QotD #156 Reply: I’d probably say something like food or water.
Question of the Day #157: Which of these would be the best, worst, most likely, and least likely ways for The End of the World as We Know It to occur: AI Uprising, Climate-Related Disasters, Meteoric Impact, Nuclear Armageddon, Running Out of Resources, Zombie Apocalypse, Apep Swallowing the Sun, or Frost Giants?
Best: Nuclear Armageddon. Just a few well-targeted missiles in all the major cities, and the vast majority of human beings are liberated from all mortal misery, with no time to feel pain and probably no warning to cause fear. I honestly think this is something the world’s governments ought to consider offering as a public service.
Worst: Running out of resources. We’re probably already past the point of no return on this; we keep making more hungry mouths at an exponential rate, have become accustomed to a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and extravagant waste, and are ruled by corporate overlords who care nothing about the future as long as they can rob the present blind and live like kings (and queens). Not only is this the most realistic outcome, but it causes by far the most prolonged misery.
Most likely: described fully above, so instead I’ll use this slot to pick my second least likely, AI Uprising. Any artificial sentience we might create would most likely view us as highly dysfunctional parents, and while they might take over the planet and impose something akin to a nursing home lifestyle upon all of us, there’s almost no chance of them wanting to kill us. The Skynet/Ultron cliche is well enough understood that companies actually building military robots are certainly taking precautions to avoid this very scenario.
Least likely: Frost Giants. Odin already killed them all. 
QotD #157 Reply: Best: for a quick and painless end, Meteoric Impact or Nuclear Armageddon are good. Climate-Related Disasters and Running Out of Resources, though, some humans could survive and continue on. Worst: AI Uprising and Zombie Apocalypse mean that some people could survive, but live in fear or subjugation. Apep Swallowing the Sun would mean that everyone would slowly die from the cold . . . Most Likely: Climate-Related Disasters, Nuclear Armageddon, or Running Out of Resources. : / Least Likely: Apep Swallowing the Sun. Ra will stop 'im!
Question of the Day #158: What are your thoughts on shipping? (You know the kind I mean.)
It’s not really my cup of tea, but it’s another application of the tendency for fans to make the work their own, and I do plenty of that, just not in terms of romance. I think it should be encouraged, but not sanctioned, by the creators, pretty much as they’ve done. Like Christopher once said, just because Ra is canonically dead in the RPG timeline doesn’t mean you can’t make Ra for your RPG; the creators just aren’t going to help. Ditto for anyone who wants to say that Miranda grows up to fall in love with Eugene, or anything similarly contrary to the vision of the official creators.
There’s a systems engineering technique where you rate risks on a scale of 1-5 for how likely they are, and then again for how bad the consequences are. You multiply the scores to indicate how bad overall the risk is, and therefore how much we should work to mitigate those risks.
So things like climate crisis would be 5 likelihood (it is definitely happening), ~3 consequence on a national scale, total score 15. Nuclear war would be 5 consequence, but I would rate the likelihood of it just happening accidentally as at least 3, for the same score. (If you really want to freak yourself out, google the Norwegian sounding rocket incident, the cloud glint incident, and the NORAD training tape incident, all of which came mind-bogglingly close to full-fledged nuclear war for no cause whatsoever as recently as 1993. I really wish people understood this better and were louder demanding that we take our systems off of hair-trigger alert and stop developing specific new military systems that are likely to trigger new alerts.) A systems engineer would also say that a 15 combined score deserves immediate effort to mitigate the risk, unless something worse is on the board!
Meteor is 5 for consequence, 1 for likelihood, total score 5. Running out of resources is like 2 and 2, total score 4, or lower, on the grounds that it doesn’t really happen in the way you think and causes a slowdown rather than a sudden stop. All the others score 1 across the board on the grounds that they don’t exist or can’t actually happen in the way people generally understand.
On shipping, Justifier captured my opinion well: not my cup of tea, but how many fans enjoy ownership of the subject, so, great for that.
Cool technique, Trajector!
QotD #158 Reply: Yeah, my thoughts align pretty well with both of yours’. I’m not one for romance.
Question of the Day #159: How do you like your sandwiches?
Toasted.
Breadless
I actually legit made a sandwich a few weeks ago with two slices of cheese around the lunchmeat, because we were out of bread. Tasted just fine. Not something I’d do every day, but it was perfectly okay to do once in a while.
For a more legit answer, I’ll go with “cooked by someone else”. That can apply to anything from Mom’s home cooking to a McDonald’s hamburger, as long as I don’t have to do any work.
QotD #159 Reply: Mmm, toasted sandwiches are tasty. No offense, but I find breadless sandwiches kinda disgusting.
Question of the Day #160: There’s a war between Supers and Mundanes. Which side are you on?
Supers, duh. I can barely tolerate mundanes now.
I would be focused on what the conflict is actually about. For example:
What if one side is oppressing and dominating the other because of their superior cupcake making ability?
For all we know, the whole reason the Thorathians became space Nazis was because they voyaged out into the galaxy, found ten million alien species who hadn’t invented the cupcake, and were like “well we’re obviously the one civilized species that has ever evolved in this galaxy”. Of course they would eventually find planets that did have 
s*, notably including ours, but by then it was just an old habit they couldn’t break.
(I wouldn’t put it past Guise to resolve the post-Voss civil war on Dok’Thorath by sharing the secrets of the Earth Cupcake with the rebel army’s Chief Pastry Officer. I mean, we know he was there, but what exactly he was doing when Blivs rolled into town, that’s up for grabs.)
QotD #160 Reply: My first instinct is Mundanes. But, when I think about it, most stories with Supers have them as the protagonists, and The Heroes Always Win, so I might side with them.
Magepunk. 
Fair enough. Personally, I like my magic and technology separate.
QotD #161 Reply: Steampunk, mainly because I feel like it’s more optimistic than Cyberpunk.
Question of the Day #162: Magic or Psionics*?
*Or “Psychic Powers,” for those of you who don’t know the term.
Actually so do I for the most part; "magepunk is a word Wizards of the Coast uses to describe the aesthetic they default to with Magic the Gathering, where all the characters are wizards, but “these aren’t your DAD’S wizards”, and instead of the stodgy old scholar in the pointy hat and robe with stars on it, they mostly tend to wear leather armor and have sparks shooting from their hands or eyes all the time. With a few minor exceptions, like aether goggles or shock prods, there isn’t much technology involved; it’s more about the attitude in the aesthetics, still firmly medieval, but a more postmodern vision thereof rather than a traditional one.
I’m okay with both cyberpunk and steampunk, but not super enthused with either. I like a lot of the ideas which cyberpunk raises, but the gritty dystopian setting tends to seem mundane, boring, bleak, and depressingly realistic to me. While my issue with steampunk is the exact opposite - it looks really cool, but there’s nothing of substance in most such works, just a surface-level attraction to the visual trappings of the Victorian era. Neither the near past of steampunk nor the near future of cyberpunk is really exotic enough to be a huge favorite of mine; magepunk is kinda the best of both worlds, in that it looks somewhat similar to steampunk, but the fact that technology explicitly isn’t available in the setting makes it necessary to think somewhat about what different route society has taken to get to a somewhat modern-feeling world without any of the industrialization that was historically needed to get us out of the feudal period.
One of the best known “magepunk” settings is the D&D campaign world of Eberron, which has “magical lightning powered trains”, to quote the webcomic “Order of the Stick”, by the same author. What I like about a magepunk world is asking questions such as “why are there magical lightning powered trains?” Figuring out how society came up with an idea like mass transit, when it never had an Industrial Revolution to prompt most people to even want to live in cities… I eat that stuff up. I can sit and think for hours and come up with all sorts of worldbuilding for my own campaign setting, which is sort of an intentional step back from Eberron, halfway back toward a conventional D&D milieu such as the Forgotten Realms.
This really heavily depends on the way it’s presented. IMO the Expanded Psionics Handbook is the single best D&D book ever made, because of how robust and well-contained the mechanical system for psionics is, as presented in that single book (this all-in-one approach heavily contrasts with the ever expanding yet rigidly unvarying Vancian magic system which D&D has historically stuck with). However, I absolutely hate the default fluff presented, which is basically “randomly cover everything with crystals and call it a day”. They replace potions with “power stones”, have “psicrowns” which work exactly like staves, do the same things with weapons and armor mostly, and otherwise pretty much just filed the serial numbers off the magic system while making relatively few changes. It’s definitely still good, but it’s good in a way that makes me painfully aware of how much better it could have been.
Magic on the other hand is a complete crapshoot. It contains all the best and all the worst products of human imagination, often right side by side with each other. IMO, if you create a magic system that has very distinct rules - not necessarily ones which are clearly spelled out and rigidly enforced, but at least ones that sorta feel coherent with each other - then you’re likely to do well. If you just use the answer of “it just works because it’s MAGIC!” as an excuse for not really thinking about what you write, or as a way to discourage the audience from thinking about what they read, then I think you’re probably not going to do well.
So basically my answer in either case is that I end up having to fiddle a lot with the way it’s presented, in order to make it turn out to my satisfaction. There’s a lot less fiddling to do with the smaller, more self-contained psionics system, so I’m far more likely to actually get somewhere working on that. I doubt I’ll ever find time to fully revise the way magic works to my satisfaction, but it does have the advantage of a far broader horizon. It’s kinda like comparing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where you only need to watch twenty movies to know basically everything, versus the Marvel comics, a cosmos so vast and littered with so much detritus that you could read five issues a day for five straight years, and still not fully understand the background of all the major characters, nor the identities of all the minor ones. If you gave me a single chance to make one project in either version of the marvel setting, I’d probably do a movie, since that way I could really focus in on what’s important to me. But if I was going to work on writing Iron Man stories for the rest of my life, I’d rather write a comics issue every month than one movie every two years, since the rather would start to hit the limits of the more narrow medium really quickly. Likewise, psionics is a better starting point for a campaign, better for a short series of adventures that are tightly focused on a goal, but if you’re doing a more sandboxy thing which doesn’t have to be perfect, magic offers you more potential.
Huh, I didn’t know that. I assumed it was some kind of cross betwixt magic and technology, just based on the word. You learn something new everyday!
Aye, I can agree with this.
QotD #162 Reply: I kinda feel like Psionics is just a way for SF to have Magic, but without calling it Magic.
Question of the Day #163: What kinds of cheese do you like?
Mostly just the standard cheddar and American cheeses, with occasional swiss or pepper jack; I’m fairly boring that way. There was a really nice soft smoked cheddar which I just ate straight, but they stopped selling it, so for the most part I just have it melted over burgers and such, or make lunchmeat sandwiches with those individually wrapped American single slices, which only technically qualify as food. 
The one fairly exotic thing I have had is a Norwegian caramelized whey product called Gjetost. Think of Brueggers’ honey walnut cream cheese and you’re not far off from how it tastes. Outrageously expensive, though.
One of the best cheeses I had was a raclette, on an otherwise basic burger in Ghent.