So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It's been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It's now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.

For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It's very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I'm open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it's actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it's fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.

Edit: since my thread was locked and I can't reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I'm not "a beehaw user", I've barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I'll be closing that now.

I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That's enough of that for me.

I was there, I saw the thread. @TheDude, did you? It was pretty strongly in favour. Do we really need to keep waiting around to see if an instance administrated by a guy who wants to declare "cis" a slur is going to turn out okay?

https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 for context.

For a long time I've tried to get a good RPG setting going for BT. I know there's an already written RPG for the game but tbh I don't really like it. For a while, I thought about making a bare-bones RPG myself that used the same base mechanics scaled down, but I found it was just too crunchy and slow. Now, I'm thinking that since the game will get very crunchy and simulated once it steps into mech combat, it can probably be narrative and story-based for the out-of-mech sequences. Since my favourite RPG is hands-down Blades in the Dark, lately, I've been thinking of writing a Forged in the Dark system game for battletech.

This is getting pretty niche so I'm not sure if I'll find enough people who play BT and know FitD well, but I'm curious if anyone in here knows of an existing FitD build, or other more narrative-focused RPG, that would be easier to adapt to BT.

My daughter has asked me to write a book targeting her age range, 7-10 years old. I've read a few chapter books with her and have an idea of the language level, but I'm finding it very challenging to keep an engaging story going with the constraints. Anyone know of any tips or guides out there worth looking at for helping set language goals in an early readers setting?

I picked up both books of the Capellan Solution for my kid. Wondering if anyone has read these... They look like the usual "not groundbreaking literature but entertaining" kind of fare. Anything they should read before hand?

I'm also curious, I noticed there are a lot of books that sit in chronological order but don't seem to be part of series. I assume most of them can be read out of order? It's been a bit over twenty-five years since I read a BT book myself.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/124923

This is one of my go-to quick lunch recipes. It takes chickpea flour, water, a bit of olive oil, and salt. You do need to prep it a bit in advance to give the chickpea flour time to soak up the water, and then for the pan to heat up, but the actual cook time is minimal. Done right - which is easy - it's got a crisp, flavourful outside and a soft, almost custardy inner layer. It goes great with zatar seasoning on it, or just coarse salt, and because chickpea flour is pretty high protein, it's surprisingly filling.

It also makes a decent pizza crust substitute for gluten free folk! It's nothing like bread but it's super delicious with pizza-like toppings.

A pan of socca and some fresh veggies or a greek salad is a really nice, filling dinner when you want to take it easy.

I'll eat hot peppers in any circumstances, but my favourite is to ferment them and pulverize them into sauce. Anyone else do the fermentation route? What are your favourite ingredients, peppers, etc?

I use a lot of different things but my recurrent non-pepper ingredient is leek. It ferments amazingly to create a sweet allium flavour that doesn't overpower the peppers themselves. I also like adding peach or apple for sweetness after the fermentation.

I showed my kid this ancient video when they got into battle tech. It might look and sound like crap now, but I was so vindicated when they made me play it three more times.

"Ammunition level... Critical"

Aah. This was the point where I realized the joy of stompy metal feet.

I'm actually just doing this to learn how to post photos, the image itself is kinda garbage without my light box, but here you go: one of my glass-green and purple mercenaries!

I find all these metal plates and hard surfaces a lot tougher than organics.

I've had great recommendations on my niche hobbies and a few funny chains of pun posting, so we're almost fully operational now.

... now I just have to wait a friggin year or whatever for my quad mechs (and I guess some other stuff).

Whoever says millenials don't understand delayed gratification anymore does not know about being a miniature gamer in the kickstarter age.

My kid, who is a terrible degenerate clanner, runs hell's horses as their main. Thus, they have a neverending thirst for things with treads and wheels instead of good solid stompy legs like Kerensky intended. Ironwind metals are a little fragile for an eleven year old (paint chipping etc) so I've been looking for stands in for a while.

As long as you're willing to either proxy the hell out of things or make your own stats, reaper CAV vehicles are a good option. The system is 10mm scale, and the mechs themselves mostly (though not universally) look a bit huge, but the vehicles are generally pretty okay looking next to catalyst mechs. The heavy vehicles are a bit huge, but work well for the assault-size vehicles that we get in BT.

Thought I'd toss this out for folks, and as soon as I learn how, I'll send pictures.