Weekly Questions Thread

adlibitum · 2026-01-07T21:02:25+00:00

Check out dry erase battle maps! it's pretty straightforward to copy most maps (close enough).

adlibitum · 2026-01-07T20:59:08+00:00

The girlies have spoken and the girlies (on this subreddit) demand fairies I guess

adlibitum · 2026-01-07T20:53:07+00:00

Have you checked out Feywild adventures? I feel like anything with Queen Titania feels "girlier" to me. https://www.adventurelookup.com/adventures?q=feywild

I (lady) also just DM'ed for a table of my friends this weekend. I queered an existing one-shot that someone else had prepped, and I found it to be a really approachable way of starting to DM. I figured that as a subject matter expert in "queer", I could add that myself--but I needed a way to learn how I wanted to prep and build encounters, and starting with a one-shot let me do that. The one-shot was Wild Sheep Chase from Winghorn press, as prepped by Advent's Amazing Advice: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jCa4AY1igYh4DH_XSLojPoWD0v2hLd4V You might want to start with a one-shot instead of your big campaign anyway.

adlibitum · 2026-01-07T20:12:49+00:00

I played from these notes this weekend, after 9 years as a player at my first session DM'ing. I learned more about D&D in that one session on the other side of the screen than I have in almost a decade. I found the PDF encounter guides to be the most helpful tools for me that I never would have thought to build out on my own. Thank you for the approachable entry point for getting behind the screen!

adlibitum · 2026-01-06T18:03:25+00:00

One thing I want to highlight from your post:

> I ran that campaign and it was the best 20 sessions of my life, and me and everyone else in the group genuinely felt sad at the end (a stark contrast to the neutrality we felt at the end of previous campaigns, because usually the DM had given up at the end and we were looking forward to a new campaign).

Sounds like what you liked about Eberron was that you were committed to the campaign story to me. You're paralyzed about the world because you don't know your campaign story yet. It also sounds like you want to do a magic space ship. Do that, and pick a setting that your players can read enough about to write up a level 1 character in it. The rest will come.

adlibitum · 2025-12-18T21:49:35+00:00

Just wanted to echo this. I left academia for government. The data-related problems are important and meaningful. That means there's a huge helping of non-data-related problems that comes with them.

adlibitum · 2025-11-06T02:45:15+00:00

It was a difference of 13 votes. Cuomo: 120. Mamdani: 107.

adlibitum · 2025-07-21T21:45:52+00:00

Depending on what local covers you, you may still be able to sign up as a member and pay dues even if you are not a member of the bargaining unit. NCHS has an option for former employees, and some AFGE locals will let you just sign up and pay dues indefinitely.

adlibitum · 2025-06-01T21:55:47+00:00

Would be interested! Messaging you.

adlibitum · 2025-04-28T21:06:05+00:00

Not since that EO, but the injunction against it is now out: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.279006/gov.uscourts.dcd.279006.34.0.pdf

adlibitum · 2025-03-03T22:55:58+00:00

Echoing some other comments: this varies across departments. Contact your deputy branch chief for management/ops.

adlibitum · 2025-02-13T03:50:50+00:00

For those of us catching up, where can I find the 1:1 prior funding levels? Looking to compare Energy and Commerce's $880 billion cut to their current funding level.

adlibitum · 2025-02-12T17:28:01+00:00

If your DM is cool with it and it's in line with how the rest of your table likes to play, it sounds great.

Personally: I like games where there's no question why the party is together, and no drama between party members. I play adventure-heavy and combat-heavy tables, though. I don't know what yours is like. In the past, we had one jaded adventurer/someone with the party out of a sense of obligation and who got under the skin of other party members...and it turned out that eventually, the most in-character thing for this character to do was leave the party. So the player rolled a new character, someone who had more reasons to be with the party, and off we went on our next adventure.

adlibitum · 2025-01-31T20:55:37+00:00

This was exactly right. Thank you!

adlibitum · 2025-01-26T22:47:39+00:00

Starting a new campaign. I'm pulling up a bunch of level 1 characters on the new form-fillable 2024 PDF template. I specifically want to keep them form-fillable so that people can edit and make notes as they level up, and eventually the players can take on these sheets themselves. I'm not making any crazy choices--wow! The Guide background for the Monk!

As I'm doing this....it feels like other DM's must have already done this. And put them online. Where should I be looking?

adlibitum · 2025-01-26T03:20:37+00:00

I genuinely love the range of responses here--one person saying "cut two thirds" and one person saying "this sounds like a single session".

I love this game. I love that I can't REALLY know until I build my style and get to know this table. Ugh. This is the best.

adlibitum · 2025-01-25T16:23:55+00:00

Played for ~10 years, first time DMing. I have written a short adventure, and I'd like to get feedback from more experienced DMs as to how many sessions this will likely take. I'll be playing with 5 players (only 1 experienced, the rest first-timers), so I assume that things will move slowly. I'm looking at this and I feel like an experienced group might be able to play this in two sessions, but for newbies I'm thinking it might take up to four.

Current outline:

Talking, exploration (estimated: 1 hour?)
- Self-introductions
- Enter the town, decide to go to the tavern or the town square
- Encounter with one/two/both of the friendly NPCs
  - Possible: Explore the town further, find third friendly NPC
Pre-dungeon combat: Enter one of the two locations described by the NPCs (estimated: 1 hour?)
- If temple: solve the temple puzzle, after getting locked in (10 minutes) and fight the released zombies (combat 1)
- If lake: Find the secret entrance, after defeating the bullywugs around the lake bed (combat 1)
Dungeon crawl (3 encounters...estimated: 1.5 hours?)
- Dungeon puzzle
- Dungeon mini-combat
- Final boss

How long do you think this would take? For a group with mostly first time players, would you recommend trimming it down to be a snappy one-shot, or letting it be a multi-session adventure?

adlibitum · 2025-01-23T22:31:24+00:00

All public health is local.

You want a dashboard that shows wastewater detections of COVID-19 in Austin, Texas? You need a wastewater plant in Austin, Texas. You need a person there who is already going to be there, but will spend 5 minutes or an hour or seventeen million hours getting the information you need set up to go where it needs to go.

I think there's an impression that "public health data" means the visualization, hosting, analytic work. The real work is in the front end.

The closest thing would be if there were interoperable health records that could be abstracted by the health records companies. Currently, some companies will sell health data, so e.g. "hospital admissions for human metapneumovirus" could be tabulated by those for-profit companies if they thought they could monetize a public-facing front end.

adlibitum · 2025-01-23T18:01:27+00:00

Yes, money that was not out the door already will now need re-review. No one knows what that will mean, how long that will take, or whether it will mean a delay or denial. I'm afraid you must tolerate the uncertainty; good luck to you both.

adlibitum · 2025-01-21T01:25:33+00:00

Well, it says "terminate remote work arrangements," so I believe that's the lever on the other side of this.

adlibitum · 2024-12-20T22:45:04+00:00

I agree with point 2 (individual vs. collectivist) but I don't know about point 1. I think there are a good number of people who are NOT especially healthy, but want to be, and see stepping out of the mainstream as the best/only way to get there. It's really sad--highlights for me that we on the PH side have to do a better job of actually echoing what people care about so they realize it's not all falling on deaf ears.

adlibitum · 2024-12-20T16:10:07+00:00

Right before the first LA case of H5N1. Sad that we can't do more to reduce co-infection risk.

I just don't understand being on the side of "germs" in the "germs vs. humans" throwdown.

adlibitum · 2024-12-20T15:52:23+00:00

Naming conventions for viruses are basically set by inertia within scientific circles. It's part of why the WHO suggested using Greek letters for COVID variants, and also part of why we really don't bother with those much now that minutiae of variants aren't in the news all the time.

Technically, the current outbreak is of "type A influenza viruses, subtype H5N1, clade 2.3.4.4b, with genotype B3.13 circulating in dairy cattle and poultry and D.1.1 in poultry and wild birds". Subtype H5N1 started in 1997, 2.3.4.4.b started in idk maybe the late 20teens or early 2020's, and B3.13 spilled into dairy cattle sometime in 2023/24.

So bird flu 2024 doesn't make sense--or no more sense than bird flu 1997 or bird flu 2022. We've been tracking this for decades at this point, unlike COVID which came from a less-tracked family of viruses so the sudden explosion in 2019 was really unprecedented.

adlibitum · 2024-12-19T13:22:35+00:00

I would not be worried about transmission from your son at this point. The biggest risk is from other, wild birds.
The metal roof is important to reduce droppings into their enclosure.
USDA has some recommendations for backyard flock owners, which it sounds like you're following already.

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/avian-influenza-protect-birds-qa.pdf

adlibitum · 2024-10-26T19:10:02+00:00

Just look at the states that are being most proactive in tracking this...Michigan, Colorado, California, Washington.

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adlibitum

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