy's venison, and maybe keep up the regular delivery (diminished or not, depending on whether we're running a surplus or not) once she's hit her bag limit. The neighbors have gotten used to seeing them make regular trips to meet with Tek. The quality of this food is going to be a big step up from the baseline, but we still need to put enough calories into everyone; we're still going to need to buy stuff from the outside. So this gets to the core of it: Ice Phisherman posted:Bringing new people in, many of whom aren't trusted, can't yet work and can't defend themselves is a serious burden and it necessitates committing to a new way of life or cutting off the people that Diego has first freed and then made himself responsible for and then casting them back out into the world to live or die if they're not completely on board with the new way of things. How do the Petrowskis handle the problem? They've got way more to steal, from what I understand, but as a commercial operation maybe they've put in the investment to deal with it. And you're right; at this scale we're also looking at questions about the trustworthiness and loyalty of our newcomers (and probably some of the older kids). We're really not ~just~ talking about farming. It's a whole cultural shift, a sudden move from hunting-and-gathering to settling and building a (small!) farm. Some of the teenagers are going to have identity crises over this, especially the better hunters. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 05:40
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Toughy posted:I thought only the excess meat was staying in touristville, couldn't they just cut into the venison profit and bring more meat home instead of selling all of it? They're basically living the situation that modern quinoa farmers are dealing with; the harvest is worth too much on the market to eat. It gets sold and turned around to buy cheaper stuff. Some of Fuzzy's pork harvests they probably ate, as a treat. Ice Phisherman posted:“I’ve been hunting deer lately and Sasha feels death on me, so we can’t spend much time together. It makes her feel bad,” she sighed, “I get one kill in the early morning and one in the evening and it takes about four hours for each kill from start to finish, and it's hard work. Normally that lingering emotional pain in the astral goes away after oh...Half a day. At least to the point where she can stand it. Sometimes less if it's a clean shot and it dies without suffering, but way more if I have to cut its throat and it dies badly."
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Apr 7, 2020 05:48
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Not for the first time this update made me think that Fuzzy has a surprisingly large amount in common with a stereotypical Shonen protagonist. Moving up in difficulty for her hunts should do some good towards improving her "job satisfaction" and hopefully bring in more money as well. Not that I have any idea how much hellhounds are worth. Seems more like a solution to Fuzzy's low mood than a big improvement on the material conditions of the clubhouse (unless this is going to rake in some big cash) but you can't help others if you can't help yourself first.
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Apr 7, 2020 10:53
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Yond Cassius posted:They're basically living the situation that modern quinoa farmers are dealing with; the harvest is worth too much on the market to eat. It gets sold and turned around to buy cheaper stuff. Some of Fuzzy's pork harvests they probably ate, as a treat. Nice article and I didn't think of it like that at all I figured it was here's what we need to eat to survive and here's what's leftover that we'll sell for profit. Just another aspect of capitalism selling yourself into starvation?
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Apr 7, 2020 15:43
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Toughy posted:Nice article and I didn't think of it like that at all I figured it was here's what we need to eat to survive and here's what's leftover that we'll sell for profit. Just another aspect of capitalism selling yourself into starvation? The history of the Irish potato blight has a lot to do with capitalism for example. Steak and potatoes were the main staples of the Irish and because potatoes are so nutritious, the Irish could eat them and would be taller, better built and more attractive than their English counterparts because their diet was better. But they would experience crop failures and go into famine because potatoes were prone to crop failures. During the potato blight, Ireland was a net exporter of food like wheat and barley. These foods were priced out of the Irish tenant farmers' ability to buy. So while one million people starved during the potato blight and people fled the country and there was massive unrest, the owners of the land kept exporting food. If someone is starving and can't pay, there is no economic incentive to pay them under capitalism. So if you have say, a bumper crop one year, you may not sell your entire crop. If say, strawberries are too common, it could get to the point where strawberries are priced so low as to make them not worth harvesting. So you let the excess strawberries rot on the vine. Meanwhile, people who can't afford those strawberries go hungry. And that goes for any food that's grown, but not economically viable to bring to market. If you can't sell it at a price that's above your break even point, you let perfectly edible food go to waste. Extra Credits did a multi-part series on the potato blight that was pretty good and explains some of the economic problems behind the potato blight and why people kept exporting food during a famine. It's an interesting watch and fairly informative for pop history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAnT21xGdSk Yond Cassius posted:OK, that's a bit bigger and denser than I was thinking originally, and less commitment from the newcomers than I would like. It's meaningfully big enough to run into the trust problem, and close-packed enough that it takes some options off the table. I thought we had more space available from earlier construction/retrofit after Sasha's visit. They do have more space available. It's just not a lot of space. The place was literally falling apart in some places previously. If they get any bigger they're probably going to have to start building homes. quote:How do the Petrowskis handle the problem? They've got way more to steal, from what I understand, but as a commercial operation maybe they've put in the investment to deal with it. Walls, firearms, defenders, fierce reputation, friends to call on and enough capital and enough markets to create a revenue stream to help provide for all of the former. Diego has some of these and with time he could scale up into an enclave, but that's tricky. Getting people who you can trust to work for you and defend the place takes a long time. quote:And you're right; at this scale we're also looking at questions about the trustworthiness and loyalty of our newcomers (and probably some of the older kids). We're really not ~just~ talking about farming. It's a whole cultural shift, a sudden move from hunting-and-gathering to settling and building a (small!) farm. Some of the teenagers are going to have identity crises over this, especially the better hunters. Yep, that's pretty much it. If Diego takes in too many more people, they'll have to change and Diego doesn't want to do that. He wants to sit on his hill and take care of the kids of Puyallup without being bothered. Setting an enclave means that he'll be increasingly bothered and will have to change his entire way of life. Most people, especially very stubborn people, will flat out refuse to change their way of life because it's part of their identity. To abandon their identity creates an existential crisis. RabidWeasel posted:Not for the first time this update made me think that Fuzzy has a surprisingly large amount in common with a stereotypical Shonen protagonist. Shonen protagonists tend to have pretty simple thoughts and ways of doing things. "I'm going to fight you to go and get stronger" or "I want this very simple thing and will strive to do it" or "I'm going to punch your face in because you're bad" has an appeal to people. Set a simple goal and achieve it through struggle and combat. Simple is easy to understand and if you win, you have a badass leather coat to signify how badass you are. The problem is that if Fuzzy is a shonen protagonist, she does not live in a shonen world. It's more complex and she's running into problems that she can't solve. They're too big for her and outside of her skillset. Complex problems aren't beyond her ability to understand, but they are often beyond her ability to solve on her own. So she does what she can do and wants a win to boost her spirits. And if her friends can simplify her problems to something within her skillset, she'll gladly solve them. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 17:14
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When it rains it pours for these kids huh These problems are also out of my ability to solve! But I think Diego really ought to consider changing his situation from "squatters" to "armed enclave" even if that's a lot of work. Just being The Weird Old Rat Wizard won't cut it forever.
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Apr 7, 2020 21:45
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Xarbala posted:When it rains it pours for these kids huh If nothing else, The Weird Old Rat Wizard will eventually become The Weird Ancient Rat Wizard, and then one day, we hope long, long into the future, there will be no more Rat Wizard. But there will still be kids in the Puyallup Barrens who will need a safe place to go, where they can find someone to care about them and to keep them safe from harm. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Apr 8, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 22:28
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I can't help but feel that a hellhound leather jacket is just going to get Fuzzy MORE attention. "Oh, this thing? Yeah, I went deep into Pullayup to take it down". That's even aside from the danger of hunting one in the first place.
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Apr 8, 2020 03:01
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