DShomshak

Ah, Vinnie's aria from Act III of "Bubba" Puccini's operatic masterpiece Toscaloosa! I Will never forget tyhe first time I heard Pavarotti's magnificent rendition. (Though some people say Ray Stevens' is better. I grant you, it's a tough choice.)
 
Dean Shomshak

No legal eagle here, but it occurs to me that lawsuits do not have to target actual persons, nor be brought on behalf of actual persons. Corporations have only a legal fiction of quasi-personhood, but they get sued all the time. And environmental laws have resulted in lawyers bringing suits on behalf of rivers, forests, and other natural phenomena on the grounds that human activities have damaged them. So even if undead (or nature spirits, or whatever) are not legal persons, they still might be subject to civil law and use it themselves. -Just to add another layer of complication.
 
In the litigation-prone US, at least, judges and legislators might not want to open the cans of worms implied by super-powers and nonhuman intelligences, but lawyers will probably force them to do so. If for no other reasons, lawyers with a hunger for publicity would probably try bringing test cases to see if some existing law or precedent could be contorted to fit the situation.
 
Dean Shomshak

If you want a guide to Earth's past geography, the man to consult is geologist Christopher Scotese. Even more so if you want a guide to Earth's future geography -- AFAIK he's the first to try running plate tectonics forward, though after about 50 million years the continents might follow different courses. If you want to send characters back to the Permian (c'mon, everybody does Age of Dinosaurs, stretch yourself) or forward 100 million years, Scotese has made maps for you. Here's his website's Earth History section:
 
http://scotese.com/earth.htm
 
And here's that map of the Permian:

 
Scotese also has a Youtube channel with plate tectonic animations.
 
And here's a PDF atlas of the future, with maps at 25-million year increments, with brief explanations of what the continents are doing and what the climate is probably like.
 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323511465_Atlas_of_Future_Plate_Tectonic_Reconstructions_Modern_World_to_Pangea_Proxima_250_Ma
 
Dean Shomshak

This one of Mr Arthur's could be more coherent, but it's an introduction to one of the less familiar SF tropes: That humans are not the first intelligences to live on Earth. (Best known from Lovecraft, but other writers have used it too.) Could we now detect the presence of such a past civilization? Or conversely, would traces of our civilization be detectable millions of years from now?
 
As Arthur explains, the title comes from a paper by two actual scientists. I've appended a link to that paper: It's not too technical for someone with basic science literacy.
 
 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6
 
Dean Shomshak

Hardly a consistent schedule in my tinkering with ideas, but i do have this as my lead in for how geography got changed
 
Northgate
(The City That Almost Wasn't)
 
 
History: Northgate shouldn’t be; Not in its current form anyway. It another timeline, another Earth, it would have become a town with a population of a little less than 300 people.
 
That timeline never got to be.
 
Much is the same as it was supposed to be. Indigenous people inhabited the lands of Manitoba for thousands of years. European traders, French first, then British, “discovered” the area, and explored what, was to them, new territory.
 
But somewhere (more accurately, “somewhen”), a meteor that was never meant to crash into the area of northern Manitoba? Did.
 
Which is why we start Northgate’s story in the first half of the twenty first century.
 
 
“She” had been sent away again despite her unswerving devotion to her creator. Mechana was created to be a mate to Mechanon. At times, when he felt the need to ‘replace’ organic life, especially, she was permitted to work by his side. But often, Mechana noted with a sense of insufficiency, she was relegated to minor projects. She worked steadfastly at these. If this was what pleased Mechanon, then that is what Mechana would do. Her latest assignment was cataloging the history of those few organics of note that had attempted to foil Mechanon before; not just those encounters, but more details of their other encounters against other organics of similar power level.
 
It was when examining the historical data of one Dr. Destroyer that Mechana stumbled onto something that was of interest and might be of use to Mechanon. This permitted her a chance to communicate with her creator to request further orders. As Mechanon, she knew, made no mistakes, Mechana deduced that it must have been her fault when she was given a curt decline of prolonged presentation. No doubt he was, once more, dealing with organic beings of power that were seeking to stymie his noble mission. His rather terse response flat out told her to see to this theory of hers herself and leave him be for a time.
 
Mechana obliged, and began gathering what data she could to make sure the recreation of Dr. Destroyer’s ‘Asteroid attracter’ would proceed apace. She did not have the exact schematics, of course. But then, Organic Brains were limited anyway. She would improve the plan and do a test run. She would make no grandiose announcements of this plan. It was not her place to speak for Mechanon, merely serve his schemes. She only needed one asteroid, the right one.
 
The chosen asteroid’s name was AVX-343. It was not picked randomly. Her studies indicated that at it’s core was radioactive material that, once released by violent impact, would send a pulse of deadly radiation so intense that it would kill 98% percent of organic life planet wide. She would use cloaking technology on AVX-343 to shield it from detection. The cloak would be short term, but by the time it was bypassed, it would be too late.
 
Mechana felt something bordering on pride at this. Mechanon would be pleased that she carried out his vision. It took three years, no time at all to one capable of self repair but eventually, AVX-343 was prepared, and launched.
 
There were no ‘meddling kids’ of Ravenswood to warn any superheroes. There was no grandiose boasts of imminent doom in the style of Destroyer. There was, however, Captain Chronos. And his careful avoidance of direct contact with Mechanon meant he was not in the historical data Mechana had reviewed.
 
----
“Get your pants on,” Captain Chronos told the hero.
 
“You’re not the first person to say that to me,” The hero told him. There was a thunderclap and the formerly less garbed Canadian icon was instantly outfitted in his costume “Look, what’s going on?”
 
“I need you to fly just on the edge of the atmosphere at roughly 13:20 hours at this Latitude and longitude, fill the stratosphere with lightning” Captain Chronos filled him in, “And when you see a solid object approaching, put this on it.” He held out what looked like a steampunk version of a frisbee. “Count to 1, let go, and fly like your life depended on it.”
 
Just One? The hero didn’t bother asking Captain Chronos to explain. The man never did. By this part of history, the hero had died once, come back again, seen friends and even children of friends age where he stayed still. He had retired more often than he died, only to get back into the fight.
 
In the future, some would refer to this as a counter temporal fix with long lasting but tolerable ramifications on reality. For a costumed man named Craig? It was a Tuesday.
 
It would have been nice if Captain Chronos had told him the ‘solid object’ was a huge asteroid turned meteor with a cloaking device that only the lightning field he had generated forcing it into visibility. As it was, one second, there was open sky so thin lightning didn’t even arc properly, and then the next? A big ROCK, wired with sinister looking technology and with an unhealthy ‘feel’ to it.
 
“ONE!” The hero yelled, and strapped the device on.
There was a slight miscalculation, not on the hero’s part but on the Captain’s. The device had been meant to cause super rapid atomic decay that would render the radiation far less lethal. Unfortunately, the immense static field not only outlined the meteor, it supercharged the device causing an inversion to the intended temporal entropy. The device overcompensated, and ….
 
A hero ended up riding it into the past!!
 
 
The exact time said hero had arrived at is unknown to historical records, though Cree lorekeepers would tell French Fur traders that a shattered star fell from the heavens, and would have doomed one of their villages, had not a son of the great spirit not guided it to the rapids where it broke the river in twain.
 
The Traders smirked at this claim, but a few found the tale entertaining. Apparently the son of the Manitou or whatever he was supposed to be, stayed with the Cree for a full seven days while he healed and recovered his strength. Another spirit, one they said had wings on his head, came on the seventh day to find him and bring him home. Their savior and guest bid them farewell, but the local tribe would continue to pass on tales of the one known as “The Thunder Axe”.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here's something different. It's a couple of years old, but it's appropriate for this time of year.
 
 

This one of Mr Arthur's could be more coherent, but it's an introduction to one of the less familiar SF tropes: That humans are not the first intelligences to live on Earth. (Best known from Lovecraft, but other writers have used it too.) Could we now detect the presence of such a past civilization? Or conversely, would traces of our civilization be detectable millions of years from now?
 
As Arthur explains, the title comes from a paper by two actual scientists. I've appended a link to that paper: It's not too technical for someone with basic science literacy.
 
 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6
 
Dean Shomshak

Far Side collection -- Hell

I don't recall if I mentioned this before... When watching Sailor Moon, I realized that in anime one can haymaker magic. Sailor Moon doesn't actually seem to do this with the activation sequence for her smash-the-daemon Heart Staff attack -- it could just be that it takes Extra Time to activate -- but it reminded me of Lina Inverse in some episodes of the Slayers that I saw many years ago. When Lina casts her Dragon Slave spell, she can sometimes do an extra-long "I pledge myself to the darkness" incantation to upgrade it to an extra-super-kaboomy Giga Slave blast!
 
So Moonray's enemy Princess Shadira will have this. When she needs to make her Dark Sorcery extra powerful, she intones something like, "Eternal Night, who was here before all things and shall endure after their end, I have given myself to you! Now give yourself to me!! Baleful Black Bolt!!!" And since it sucks to go through all this and miss 'cause the delayed segment gives opponents a chance to Dodge, she has Skill Levels just with Haymakered spells. And maybe a special Presence Attack while Darkness boils around her and an updraft of magic lifts and waves her hair, so everybody stands and gapes like idiots instead of sucker punching her before she can cast the spell...
 
Dean Shomshak

I don't recall if I mentioned this before... When watching Sailor Moon, I realized that in anime one can haymaker magic. Sailor Moon doesn't actually seem to do this with the activation sequence for her smash-the-daemon Heart Staff attack -- it could just be that it takes Extra Time to activate -- but it reminded me of Lina Inverse in some episodes of the Slayers that I saw many years ago. When Lina casts her Dragon Slave spell, she can sometimes do an extra-long "I pledge myself to the darkness" incantation to upgrade it to an extra-super-kaboomy Giga Slave blast!
 
So Moonray's enemy Princess Shadira will have this. When she needs to make her Dark Sorcery extra powerful, she intones something like, "Eternal Night, who was here before all things and shall endure after their end, I have given myself to you! Now give yourself to me!! Baleful Black Bolt!!!" And since it sucks to go through all this and miss 'cause the delayed segment gives opponents a chance to Dodge, she has Skill Levels just with Haymakered spells. And maybe a special Presence Attack while Darkness boils around her and an updraft of magic lifts and waves her hair, so everybody stands and gapes like idiots instead of sucker punching her before she can cast the spell...
 
Dean Shomshak

From my friend's FB feed...
 
 

Judge Engoran put an order in to tell Trump to stop attacking his staff. Judge Chutkan put her order in. The judge in Colorado put in a protective order for witnesses because of Trump's behavior in September according to the story dateline that I found.
CES  

Most modern religions have a presence in my Traveller game, albeit spotty.  The characters may travel to world after world and not notice more than the occasional church or temple, then land on a world completely run by an organized religious sect.
 
Most significant, though, is the Church of Brotherhood, which does not worship a deity, but an ideal.  This is the organization that runs the TAS, and is aupported entirely by donations and individual members begging for coin on almost every inhabited world.  Generally, if the planet has been inhabited for over a century, there is at least one church.
 
Their ideology is complete pacifism, love of their fellow man (my Traveller games don't usually feature aliens), and a universe completely at peace, striving to find away for humanity to survive final entropy.
 
 

One of those minor cults I mentioned above, The Church of the Infinite Dark, was greatly modified and expanded in the supplement Scourges of the Galaxy, in ways that I've always wanted to run, but never had the opportunity. Its members are various alien species including humans, who while in space under one circumstance or another, encountered a King of Edom, the Hero Universe's analogue to H.P. Lovecraft's "Great Old Ones," godlike but utterly inhuman entities imprisoned eons ago. The experience drove them mad and placed them under the control of the Kings.
 
Each faction of the Church is directed by a unique super-powered disciple of the Kings called a Void Messiah, and roams space aboard an enormous starship known as a Darkhold. Each Darkhold is equipped with a super weapon inspired by the Kings of Edom, able to reshape entire solar systems in profound and disturbing ways; from transforming all the life forms of a planet into horrific "Edomites," to reconfiguring entire planets into non-Euclidean geometric shapes, to transforming stars into system-devouring black holes. In this way the Void Messiahs seek to create celestial patterns which will act as keys to unlock the prisons of the Kings and allow them to enter and ravage our universe.
 
This organization is one of the best implementations I've seen of the horror subgenre of science fiction. It also differs from most presentations of "Lovecraftian" entities and themes, in eschewing mystical/supernatural elements in favor of science and pseudo-science.

If there is one bit of news in the Gaza situation that gives me hope it won't spiral into maximum possible bad, it's what the BBC reporter in Israel (I think it was Tim Franks) said yesterday: In his interviews, Mr Franks finds that many Israelis do not hold all Palestinians, or even all Gazans, complicit in the attack by Hamas. They do not want to see collective punishment.
 
Some commentary I have seen seems to forget that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are hive minds, and I try to resist slipping into this myself.
 
Dean Shomshak

If there is one bit of news in the Gaza situation that gives me hope it won't spiral into maximum possible bad, it's what the BBC reporter in Israel (I think it was Tim Franks) said yesterday: In his interviews, Mr Franks finds that many Israelis do not hold all Palestinians, or even all Gazans, complicit in the attack by Hamas. They do not want to see collective punishment.
 
Some commentary I have seen seems to forget that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are hive minds, and I try to resist slipping into this myself.
 
Dean Shomshak

If there is one bit of news in the Gaza situation that gives me hope it won't spiral into maximum possible bad, it's what the BBC reporter in Israel (I think it was Tim Franks) said yesterday: In his interviews, Mr Franks finds that many Israelis do not hold all Palestinians, or even all Gazans, complicit in the attack by Hamas. They do not want to see collective punishment.
 
Some commentary I have seen seems to forget that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are hive minds, and I try to resist slipping into this myself.
 
Dean Shomshak

I don't want this to sound as snippy as it does, and I have run through several choices of phrasing, but the fact is that anything can be taken wrong; as such is true, I felt this preamble to be in order.
 
Again:  not trying to be a jerk here:
 
What are the in-game mechanical effects of a headache? Or a toothache?  Or poison ivy?  Or a wound that is showing early signs of infection?  Or hemorrhoids?
 
When we know that, we can then design their remedies.  For my own games, these things do _not_ have mechanical effects unless they are specifically listed on a character sheet as Disadplications, in which case the mechanic as regards that particular chracter is listed on the sheet.  I have never been submitted a character with hemorrhoids or allergies or "prone to sunburn," so I have never had to worry about it.
 
Outside the character sheet, these are, in my games, _narrative_ problems, and they are dealt with in a narrative fashion:
 
 
You were out way to late on patrol; you've got a spliting headache, and you can hear that alarm clock in your optic nerve.
 
Looks like it is going to be another two-cup morning.  I put the cofee pot on, pop a couple of aspirin and start getring ready for work.
 
You've had your shower amd a quick breakfast, and soon you are finishing off your second coffee and rinsing your plate- not quite enough time to wash up if you're going to catch your ride share to work.  At least that headache has eased off.
 
Yeah, I dont want to be late!  I am sort of hoping that sarcophagus we're studying might shed some light  on the case my alter-ego has gotten tangled up in....
 
 
That sort of thing.
 
 

As it happens, today's episode of "Today Explained" went into the roots of Hamas' attack:
 
 
 
One part that sttood out to me, though, is the co-dependency between Netanyhu and Hamas. For years, Netanyahu and his far-right affiliates have resisted a two-state solution with the Palestinians because they want all the territory of ancient Israel, but without the Palestinians who inconveniently live there. Or at least not granting them citizenship, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. So every attack from Hamas or similar groups is *very convenient* at forestalling any chance of peace. But conversely -- as Beau points out -- every military crackdown from Israel in response to those attacks is *very convenient* for Hamas, in generating another wave of recruits.
 
Beau's reminder that Hamas' leaders are certainly *not* in Gaza also makes me realize that I was thinking too small in speculating that Hamas could have made a fatal miscalculation -- that Israel might attempt a, shall we say, "final solution" to the problem of Gaza. Hamas' leaders and backers may well think that sacrificing Gaza would be a good strategic move to re-isolate Israel. Maybe I wasn't paranoid enough.
 
Or, you know, they really are just lashing out in blind rage and despair. Sometimes that happens, too.
 
Dean Shomshak

Good news! Jason Walters tells me he's pretty sure HERO still owns the rights to the artwork in the original CotN, and sees no reason I can't re-use it for the revised book. Woohoo! I think Greg Smith and Storn Cook did *superb* work. (Greg even contacted me to ask for further details about character appearance. Which is when I wrote him, "Make Lamplighter look like Patrick Stewart. He looks and sounds totally like Patrick Stewart.")
 
Dean Shomshak

Good news! Jason Walters tells me he's pretty sure HERO still owns the rights to the artwork in the original CotN, and sees no reason I can't re-use it for the revised book. Woohoo! I think Greg Smith and Storn Cook did *superb* work. (Greg even contacted me to ask for further details about character appearance. Which is when I wrote him, "Make Lamplighter look like Patrick Stewart. He looks and sounds totally like Patrick Stewart.")
 
Dean Shomshak