Xavier Onassiss

Urban Legends of the Fall of the  Roman Empire Records Strikes Back to the Once and Future King of the Hills Have Eyes Wide Shutter Island of Dr. Moreau

Waiting for Gal Gadot.

Aren't we all?

In retrospect I think our politics would have been better had Nixon gone to prison and all of his misdeeds fully exposed to public scrutiny. It might have had a stronger deterrent effect upon subsequent administrations(including this one).  It annoys me to no end that the media treats impeachment as the end of the disciplinary process for presidents.  News flash: if a president commits "high crimes and misdemeanors", there's a very strong chance that some of those high crimes are also serious felonies.  It's not only "okay" for presidents, once removed or out of office, to be prosecuted, it's okay for them to be incarcerated too.  It sends the message that no one is above the law in our country.  

This is why we have laws.

This is corrosive effect of having a class of citizens who are above the law.

And this is something everyone should have seen coming decades ago.

Now it's probably too late to change course.

Covered CA plans released their rates yesterday assuming this would happen. It is most heavily impacting people who do not qualify for subsidies, especially in the he silver tier. Covered CA set up a work around to it ncrease subsidies by creating a higher cost plan. People who do not qualify for a subsidy will have more cost effective options outside of the exchange.

 

It will effect about 20% of enrollees. Their rates will go up about 16% unless they buy outside of the exchange.

I actually thought it would be worse than this.

This is to be expected, given their position. I mean, I don't expect much out of politicians and pundits on either side, but if you're on the pro-side of something, you should have some basic knowledge about what you're supporting.

Regardless of how much a politician knows or doesn't know, as long as they keep voting "correctly", those big fat checks just keep coming in.

I think that the opposite of "speak softly and carry a big stick" is "Yell like hell and wave a twig ".

More like "Tell the entire world 'I got nothing'."

Facebook is forever, and I'm a public servant. No thank you

Understood.

Actually everyone who uses FB should take care on some level. About a year and a half ago I "scrubbed" my FB feed of all references to my primary employer (the one on my profile is my own company) because of their draconian social media policies. Actually, I'm not sure they have a "policy" in any real sense; they tend to arbitrarily discipline employees for online activities, regardless of whether they're on their own time, using a private account, not speaking for the company in any way shape or form... you get the idea. Legally it's indefensible, but rank and file employees simply can't afford to take a billion-dollar company to court.

So... no talking about work online for me. Everything else is fair game, including politics.

 

 

Makes me glad I have nothing to do with Facebook and Twitter.

 

Dean Shomshak

I'm not 100% sure that's a good thing. Maybe what we need is more real, reasonable people on Facebook (twitter can fall in a hole and die) to counter all the BS and misinformation. The Reality Based Community needs all the help it can get. Sometimes it's not easy, and sometimes it seems pointless, but these days it's more important than ever to keep control of the narrative.

From the "Name for a new campaign" thread over in Star Hero; I realized one of my suggestions probably belongs here instead:

Space Bunnies and Edgar Rice Burroughs!

StarJammerFinder! uh, no... I mean...

SpellFinderJammer, well, no... that's not right either.

I've got it... Space Bunnies and Edgar Rice Burroughs!!!

AHEM.

 

On a more serious note...

Wizards and Wormholes.

Tripping the Astral Deeps

Per Arcanum Ad Astra (Through Magic, to the Stars)

 

Something I noticed quite a bit with alternate Dimension Travel lately, is that the alternate Dimensions is consdiered highly Psionically active:

Warp in Warhammer 40k. Hyperspace in Sword of the Stars. Jumpdrives in Stellaris. Babylon 5 Jumpspace.

I don't recall exactly when or where, but I think Traveller might have hinted at a link between teleportation phenomena and jump space once or twice.

Funny how all these people with nothing to hide still close the stall when they're taking a dump.

My first suggestion would be to ease off on the loyalty and obedience complications, probably for both branches. Yes, military personnel ARE trained to follow orders, but what you've got seems extreme to me. I would probably replace all the complications with Subject to Orders, 20 points. (6e, Vol 1, page 428)

 

Also, your skill packages, to me, look far in excess of what I'd expect to be common to all personnel. Are these package deals supposed to represent the basic starting point for all enlisted personnel? If so, they represent a VERY different type of military than what I'm familiar with. Based on my trip through US Navy boot camp, my version of the basic sailor starting package would look more like this:

 

WF: Small Arms; 2 pts

KS: Navy History; 2 pts

PS: Damage Control & Firefighting; 2 pts

Social Complication: Subject to Orders; -20 pts

Total Cost: -14 points.

 

If that seems too little to you, keep in mind that I mean it to be something which is 1) common to ALL Navy personnel, and therefore 2) representative of boot camp training only, excluding anything the sailor would learn at "A" School or afterward. In my case, I had an additional year and a half of training before I got to my ship. Six months of that was basic electronics technician training, very similar to what non-nuclear ETs would get, and the remaining year was broken down into six months each of classroom and hands-on training. None of that training would be given to, say, an Aviation Ordnanceman . . . and likewise, I received no training in explosives handling or any kind of weapon system maintenance.

 

The TL; DR version of all that is that IMO, such hefty skill packages should be rating-specific, not service-wide.

As mrinku noted above, some sort of Vac Suit skill should be taught to all recruits.

I would also include some training in Zero-G Operations. (Environmental Movement?) All Spacers/Astronauts need to be familiar with this.

And depending on the technology level in the service, Spin-G Operations as well. Rotating habitat modules on spacecraft for simulated gravity can cause illness and disorientation; training and acclimation allows crews to tolerate higher RPMs at which smaller habs must rotate to achieve useful G-levels.

But if your fleet has artificial gravity, just show everyone the safety videos and teach them to strap themselves down.

Am I supposed to be surprised that the latest version of the GOP's "kill all the poor people" bill was announced non-viable and quietly aborted on a Friday afternoon?

Political theater is so predictable.

A ship's crewman will have at least some damage control training (mechanics aboard ship, for repairs and damage mitigation) as well as familiarity (both B/R and use) with multiple useful systems, like communications ship-to-ship, ship-to-surface, and interstellar; electronics tech; environmental systems tech; ship fire control/ target acquisition systems, etc., and other analogs to water-vessel roles or harbor-support roles. Frankly, I'd expect a different INT minimum as well.

 

"Starcrew" might be the non-gender non-species noun for "sailor".

I just use the tried and true "astronaut."

Haven't watched it, probably won't.

The reviews I've seen so far are mixed, at best.

Does anyone else remember the aliens from David Feintuch's Midshipman's Hope series?

To quote Douglas Adams, "Why drive yourself mad trying to keep from going mad? Just go mad now, and save your sanity for when you really need it."

Some co-workers joked about driving me insane tonight. I told them they were too late.

So they threatened to drive me sane instead. I wasn't having it. "You do that, I'll have to go find a real job!"

Speaking of going to find a real job, I have no idea what WTF he did at the White House, but Sebastian Gorka resigned today.

The survivors of Charlottesville have a few things to say about all the false equivalency between the Alt-Right and Antifa.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_fb_top

I think that actually speaks to the reason why so few SF RPGs have shown any staying power. In Fantasy, you've got a warehouse full of races, monsters and other tropes that are in public domain and players already know: dwarves, elves, dragons, magic wands, etc. But there's not so much of a "Generic SF Warehouse" that game designers can draw upon without violating copyright.

 

Dean Shomshak

To some degree, I think I'd beg to differ on this point.

Science fiction has (IMHO) enough standard alien racial tropes to get by. I'll admit not as many as many as fantasy literature, but think about this for a minute. How many times has the "cat like aliens" thing been done, and how similar were they? (A: more than I can count.) You drop a race of cat-people into your SF game, the players will know what to expect. The same goes for "wolf-like" aliens, insectoid creatures with so-called "hive minds", space amazons, amorphous blobs, beings of pure energy, evil space squids (hurray, tentacles) and you might consider androids/robots to be a playable species. Your players know what all of those are. Or at least they should.

Has anyone else noticed how many states and municipalities have made announcements in the last couple of days that they're going to remove Confederate statues?

It's like the whole country is saying Enough is enough!

Good poll. There's a similar scale with a bit more detail here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

Considering the number of books in some of those series and the complexity of the non-fictions, I've seen easier lists in college courses.

I used to feel guilty when I told players they "should check out" a few episodes of something or other. My hat's off to you sir!

Many thanks.

I forgot to include the six o'clock news as a resource.

I don't mean to say I blatantly insert current events into my RPGs, (I don't) but taking a bit of real-life politics or socio-economics here and there and using it in the background can really make a setting ring true. If you do it right, players will look at what's going on and instinctively "get it" without needing everything explained to them, because they've seen it before and they know how it works.

I'm posting a modified version of the reading list from my setting, since I've done some reading since it came out.

Stephen Baxter; the Xeelee sequence

David Brin; the Uplift novels

Wil McCarthy; The Collapsium (and sequels)

Alastair Reynolds; Revelation Space (series)

Ken MacLeod; the Fall Revolution novels, Newton's Wake

Paul McAuley; The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun

Charles Pelligrino & George Zebrowski; The Killing Star

John Scalzi; Old Man's War (and sequels)

Allen Steele; Coyote (and sequels)

Bruce Stirling; Schismatrix

Charles Stross; Singularity Sky, and Iron Sunrise

David Weber; the Honor Harrington novels

Walter Jon Williams; the Dread Empire's Fall trilogy

C.J. Cherryh; Chanur novels and Downbelow Station

Kim Stanley Robinson: Mars trilogy

Dani and Eytan Kollin; The Unincorporated Man series

Larry Niven; Known Space novels and stories

Non-fiction:

Martin Beech; Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds

Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart; Evolving the Alien

David Darling, PhD; The Extra-Terrestrial Encyclopedia

James Kaler; Extreme Stars

John S. Lewis; Worlds Without End

Eugene Mallove & Gregory Matloff; The Starflight Handbook

Gerard K. O'Neill; The High Frontier

Robert Young Pelton; The World's Most Dangerous Places

Marshall T. Savage; The Millennial Project

Peter Ward & Don Brownlee; Rare Earth*

Nicholas Johnson; Big Dead Place

Jerry Linenger; Off the Planet

Television:

Babylon 5

Firefly

Battlestar Galactica (reboot)

The Expanse

Movies:

I'm thinking... oh yeah, The Europa Report.

On the web:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.php

http://www.orionsarm.com/

http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/BigIdeas/index.html 

http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm

*Yes, I've heard all the BS about "creationism" in this book. And no, there quite simply isn't any. Don't start with me again because I'm not having it.

Cats don't bark.