01-11-2019, 08:08 AM | #71 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
One PC, Alice Talbot, moved to Houston two years ago to attend Rice Unicersity, where she's a graduate student in anthropology. Alice was born in 1994 and grew up in a fairly secular, if New Age-y and 'progressive' household in San Francisco. She attended UC Berkely until the end of 2016 and while well read and brilliant, she would not have extensive life-experience, as a shy, sheltered college kid who's read a lot more books than she's had wild nights.
Alice is an only child. Her mother is a kindergarten teacher at some exclusive child-care facility with terribly newfangled pedagogic theories and has a PhD either in education or devopmental psychology. Her father is an actuary who believes very strongly in leaving the messy complicated business of child-rearing to his wife, who is an accredited expert. His hugs always felt like he was vaguely uncomfortable that there was no way to explicitly limit liability for one who was, after all, not responsible for those matters of the joint household not neatly reducible to mathematical formulae. Whether by nature or nurture, Alice is shy, reserved, private and somewhat mousy. She claims to be a lesbian, but in truth has not seriously dated anyone, male or female, since moving to Houston. It might even be that she has not been on a single date since her move, which is not all that surprising, as she's seldom the most attractive person in any group of three or more. Nor is she outgoing and apart from visiting the Penemue and joining a Vovinam dojo/gym at the suggestion of Mr. Alexandre, Alice has not made any deliberate attempts to socialize or make new friends. What wil Alice have noticed about her new home that surprises her? Living in the Rice Graduate Apartments, does she get any neighbours with ideas about Southern hospitality or are the other grad students there as likely to ignore her as she is to forget their existence? Do strangers strike up conversations in university buildings, book stores, cafes or libraries, not in order to chat up a college-age female with all her limbs and no obvious deformities, but actually to be friendly, invite her to church or find out about her life? Basically, what's it like to live in Houston if you grew up in California?
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01-11-2019, 08:44 AM | #72 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Shoreline, WA (north of Seattle)
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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Did you consider the Everglades? As regards what position he'd play on a football team... unless your players are big into American football, just make him a linebacker. Or he could be a bit of an iconoclast and play baseball. Maybe he had a shot at the minor leagues but hurt his pitching arm in a boating accident just before the scout showed up, etc... actually, if he was looking at becoming a SEAL early in high school, he might have focused on stuff like cross-country running and swim team instead of football. Or tried to go multi-sport as much as possible. Did his parents go through college? If not, and if they made their own fortunes their own way, they might consider college unnecessary or even undesirable, depending on the college. Maybe Dad got drafted for 'nam, found out he was good at it, and served in the brown water navy. Back in the States, he starts up a business as an outfitter and guide for wealthy sportsmen, ends up selling fast bass boats and deep sea fishing rigs on the side. Smart, canny, not particularly book-learned, and with a bit of contempt for fancy-schmancy college folks with their expensive, useless degrees. It's Uncle Sam. Uncle Tom is completely different. One thing I forgot to mention: Florida State has a satellite campus in the Republic of Panama. I'd be surprised if other american universities didn't have similar throughout the Caribbean and Central America. |
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01-11-2019, 09:46 AM | #73 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
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Christianity (in Texas, mainly flavors of Baptist in the Anglo population) seems to be integrated into daily life in a way that's much less common in California, though not unknown.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-11-2019, 11:52 AM | #74 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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01-11-2019, 01:19 PM | #75 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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01-11-2019, 01:24 PM | #76 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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01-11-2019, 01:38 PM | #77 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
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This enables people who aren't actually locals* to survive. The first day was about 60-65° F. It's colder 'today', just over 50° F in the morning, rising to about 60° F in early afternoon. I expect that summers on the Gulf Coast will be pretty hard to survive for the PCs who aren't locals. Caribbean might be hot, but will tend to have more fresh breezes, less humidity and overall nicer weather. Or so I'm led to believe. My personal experience is that New York is a hell furnace in summers and Washington DC is somehow even worse. 100+°F and 100% humidity was my first experience of DC. *And who mostly have Temperature Tolerance.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! |
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01-11-2019, 01:55 PM | #78 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-11-2019, 03:27 PM | #79 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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Briefly, but one PC has a family member there and one future adventure might be set there, so I decided I wanted to feature another part of Florida through Bo Johnson's roots. Quote:
I use every opportunity to instruct, however, if only to make watching the Super Bowl more interesting for them. I imagine that Bo did pretty much every adrenaline-charged sport available in a beach town. Football just happened to be the one where a scholarship for exceptional performance was most realistic in the area he's from. Or so I assumed. Quote:
Both want their smart, if headstrong and reckless, son to achieve more in life than they have. The fact that Bo could probably have gotten at least a partial scholarship, maybe even a full ride, to a good college if he'd elected to apply himself exclusively to that in his senior year, probably rankles a bit with his father. Even if most people who go to even the best football schools never play in the NFL, going to Florida, Vanderbilt, LSU or UGA on a football scholarship and coming out with an engineering or business degree or something, let alone a law degree afterwards, means a lifetime of connections and a very good head start to a nice career. Sound cliched and as if an alien were trying to mimic you 'Hoo-man, Southern Hoo-man, Floridan species', or something that could ring true for an actual family in the Florida panhandle? Quote:
Granted, I did receive a work call just as I was writing this and I was working on several emails, but still, that's not a typo, that's a pretty major mental error. Quote:
I'm still going to need several academic consultants, sources, advisers, briefing officers and mission specialists for every adventure, which means that I need a steady supply of people affiliated with universities that have influence in the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! |
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01-11-2019, 03:28 PM | #80 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Houston as it Appears to West Coast Folks?
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The places in the US I have visited are Boston and Portland. Those have quite acceptable climates, in winter.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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