I’m running a PF2 campaign where the party are outlaws running around Alkenstar, robbing banks and seeking vengeance.

Every day begins with some newspaper headlines. One will be about them if they did something substantial or noticeable, but I have a ton of fluff ready to insert. Some is story related foreshadowing, some is just stuff like “Prices of apples are up 2% after news of heavy rain in Geb’s south has washed away too many skeleton fruit pickers”

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM (AWS authentication system) is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide to fail because the internal authentication is broken.

I can’t login to the AWS console to check on my stuff in the European zone, because the login goes through IAM in us-east-1 where all the authentication does.

It really highlights just how centralized so much of the internet is on like three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google)

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide (even outside of AWS’ us-east-1 location) which rely on IAM in us-east-1 to also fail. I’m having trouble even logging into the AWS console to check on my European servers.

Edit: IAM is the main authentication method. So AWS may still be up and running fine in other locations around the world; but if you can’t connect to them because AWS’ internal authentication is all fucked up…

Oof, you’re probably as out of luck in Drenthe as I am in Nijmegen. In Amsterdam I can recommend La Condesa and Tacoteca as pretty good. I’ve heard rumors of places in Den Hague but I haven’t gotten there yet.

The only places without a housing crisis at the moment are places where nobody wants to live.

There is, nationwide.

But also everywhere else in Europe, and everywhere in the US that I would be willing to live. What can you do eh?

Good food does exist, it just takes some time and effort to find out where to go and where should be blacklisted. And there’s like three good Mexican restaurants in the whole country.

Haha sorry, I managed to submit that comment waaay too early.

Moved from the US to the Netherlands in 2023 and regret nothing. The opportunity came in the form of the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty. It makes it ridiculously easy for Americans to move to the Netherlands, if you are self employed. It worked for me to move, and when my business went sideways due to my main client screwing me over, I got a normal Dutch job as a highly-skilled migrant.

Downsides:

• Pay is decidedly lower compared to American salaries (but pretty good compared to Dutch standards)
• Spicy food is rare
• Korean food is also pretty rare
• Good Mexican food is borderline nonexistent. My coworkers saw nothing wrong with “cheese flavored yogurt” being applied to nacho chips instead of actual cheese. I once tried a local restaurant’s nachos and got a plate of chips covered in a really sweet ketchup.
• While everybody speaks English pretty well, you WILL want to learn basic Dutch to better understand important legal or medical meetings. But you should be learning the native language anyway, no matter where you go.

Benefits:

• Everything I need is within walking or a short bicycle distance
• Nobody is going to shoot me here
• I can get medical treatment without going bankrupt
• Health insurance doesn’t cost as much as rent
• My asthma inhaler doesn’t cost 1/4th of my rent
• High fructose corn syrup is rarely found here (it gives me migraines)
• The cities are more attractive (more appealing architecture)
• The roads are damned near immaculate. I don’t drive here because I don’t need to, but on the rare occasion I’m in a car it’s impossible to not notice how good the roads are. I have crossed the country from Schiphol to Nijmegen and didn’t see a single pothole anywhere, in roughly two hours on the road. Seriously, they could spend 10 or 20% less on the roads and still have what would be the best roads anywhere in N.America by comparison.
• The work-life balance is insanely better (I get 35 paid days off a year, starting from the moment I started working). I can tell my boss I’m sick and that’s that. If I move to a new home I get a free day off.
• Trains are much more enjoyable for traveling between cities than driving; I’ve been reading so much lately
• Dutch is a pretty accessible language if you’re a native English speaker that already understands some basics of German
• Nearly everybody speaks English better than the people I grew up with in the mid-west
• A huge amount of Europe is only a single day’s travel away
• Store workers here aren’t obviously beaten and ground into a raw bundle of nerves and depression like in the US. Of course it’s not a workers paradise by any means, but people generally seem more genuinely happy.
• So many restaurants have patios or tent covered tables to enjoy a drink or meal while staying outside to enjoy the weather when it is good
• Food from Suriname is really good, as are frikandelbroodje and kaassouffle
• Nijmegen’s Vierdaagse can be a blast, the whole old/inner city becomes a giant festival

There’s probably more benefits, but those are the highlights for me. All around though, the biggest advantage is that I can easily see a much better future for myself and my wife in the Netherlands than I can in the US.

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A small amount of cream cheese.

All of your descriptions are hardly unskilled, those take a good deal of education, practice, and in the case of plumbers legal certification that probably involves an apprenticeship. It’s absolutely a skilled profession.

In my youth I briefly worked for a temporary agency and did a bunch of odd tasks to fill in when needed. The least skilled thing I did was for a newspaper: sliding racks of newspapers from a conveyor belt onto a long table, watching this massive table vibrate the newspapers for a solid couple of minutes (to prevent pages from getting stuck together as the ink dried), then throwing in the day’s collection of laminated ad inserts into each set, and then pushing the boxes onto the next conveyor belt down the line. Training was thirty seconds of instruction.

I would call it ‘labor’ because it doesn’t need any adjectives or qualifiers. It’s just work, somebody laboring at a task.

30 euro for gigabit up/down, Netherlands

He also once thought every home would have a dedicated ISDN line.

My rule as DM is that players can freely expend their normally limited resources if it’s done for role playing or fun and doesn’t affect the story, combat, etc.

Druid wants to spend all evening as an owl in the rafters of the barn? Cool. Wizard wants to create a pocket dimension in which he can then use Wish to create the universe’s best ganja and smoke it in peace? Awesome.

Artificer wants to … wait, he wants to do WHAT with his pants? Okay fine, but we’re cutting to black for the evening. And there may be assassins in the morning now.

They’re just not the same for me, unfortunately. They have a place, but I prefer reading.

I just wanted to be able to read a book without (possibly) straining my neck :(

Playing D&D