Netzilla

In a pulp genre rockets-and-ray guns campaign, the PCs' ship arrives at the homeworld of one of the party characters. In the finest nonsensical pulp tradition, individuals of that race look like collections of organs floating in a fluid-filled jar, even in their native environment.
 
One of the humans (Jake, the former rum-runner driver/pilot, a relatively coarse individual) addresses one of the natives: "Hey, Testicle Face, where can a guy find a card game here?"
 
Again in the finest nonsensical pulp traditions, the natives speak English with odd lapses. The addressed native says to a companion: "What is 'testicle'?"
 
"It is an organ, a gonad. It is a sensitive and delicate organ."
 
"Ah! He is using an endearment and announcing affection!"

I forgot this one from a few weeks ago. Historical fantasy game, set in the "real" Europe of 1001 AD. The PCs have been summoned to meet with Pope Sylvester II aka Gerbert of Aurilac, who in real life was also one of Europe's leading scholars and mathematicians of his day. (Granted not a ton of competition for that title in 1001...) They find the Pope has constructed a giant room-sized abacus, with His Holiness up in the choir loft directing monks who are pushing large disks around like a giant game of shuffleboard which is apparently a thing Gerbert actually did. So I'm describing this to the players - mainly just because I thought it made for a cool visual and gives a sense for the guy's character - and I offhandedly remark that I have no idea why a giant abacus would be better at solving mathematical problems that a regular-sized one, when one player explains:
 
"Well you see, Moore's Law tells us that the maximum size of abacus stones doubles every 5 years..."

Star Wars game, referring to our captain:
"She's sticking with her core competencies: hurting people and breaking things.'
"Don't forget threatening to hurt people and break things."
"What about her piloting?"
"That would also fall under threatening to hurt people and break things..."

The start to the Northlands campaign (basically, all characters are young members of the Viking Jarl's household, starting out eager to prove their worth). We are summoned before the Jarl, and assigned the task of watching over his three young daughters as they go out this early Spring day to pick wildflowers for the festival. The daughters range in age from about 9 or 10 to 16. There is an almost apologetic "I know this isn't exactly the assignment a young, eager Viking is hoping for, but there's no one to bash and pillage at the moment" aspect to the speech.
 
When we note that our four PC's consist of a young Elven druid (who's pretty OK with going out to pick wildflowers), a 17 year old warrior (who's OK with it since nothing better's out there) and two...sixteen year old twin sisters, one of whom is likely hard to distinguish from the Jarl's daughters.
 
Now, on the way out, we meet a band of hardy warriors headed back from a (failed) assignment to find a couple of criminals (clearly very nuanced foreshadowing of the foes we will face later in the scenario). One of whom chooses to be insulting, and mock the PC's with their "job of shepherding young girls". 16 YO female PC responds, loudly as they depart, "Of course [Warrior's Name] would think little of such a task. EVERYONE knows he doesn't like girls."

I friend of mine recently went to a Workshop about making jewelry and ordered some raw minerals home. His mother had to take them from the post office and remarked over the phone:
"That package was heavy. What was in there, lead?"
"Kinda..."

The paper behind this just came out in Nature. Really nice result. A bright nova (V1213 Centauri, IIRC) was in one of the OGLE fields, which are observed several times a week with dedicated instruments in order to catch gravitational lensing events. So they have extensive monitoring of the star over 2009-2016, and the big outburst was in the middle of that. Behavior of the nova definitely changed after the big outburst, and it did so in general agreement with overall theories of how novae work. I expect bigger scientific payoff when more analysis and calculation is done, but this is a really promising event to have observed that thoroughly. It reminds me of the very different "slow nova" system RR Telescopii, which was captured in survey plates for 40+ years prior to the outburst start in 1944.

<pet peeve mode>
 
I am just about certain that this illustration, like just about all of them you will find, give an important and drastically wrong impression.
 
There are lots of astrophysical phenomena which are powered by an accretion feeding onto a central massive object; in this case, a black hole. Accretion disk phenomena are difficult to treat, but the above picture gives the impression that the disk is thin compared to the diameter of the central massive object.
 
At the point where the matter is coming down onto the central thing, that may or may not be true. But further out, it is certain NOT the right picture.
 
The accretion disk is a big fat slab of gas, with the gas moving in orbit around the center thing, and grinding against its neighbor gas, which means the faster it goes the hotter it is (and since it moves faster the closer it is to the center, the hotter it is in the middle), and most (?) of the gas gradually makes its way into shrinking orbits and eventually joins the thing in the middle. A fraction of the gas in the periphery of the disk, though, actually moves outward.
 
This slab is fat. Many many times larger than the central object. In the immediate vicinity of the center object, the disk is pinched thinner. This naturally makes it hotter, as the disk material is grinding against more and more of its neighbors, at higher and higher speeds. And Hot equals Bright, in terms of giving off light.
 
Black holes, kind of by definition, are the most compact things in the Universe. So that fat slab of a disk has to pinch down by a very large factor in the center for the material to feed onto the black hole. And, that only happens in space a few times the black hole's size.
 
The traffic problem is ferocious, and most of the time, some stuff has the spectacular crash with something else that's also trying to cut in line, and pieces go flying. And the only way they can go and keep flying is if they go straight out the pole axis (both "up" and "down" out of it). (Lots of pieces don't go that way; those just rejoin the general spiral-in flow once they've bounced around off of everyone else in the vicinity.) The rest just makes for a nastier hotter traffic snarl in the center, as every car in the Los Angeles Basin tries to swirl down the open manhole in the middle of the intersection of Broadway and 1st Street in the middle of L.A. itself.
 
THE BLACK HOLE IS TINY COMPARED TO THE THICKNESS OF THE DISK. All the pretty pictures of this skimpy disk like an old vinyl LP around the midline of a bowling ball is VERY WRONG.
 
The black hole is a single fleck of black pepper in the middle of a big round fountain a foot deep with pancake batter. If you aren't looking direct down the throat of one of the polar axes, you have NO HOPE AT ALL of having a sightline to the black hole. All you see is either the edge of the disk (if you are kind of in the plane of the disk), or a MOFO INSANELY HOT BRIGHT ZIT right in the middle of the disk, maybe sitting in a dimple but it's hard to see that for sure. And if there has been a cosmic crunchola collision very recently, you may also see the insanely hot blast fragments of the incinerated guts of the sumbeech who tried cutting into line feeding the on-ramp, and those blast fragments have been reduced to fully ionized ten-million-degree plasma and are being expelled at very healthy fraction of lightspeed.
 
But this image of the Big Looming All-Consuming Black Orb looming over the paper-thin sheet of stuff feeding into it ... No. WrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongWRONG!
 
</pet peeve mode>
 
Grumble.

Dear customer support representative,

If you send a trouble ticket to programming, and we send back to you asking a clarifying question, please answer the question.  If you have a theory about what might be going wrong, that's fine, so long as you provide us with an answer to our question.  If you don't even acknowledge the question at all, guess what, we'll send it back to you and ask the question again.  

When we ask you the question for a second time, don't start questioning why we're asking for clarifying information.  Especially don't do this while making claims about how the system operates that are factually wrong.  When you do that, we'll end up sending the TT back to you gain, explaining what you got wrong and why we need the information that we asked for.  Also, we'll ask the question again because you still haven't answered it.

Once we've asked you for this information for a third time, don't go off on some condescending rant about your theory and claim that we don't know what we're talking about and refuse to answer the question.  You especially shouldn't do that to the senior programmer in charge of the project who's been working on it 5 times longer than you've been employed at the company and has written probably 90% of its code.  At that point, we have to get your supervisor involved so we can finally get the information we need.  That will then allow us to determine what is actually going on and hey, maybe your theory was right and we now have confirmation of it.  Of course, in this case, your theory was wrong and, when we did get our question answered, we were able to quickly determine the real cause of the problem and handle it.

If you had simply answered the question when we first asked it, we could have arrived at this resolution last week, and the customer (and I) would be far less annoyed.

Mankind has sent robot invaders to five celestial bodies so far:
 

Sounds like a champions campaign origin waiting to happen...

You've been busy this week. Take a few minutes to grieve my friend.

It just hit me... Donald Trump's behavior toward his opponents has been the political equivalent of an Internet troll. Making harsh accusations often not supported by fact, then acting offended by and lashing out at anyone who calls him on it; or proclaiming them a joke after the fact, and scorning people who didn't "get it."

Indeed, the definition seems circular: "All Precursors become peaceful because if they do not, they are not true Precursors."
 
But whatever. I grant you SF writers have done this enough times for it to be considered one of the standard tropes. Just not the inevitable, universal one. And the Aldar still make an interesting commentary on the trope and the trope's underlying assumptions: that "Wisdom/Advancement = Peaceful" and "Wisdom/Advancement = Weakness."
 
Both the Precursors who destroy themselves and the Precursors who are destroyed through pacifism give an element of tragedy to a setting. A third common option seems to be the Precursors who transcend or in some way withdraw from the setting, more or less voluntarily. Such Precursors give a sense of mystery rather than tragedy. Or like the Aldar, no one really knows what happened except they are gone.
 
Dean Shomshak

Today would have been Mom's 76th birthday. I celebrated by eating a rare steak and a rich dessert (that I shouldn't have), and tipping the server $20 on a $25 order.
 
The day's actually been pretty good. I'm almost done with sorting through Mom's stuff, I dropped off her cable box to the company, and called up her telephone company to cancel service. The cable box owes the estate $11, which they'll send as a check, and the phone company will send a final bill to me (which will be probably 10x that, knowing the phone company). I haven't had to deal with any relatives today, so that's a bonus.
 
I've mentioned before that Mom used to feed the animals around her house, including a family of crows. I hadn't seen any of them for the last couple of days, until today. One of the crows was keeping a lookout in a tree across the street, and as I went out to check her mailbox, I heard a call from it that I always associated with when I'd feed them, or when I'd put the trash out during previous visits. On the way back from the mailbox, two other crows arrived, and all were visible on the lawn watching me, and keeping an eye on her house. we looked at each other (at a distance), and then they all quietly took flight. I have no doubt that they know she isn't there, and I almost took it to be paying respects.

A little over an hour ago, I received a call from the humane society in Mom's town--it seems that Mom's med-tech managed to sneak them in to rescue the cat. They've promised to try to find him a good, quiet home, and will have him up on their adoption page soon. It's probably some of the best news that I've heard all day.
 
Work normally gives 3 days for bereavement, but it takes me pretty much a whole day to fly up and a whole day to fly back. They're going to let me burn a few vacation days on short notice to pad out the trip.
 
Thank you all for your condolences and prayers, it is deeply appreciated.

xkcd actually dealt with that argument. It is not really one:

https://xkcd.com/1232/
 
It is realy just an argument from people who have no good argument against space exploration, and try to bring out a dead-beat argument.
Once you realise it is a dead-beat argument, all you will hear is a surrender by the other party.
 
Global extinction by planetary event is still a likely possibility. And might be a core driving factor in conflicts.
People being actually raised with a example for "the pale blue dot" in thier nightsky might have tremedous social effect once they return home. Same way most other "studying abroad" has positive effect on leaders right now.
I asume colonising another planet would either accelerate "solving all problems" or even make it possible in the first palce.
 
Same way Urbino once helped fan the flames of Renaisance.

While I'm not a Hillary Supporter, here are Snopes articles on those pictures
 
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
 
http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-blackface-photo/ 

The thing that makes me sigh is, even if you debunk a couple dozen of these bogus allegations, it doesn't seem to matter. People hold on to this caricature of HRC as this lying, corrupt, greedy conniving Lady Macbeth, not from objective in depth research and observation, but as some tribal article of faith.

"It's okay to elect Trump 'cuz he probably won't get away with half the stuff he'd like to do."

Have you done your due diligence on all candidates running? Trump has talked about bringing back torture, banning Muslims, being blase about Russian aggression, deporting 11 million people in less than 2 years, changing libel laws to make it easier to sue the media, and many many other "out there" policy proposals. That's not hyperbole. Those are his stated positions.
There's ample evidence that he's a malignant narcissist, on top of all that. Several historians have described him as the least qualified major party candidate for president in the history of the country. But, ho hum, a pox on both their houses, not a dimes worth of difference, etc.
To quote Thomas A Beckett, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider the possibility that you are mistaken."

This was an interesting perspective, I thought:
 

You remember 4, 8, and 12 years ago a candidate going so far beyond the pale that their own party disavowed their statements? You remember former Presidents from the candidate's own party refusing to endorse him?  You remember a candidate making racist, bigoted, and mysogynist comments and statements multiple times and doubling down on them when challenged?  
 
What I remember is growing up in a Jewish household and learning about the Holocaust...and repeating each time "never again."  That didn't mean or insinuate that we should look for Hitler himself to arise again and oppose him -- it meant that we should learn from the past and recognize the signs of a demagogue and a tyrant.  The signs of fascism, bigotry and hatred.  And oppose them. 

Let me explain: "America" is the most awesomest scripted drama television show ever created for the Canadian market. (The producers also export it to Europe, Africa and Asia, where it does amazingly well, considering the language barriers.)
 
To support this show, entrepeneurs have built "Americaland" theme parks with duty free shopping at all major Canadian border crossings,further monetising this entertainment experience, which soon spread to newspapers, magazines, comic books, and even the mass book market. 
 
However, the initial "slice of life" broadcasting, such as Leave it to Beaver, The Nightly News, televised high school football (What? I mean, seriously?) and Cal Worthington used car commercials began to pall in, I want to say, the 1960s, and the producers moved on to an "event" format, with "Presidential elections" the fall after the Olympics --I think? Every four years, anyway. 
 
"Presidential elections" featured life-and-death struggles between larger-than-life characters running for "President of the United States," or, possibly, "King of the World." (The writers often blurred the distinction.) As with the Olympics, their popularity soon overwhelmed the original, occasional-event format, and events were spread into the previous year. An alternative, rival concept, the "Off year election," was also successful, because while the stakes were smaller, the personalities were even more outrageous. For example, the comic geniusses who invented "Tip O'Neill" and "Newt Gingrich" got the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example. I think? I don't pay much attention to that stuff. Anyway, they should have. 
 
Eventually, however, the producers got greedy, and began to try the madcap, cast-of-thousands format of "Off year elections" with the high stakes and larger-than-life personalities of "Presidential elections." The critics are, understandably, divided about this. Some see it as the culmination of two generations of first-class entertainment, and look forward to a sequel, perhaps a remake of The Day AFter, or Terminator. Others think that increasing inputs will just lead to declining returns, and that America will soon be cancelled. 
 
We'll see! One thing is for sure, and that is that it'll make for some fun television. (Of course, for the poor, delusional crackpots who think that it is real, it's a world-historical tragedy unfolding in real time, but that's why they should be taking their meds!)

Spoilered for long-winded political rant.
 
 
 

I don't remember going through any mirrors, so how did I get to a world where the Republican candidate is the sucking up to the Russian dictator and the Democrats are holding the line?