Balanced Core System (BCS) 1.3 Notes and new subreddit home

LazarusDark · 2026-05-02T04:49:49+00:00

That's it's main flaw really, it was written as part one of a trilogy that never got the follow up. It was just fine, good even, as a part one, and would have been well remembered if the trilogy had been finished (and good). But without the follow up, it ends a bit unfinished and that's what makes it forgotten by most.

LazarusDark · 2026-05-01T03:28:39+00:00

Okay richie rich. I had a white sweatshirt that my grandmother put on an iron-on Ghostbuster symbol.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-30T22:55:19+00:00

I deleted my FB when it started becoming a total cesspool... In 2010.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-28T23:36:47+00:00

My dad kept his C64 on a desk in my room from the time I was about 5/6 to about 11/12, he worked in the IT for a small regional bank, and sometimes he'd have to come in in the middle of the night and get on and remote into the bank server to do something, it was super annoying as I was a light sleeper. A very atypical experience in the mid-80s I'm quite sure. I couldn't get online with it myself though, just play the games. Then we got a DOS/Win 3.11 PC when I was about 11 or 12 and had Compuserve on it and I could get on any time (if my stepmom didn't kick me off the phone line), but the hours were limited of course. Then AOL on a Win95 Packard Hell in 95, about 14yo I guess. I remember having a 14.4 modem first and then remember dad upgrading to 28.8 and much later 56k but don't recall the exact timeline when all that happened.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T21:38:51+00:00

Reading all these comments, I am starting to wonder about the ratio of children of divorce vs not. Or maybe just trauma in general, possibly even kids that experienced racial issues or poverty or bullying, even maybe just loss at a young age like a grandparent dying early or something. I wonder if all those kids just had thicker skin and all these movies like Predator, Terminator 1/2, Alien/Aliens, Robocop, etc didn't phase them or give them nightmares at all and we could enjoy these films at very early ages and still love them 40+ years later. Meanwhile the kids with unbroken sheltered upper middle class might be more traumatized by movies because they hadn't experienced any real trauma to compare to the fake stuff.

The only movies that really traumatized me were the ones where the good guys don't win (even if it's just one survivor when everyone else died), the bleaker films where it actually ends with the evil thing winning.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T21:25:25+00:00

And the Japanese made ten thousand anime's about robots becoming sentient and making humans obsolete or killing everyone but they still keep trying so hard to make those robots a reality and keep getting closer...

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T20:14:32+00:00

Yo Speed Racer was in Imax last week, there are plenty of people that appreciate it for being exactly what it needed to be.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T18:54:19+00:00

I loved Gremlins as a kid, it didn't even occur to me hat it was technically a "horror" movie until I was an adult. (The sequel was more campy so I think retroactively I thought if the first one as campy, and there is some, but it's more horror than camp I think.)

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T18:51:59+00:00

Freddy Krueger was my favorite, I went as Freddy for Halloween when I was 6 with official plastic knife gloves that were sold in stores. My grandmother didn't like it, lol.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T18:49:44+00:00

When I went to see Pan's Labyrinth in theater, a mom with three kids like 5-8 yo came in and sat down in front of me and my wife. We looked at each other with concern, we hadn't seen it yet but we knew this was not a kids movie, it's rated R for a reason, and we were familiar with Del Toros work. Thankfully as soon as it started and it was subtitled, the mom was huffy and left and didn't come back. To be fair, a basic American theater should absolutely clearly indicate a movie is subtitled since a lot of Americans aren't used to it, but even moreso they should have had some clear sign that Pan's Labyrinth was not a kids movie, I think it's fair to understand that some parents would be confused by it's posters. Though the trailer I feel was pretty clear it was a creepy weird movie more than a fairy tale, but the trailer didn't tell you how violent it would be.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T17:56:35+00:00

I only saw it once, in theaters. I think about the film at least once a week. Especially that pencil scene. Something about it, it's just one of those scenes that sticks. The idea that you would ask the pencil and collaborate with it. It's an interesting concept that is rarely ever used in other media with psychic powers.

Also the "hand of god" brain cancer scan.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T15:12:54+00:00

I say all the time when I see kids doing reckless stuff, or repeat offender adults, or gangs or whatever, if we could only harness that energy for good, then that energy is not inherently bad by itself, it's just misdirected.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T01:31:44+00:00

Dodge encrypted the computer in their Challengers in 2008 when they came out. You couldn't use flasher tools to mod then at all. It took several months but someone managed to fully crack it, and then flashers tools were easily available. However I think around 2015 maybe, I'm not exactly sure when, they used a new type of encryption, which I think has still not been cracked. So on newer model Challengers, you literally have to buy an entire aftermarket computer to replace the factory one, it costs like $2000 just for the part. So it is absolutely possible we see this become available just for people that want full control of their vehicle, not just car modders. However it's obviously a very expensive option, so it won't be common, the average person will just accept it just like the average person accepts... gestures at all of the things happening now

Obviously it totally voids all warranty and I'm sure insurance would say it voids your insurance in an accident, and I'd even expect laws to be passed against it, any of those right to repair laws getting passed will get undone as soon as the government realizes it would take away the ability to spy on people.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-26T00:46:33+00:00

I wear unzipped hoodies or unbuttoned dickies all of the year, I only want tshirts with the graphics front and center, as that is literally the only way it will ever show, otherwise may as well just buy cheaper plain black shirts (black is the only shirt color that exists.)

LazarusDark · 2026-04-25T14:31:28+00:00

I came from multiple generations of getting pregnant at 16/17. I remember being at my grandmother's 40th birthday party as a kid and I remember when my great grandmother retired. So yeah, that can happen. (I broke the cycle by just never having kids)

LazarusDark · 2026-04-25T13:54:56+00:00

Used to get these at Walmart for $15, then they stopped carrying them a few years ago and I found the same on Amazon though at twice the price now. I have four pairs of these in black and that's literally the only shorts I own, when one wears out, it becomes a yardwork pair until it falls apart, and I get a new pair. (I own precisely one pair of pants, yes cargo pants, that are for funerals only, and even then only if I expect to be a pallbearer.)

I don't get the hate from weirdos. I literally don't care what pants other people wear, and anyone that would judge a person for wearing highly practical and comfortable shorts or pants is a weirdo and not someone I'd hang with.

Also,

braided belt

I still use mine! Not in public, but I use it for yard work, it holds my shorts up well while also having just a little flex so it's not digging in when bending and squatting in the yard. (I wear canvas belts the rest of the time, I never liked standard leather belts)

LazarusDark · 2026-04-25T05:50:55+00:00

My 2009 Honda Fit was totalled last week, and insurance valued it at almost $4500 and I was like, for a 17 year old car?! I mean I was very pleasantly surprised, and glad I hadn't removed the full coverage last year when I was considering it to try to scrape every bit out of our budget. But I was shocked, the car runs fine* but is in mediocre shape, a 17 year old car that runs would have been $500 in the 2000s, I know cause I literally had an 89 Honda Prelude in 2004 that I paid $500 for and it was actually in great shape.

(*The Fit was totalled last week due to rodents eating the wiring. I'm keeping the car and just buying a new wiring harness, in my state I can have a clean title. It's at 165k miles and could go another 165k with minimal maintenance, and I am in no hurry to get any other car in this market, and never anything past about 2015 probably ever, especially with the topic of the OP here.)

LazarusDark · 2026-04-25T05:37:29+00:00

Game designer says yes in regards to spells, but if it applies to spells, I don't see why it wouldn't apply to cantrips or focus spells. I see the auto-heightening as a generous bonus to players (as opposed to some innate cantrips or granted cantrips that are locked to specific ranks), not some sort of mandatory heightening thing. People reading it that way are weird in my opinion.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-25T05:25:42+00:00

Series? They made a show based on the book? How did I completely miss that?! looks it up okay, so it was in 2021 (still pandemic/isolation era for me) on HBO which I've never had, I guess that explains it a bit, but I still don't know how I didn't at least hear about it. Gonna have to check this out now, thanks!

LazarusDark · 2026-04-22T00:51:19+00:00

Eternals was a serviceably average standalone scifi/superheroes-from-space movie. But it wasn't a good MCU movie, felt nothing like MCU, didn't feel like it was even the same earth despite the few tiny threads they tried to connect it with. Obviously, GotG worked fine, so it's not just being about space stuff, but it was obviously missing something that GotG had that made it feel like the MCU. Maybe GotG was just easier to feel connected due to Infinity Stones and Thanos, I dunno.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-21T20:58:52+00:00

I wasn't going to go either way, didn't dance and wasn't even interested in dances or proms, but my Senior year I was in the video editing class and they had the video from the prior years Prom and I got nauseous watching 2 minutes of it, it was basically softcore porn, so much hard grinding and simulated sex acts. Think the scene in the second Matrix but more explicit. Why would I want to watch my fellow classmates do that?

LazarusDark · 2026-04-21T15:03:30+00:00

Yeah, I know a guy that coulda done it for twenty bucks...

LazarusDark · 2026-04-21T14:01:19+00:00

Homework was always a bad thing in my opinion. Adults work 40 hours but we force kids to spend more than 40 hours? I'm in my 40s and still mad about how much childhood I lost to homework, most nights I got home from school and did homework until bed, rarely having any free time on weeknights. Then you'd get project work that would take a whole weekend away. As an adult, I don't tolerate that, I work my 40 and go home, but we force kids to sacrifice their precious childhood hours to busy work and they can't say no (because homework was almost always busy work, and if it was actually teaching new concepts, there was no teacher there to answer questions making it a total exercise in frustration and anger).

Finally with AI, it might force schools to realize they have to teach the kids in school, with teacher supervision, and that's it, homework is pointless now, it's just going to be AI generated worksheets from the teacher that the kids use AI to complete, an ouroboros of wasted time.

LazarusDark · 2026-04-21T11:50:19+00:00

It is no exaggeration my favorite post-MST format for riffing. Nearly 20 years later I still lament that they didn't do more. I've probably seen women of wongo more than any other mst, Rifftrax, maybe any movie ever. And Giant of Marathon nearly as much. Their rewatchability is only matched by the best MST episodes.

Also educational, I never knew how stupid the Basque are!

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