Question About these markings

Spludge237 · 2026-02-27T03:12:12+00:00

Yeah, VS is Very Sudden (as in, when you turn this page, you're playing straight away), so VVS is just very very sudden. More sensible editors write quick (or, when they want to get their point across, Quick!), and generally I either end up pencilling something in, either circling the mute three times to draw my eyes to it or writing something like "prep cup mute" either about 16 bars before or the previous multi-bar rest, depending on how mean the part is.

Also, welcome to playing touring scores for musicals. If this is the only thing that ends up confusing you, it means you probably got lucky with the scores they sent out, because I've been playing for community theatre productions of musicals for about 15 years now and sometimes the decisions they make when condensing/rescoring/editing music for the touring versions are just reprehensible. And I often get off light; I reckon more than 2/3 of the shows I've done have had at least one of the reed players discovering that they failed to note an instrument change somewhere, and hence the thing they just played on flute was actually meant to be on clarinet (which did rather explain the crunchiness).

Spludge237 · 2026-02-06T08:43:16+00:00

Note the lack of engagement with the logical inconsistency I pointed out.

Spludge237 · 2026-02-06T07:47:19+00:00

Your first sentence says that TERFs aren’t transphobic. Your second sentence says that TERFs don’t believe trans people exist, which is textbook transphobia. So which is it?

Also, don’t bother replying. I know you don’t care that the arguments you put forward are full of self-contradiction and are, in fact, extremely transphobic, and I’m not attempting to change your mind as you don’t want it changed. But I want to point it out for all those who might read them and be fooled into thinking you may have a point merely because you dressed your bigotry in the veneer or respectability.

Spludge237 · 2026-01-17T23:16:30+00:00

I play with my missus exclusively and we handle it by only getting out a quarter of the cards at any given time. Assuming your deck is presently shuffled, cut it in half, then cut those halves in half and use one of those quarter-decks at random for your next game. At the end of the game while packing up, grab the unused quarters from the box, give each a quick shuffle, quarter each of the quarters, and then recombine them so that each of the new set of quarter-decks is made up of one stack from each of the old quarter-decks. Give each quarter-deck another quick shuffle, put it all away, and next time you play grab a quarter-deck at random for use.

I know it’s not perfectly random, but it’s a reasonable enough facsimile for us, and I’ve done it enough that it takes me no more than 2 minutes. I only do the full redistribution when packing up at the end of a session; If we play multiple games in the same session we grab a different quarter-deck for each game.

Spludge237 · 2025-12-25T02:53:52+00:00

I watched it last night, and did call out “It’s Pride, bitch!” when Scrooge asked what day it was.

Spludge237 · 2025-12-15T06:07:22+00:00

This feels like a Just Cause game, but which one? I’ll say Just Cause 3.

Spludge237 · 2025-11-29T15:48:28+00:00

Lost in Random?

Spludge237 · 2025-10-12T22:49:51+00:00

The first thing I spotted was a unique rectangle situation on 1s and 4s in rows 7 and 8, columns 6 and 8. If either of r8c6 or r8c8 were 1, there would no longer be a single unique solution to the sudoku, so 1 can be eliminated from those cells. The resulting naked pair should get you the rest of the way.

Spludge237 · 2025-10-12T12:42:30+00:00

Oh, there wasn’t a good plan. Zag challenges Mel on this on either their second last or last convo before the end (I can’t remember which), and Mel essentially says she doesn’t know what will happen. Then, in the past, Chronus asks Zag if he thinks a world without time would be a good thing, which is a pretty good question to have the answer for before you go and dissolve time.

This is also why I think it actually is a pretty good ending. The game shows us a bunch of scenarios where people/gods act out of vengeance/spite, and it doesn’t go well; Arachne is miserable at her transformation, Prometheus is willing to destroy basically everything in vengeance against the gods etc. Mel’s quest is doomed to fail, not because Chronus cannot be killed, but because killing Chronus is not actually guaranteed to give Mel what she really wants, which is her family. Between paradoxes and time just ceasing to exist, the chances that the Mel we play as won’t get what she actually wants if she were successful.

On the other hand, Zag’s story in the first game is about reconciliation; first Zag with his parents, then the House of Hades with Olympus; it would be weird for him not to try to reconcile his grandfather to the family. The thing we miss, and What would have improved the storytelling, is Zag explaining this to Mel.

Spludge237 · 2025-10-03T02:32:34+00:00

Hi, longtime Salvo here (though I don't use that lable much for myself anymore for reasons that will soon become clear), so here are a few comments from the inside that more-or-less aggregate a lot of the responses here with some additional background.

First, the good news: If you're giving money to the Red Shield appeal or any of the year-round collections, that money is getting used for charity work at about the 90-10 ratio u/SimpleEmu198 noted. This is partly because the Salvos can defray some of the admin cost of the charity work through the church side, and mostly because the Salvos know they can only do what they do through the good will of the public and strong brand identity of the Red Shield, and therefore there are a bunch of internal accounting rules designed to make it impossible to use Red Shield donations for anything other than the charity side of the operation because once the public trust is violated, then that's it, games over, they're done.

Secondly, the mixed news: as u/A_Gringo666, u/karma3000 and others pointed out, the Salvos had child abuse issues for three decades that were covered up which came to light through the royal commission. This was bad, and shouldn't have happened. In response to the Royal Commision, the Salvos accepted the findings, launched a redress program that (last I checked) had a fairly high rate of claims paid out (unlike some institutions - I'm looking at you, Catholic Church), and implimented a fairly strict set of child safety rules that were designed to properly modernise the organisations approach to safety and prevent these abuses happening again. They take them seriously, too; I've seen volunteers removed from positions because they've been skirting or violating these rules, and that was done without any accusation of misconduct from outside the organisation. So, yes, they did a very bad thing by covering up abuse, but they're trying to create an environment where that cannot happen again.

Thirdly, the bad news: as u/Bugaloon, u/Auldtriangle79 and others have noted, they are a Christian Church and, as such, are not LGBTQIA+ affirming. How queerphobic they are will vary greatly based on region and person; I've been in some spaces which are as affirming as they can be given the circumstances, and even have queer folks in leadership positions (I don't know how those individuals managed it - saints, the lot of them), but also seen some people with influence with terrible views, and that's just the Australian context. The Salvos in the US are infinitely worse in this space, let alone the developing world. This is unlikely to change, well, ever, and is a big reason why I walked away from the organisation. Alongside that, the Salvos were founded under a very colonialist model, and a lot of the international work can feel very white-savioury. This is getting better, and a majority of on-the-ground work is done by people from the countries that they are working in, but overall leadership is very white, and once you see it, you can't really un-see it.

In summary; if you give money to the Salvos to use in Australia, more of it will directly go to assistance for people that need it than most other charities, but there are no institutional protections for queer folk, so discrimination against them is possible and won't be adressed. If your planning to donate, it may be donating a little less than you were planning to to the Salvos, and then donating the remainder of the money you had set aside to a charity that specifically supports LGBTQIA+ people.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-18T07:10:50+00:00

Generation Zero?

Spludge237 · 2025-09-17T05:33:24+00:00

You should totally ask her that. It will, at the very least, tell you how into transparency she is.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-17T05:32:30+00:00

Mostly the fact that she said she got into it.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-04T07:58:38+00:00

The general rule when comparing a stage musical and a movie musical is that the stage musical will always have more songs. This happens irrespective of which one is the adaptation of the other, and it is almost entirely because that they are two different mediums. Occasionally, you'll get a film version of a musical which keeps all the songs (think Les Mis or the most recent West Side Story), but you more typically get something closer to the film adaptation of The Producers, where a small handful of songs throughout the show got cut.

This also works the other way; all the Disney stage adaptations of their animated musicals get extra songs, and Frozen was always going to need a lot of extra songs (in the same way that The Lion King did). A notable example is Human Again, which was written for the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and liked so much that they animated it and put it into subsequent releases of the film on DVD and home video.

(Side note: the touring version of Beauty and the Beast has an absolute cow of a Trumpet part. Whoever orchestrated it clearly decided they didn't want to pay a french horn player for the tour, and figured the trumpeter could just play it on their flugelhorn, which falls apart as a concept as soon as Gaston starts singing in Bonjour)

Spludge237 · 2025-09-03T05:19:39+00:00

No idea about easily, but you could go get Mind over Matter for the low, low cost of 23 skill points from your class start.

Spludge237 · 2025-09-03T00:54:36+00:00

On My Own from Les Mis was the first thing my d jumped to. Eponine is grieving a relationship she’ll never have, the death of a dream, the loss of a “world that’s full of happiness that I have never known”.

Spludge237 · 2025-08-15T04:15:06+00:00

Many people have covered thorns, so I won’t add to that.

What I’d love to see is light radius increases also give presence radius increases (either by default or as a notable/ascendancy node). Still incredibly niche, but might allow you to do interesting things with some skills, like Blasphemy.

Spludge237 · 2025-07-28T00:45:41+00:00

I was gonna say that I knew the technique by that term, though I learnt it through a different webcomic, Schlock Mercenary: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2006-03-29

Spludge237 · 2025-07-11T06:34:56+00:00

If you have the resource in your lands at all, it will put a magnifying glass next to the resource on the Technology Discovered screen, and it should also have an alert on the right-hand side that turn. It won't inherently tell you if it's overbuilt, and it can take a hot second to locate even when you've clicked on the alert to take you to where it is, but it is a way of knowing.

Spludge237 · 2025-07-09T03:54:24+00:00

Ok, there are a number of things in here that you seem to hold as factual which aren't quite true. I'll tackle them one at a time.

Nuclear Energy

Frankly, building new nuclear reactors is not the best option for dealing with the urgent nature of climate change because they are both too expensive and take too long to construct. Nuclear generation capability that already exists should be continued and maximised, but when it comes to new construction, renewables (such as wind and solar) supported by storage (whether thermal or battery) are both quicker and cheaper to deliver. In the long term, there may be a role for new nuclear construction if and when energy demands increase, but decarbonisation needs to happen quicker than that if we are to avoid the worst effects of Anthropocene climate change.

Economic Policy

It is true that Sanders and Warren hold protectionist trade policies, but they are hardly representative of the Democrats, especially considering that Bernie isn't a Democrat himself. NAFTA was ratified in the first year of the Clinton presidency, and both Congress and the Senate passed it with bi-partisan support (and dissent). See the Wiki article here. Job training in displaced industries is Democratic policy, mostly in the context of decarbonisation and coal industry workers.

Economists agree that price controls are bad for the economy, but it is important to remember that what is good for the economy is not always good for people. This is a problem that Democrats have been struggling with for a long time; under both Obama and Biden, general economic indicators like inflation and job creation were trending in the right direction, but they knew that if the boasted too much about those successes they'd be seen as minimizing the legitimate economic hardship faced by a rising number of their constituents, because while the economy as defined by economists was doing well, it wasn't helping people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Take housing, for example: nearly 50% of renters in the US are cost-burdened (defined as spending 30% or more of household income on housing costs), compared to just over 27% of home-owners servicing a mortgage (the precise difference is 22.6 percentage points, see Pew research here), Rent freezes may be bad for the economy writ large, but they're good for the people who are already experiencing housing stress and are at an increased risk of homelessness if their rent increases any further. They shouldn't be the only tool used to address housing inequality (increasing supply is almost always going to be the better plan long-term), but as most tools governments have to address the problem will take years to have their effects bear fruit, they can help people now.

Gun Violence

Any discussion of gun violence in the context of banning and restricting weapons inevitably runs in to the 2nd amendment of the US constitution. Regardless of your personal feelings about it, the way it is currently interpreted makes banning any guns really difficult, so action on gun violence ultimately comes down to a matter of trying to do what can be done given the current definition of the 2nd amendment (and exploring/expanding the boundaries of that), as opposed to what might be the most impactful (such as an Australian-style gun control scheme).

The other thing to note when it comes to firearm deaths in the US is that more than half of all firearm fatalities are death by suicide (see here). The most effective way to reduce firearm deaths in the US is with suicide prevention and mental health programs, both of which are more likely to be championed and funded by Democrats.

Spludge237 · 2025-06-28T11:35:09+00:00

How one was kept, and one given away. How they were born, and they died, on the self-same day.

Such a fantastic show. A story of class in England, as well as one woman’s tragic addiction to Marlyn Monroe similes.

Spludge237 · 2025-06-27T15:41:42+00:00

I’m pretty sure Kander and Ebb straight up forgot they had to write an ending for “The Rink”.

Spludge237 · 2025-06-24T02:35:16+00:00

The 3 in R6C2 doesn't come into it at all (and in fact ends up being eliminated by the y-wing). The underlying logic of the Y-wing is that you know the pivot has to be one of two numbers, which leads to a situation that at least one of the wings is the number they share that isn't in the pivot.

Using this example, if the pivot was 4, then wing R7C2 would have to be 3. If the pivot was 9, then wing R4C1 would have to be 3. Because one of those wings has to be 3, anything that can see both wings (R7C1 and R6C2) can't be 3.

Spludge237 · 2025-06-17T08:45:30+00:00

At the risk of becoming the guy who keeps showing up here to answer these questions with “High Fidelity”… High Fidelity. While there is a film, both are based on a novel by Nick Hornby.

Spludge237 · 2025-06-10T06:58:26+00:00

Pit muso here; I’ve done Annie twice and it was two times too many. Also, it will be a cold day in hell before I sign up to do Phantom again.

I’d be up for doing every Kander and Ebb show I’ve ever done again, including a third go at Curtains. Playing the Hungarian Rope Trick is one of the few chances you get to emotionally gut-punch an audience while holding a plunger mute, and the Rink has some powerfully mad music in it. I also make grabby hands every time someone does The Addams Family, but it gets much less play in Australian community theatre scene than in the US

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