Blackmoor Vituperative

Personally, I think we have too many punctuation symbols. Do we need commas, colons, and semicolons? Do we need three different kinds of dash? If you used a comma instead of a colon or a semicolon, or vice versa (as millions of people routinely do), would anyone be more or less confused about the meaning of the sentence?

My answer is: no, they would not; most people couldn’t tell you the proper usage of a colon vs. a semicolon — or an n-dash vs. an m-dash — if you paid them.

If you are like me (and I know I am), you buy juice mainly to mix it with alcohol. FUN FACT! Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix has 19 times as much juice as V8 Splash Berry Blend, and 8 times as much juice as Ocean Spray Cran-Blackberry.

• 95% – Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix
• 5% — V8 Splash Berry Blend
• 12% – Ocean Spray Cran-Blackberry

Et tu, Ocean Spray?

On the other hand, Mr & Mrs T Pina Colada Mix is literally just sugar water. “Natural and artificial flavors” comes after “titanium dioxide, potassium sorbate, sodium citrate” in the ingredients. Pineapple juice is not expensive (around $0.06 an ounce). Cream of coconut is not cheap, but it’s not that expensive (around $0.25 an ounce). Mr & Mrs T Pina Colada Mix costs about $0.10 an ounce.

Buying good rum or good vodka and then mixing it with sugar water is OFFENSIVE to me, on a deep and personal level.

The moral of this story is: READ THE LABEL. But if you want me to read them for you, here is what you should buy:

• Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix
• V8 Original 100% Vegetable Juice
• V8 Spicy Hot 100% Vegetable Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Kiwi Strawberry
• Juicy Juice Mango Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Strawberry Watermelon Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Apple
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Tropical
• Juicy Juice 100% Orange Tangerine Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Berry Juice
• Great Value 100% Lemon Juice
• Realemon 100% Lemon Juice
• Great Value Lime 100% Juice
• Realime 100% Lime Juice
• Libby’s 100% Pineapple Juice
• Great Value Orange 100% Juice
• Simply Orange Pulp Free Orange Juice
• Coco Lopez Real Cream of Coconut

This is your semiannual reminder that the pointless ritual known as “daylight saving time” does not make you lose or gain anything. You don’t gain or lose time. You don’t gain or lose daylight. The amount of daylight stays precisely the same.

That’s not entirely correct: we do lose something. We lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of lives.

Current version of Karelia map, for my maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t D&D game. I like the overall look, but I am bumping into limitations in Inkarnate (which is what I used to draw this). namely, there is no way to group objects into, say, “Labels”, or “Rivers”, and change the size, colour, font, etc. in a simple way. Photoshop can do that fairly easily (no great surprise), so I am thinking about doing the landmasses in Inkarnate (which is easy to do with its built-in textures and POI icons) and then doing the rivers and labels in Photoshop.

Alternately, I am playing with the idea of loading this map into Campaign Cartographer (from ProFantasy), and re-drawing it in that program. Campaign Cartographer is a much more powerful mapping program than Inkarnate, and can do everything (or nearly everything) I would like to do in Photoshop. I have owned Campaign Cartographer for literally decades, and have subscribed to their monthly “Cartographer’s Annual” since 2007, but I have never taken the dive into learning it. It has a steep learning curve.

On the other other hand, I am wondering if perhaps I have gone down a rabbit hole on this whole map thing. Maybe I should just declare it “good enough”, and move on to planning the actual game. Maybe.