Cancer

Re: The Last Word Nerts. First draft of the exam is too long, way too long. When I do it from a standing start, it takes me 17.5 minutes; they get 50 minutes. For an essay exam that factor of 3 is about right, but for a problem-based exam like this one it has to be a factor of 5 or so. Gotta chop stuff out.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Yeah, the 2nd momcat was probably an abused, and the kittens picked up her habit of hiding from people as a first reaction. The 1st momcat was, by contrast, a real people-oriented sweetie.

Re: Astromancy Another question: how many Elements are you going to have? I see 3 (Fire, Wind, Spirit) listed. Are all the Elements known? If one (or more) Elements exist but are unknown to the astromancers of the world, then they are juggling unknown and hidden Elements when they do their thing ... which increases the hazard, perhaps drastically. That could be "lost lore" to be quested for. FWIW, you could do a mock-up using the real sky (88 constellations) and impose, say, a cut-off of a certain apparent brightness for determining the number of capital-S stars in each. (That seems likely to give you lots of constellations with zero Stars, though.) Then you could assign the Elements to the stars via an arbitrary thing like spectral type. Given that you can get the basic data file for doing that mock-up easily, it depends on how hot you are for the programming task. Then throw in jokers like variable stars (which sometimes contribute, sometimes don't), eclipsing binaries (where one Star has two Elements, except during an eclipse when one is blocked out), novae (rare, one-shot Stars with perhaps exotic or multiple elements), ....

Re: Astromancy If you want to complicate it even more, limit the casters to being able to use only those constellations that are up at the time & place of the casting. That makes more GM work, though that could be front-loaded & automated.

Re: Every Myth Is Not True I would be way too tempted to embed into a game-world based on a premise like this something which is a fundamental contradiction, e.g., there cannot be any gods or underlying legends, yet the certain incontrovertably real past events require that some gods/legends/supermen did exist at the time. And, discovering/exposing that causes the fabric of "reality" to be threatened, with growing chaos and disintegration of physical, social, and spiritual order. Like Ragnarok, but with the cataclysm being of greater magnitude. But, I'm a straightforward, cheerful sort of guy.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings So, when is the next flurry of posturing and ballot-box stuffing going to transpire for the NGD Presidency?

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER We now have 3 resident cats at home, counting Hobbes, whom we adopted from the 2nd fostered litter. He's almost exactly 6 months old now.

Re: Complicate the Person Above L. Marcus has never, ever been seen in the same room at the same time as Bart Simpson, Fidel Castro, David Beckham, or Gaspode the Wonder Dog. Consider the implications of that carefully.

Re: The cranky thread Don't mention epic fail possibilities until those are safely past the point of possibility.

Re: The Last Word Yeah, and more civil than some other ideas for smilies I've had.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Oddly, the kittens in the 2nd litter never did that. The guys in the 1st litter did.

Re: The Last Word I'm surprised we don't have that one already. In fact, I called up the smilie window to see, because I was almost sure we had it.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER We'll do the kitten-fostering thing again, but not for a few months, I think.

Re: The Last Word Though I have trouble thinking up an image that would convey it. Nothing as spiffy as, say, for example.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat (wreckage of destroyed conference room) "What happened here?" "Annual performance review time."

Re: The Last Word There ought to be a smiley for that.

Re: The Last Word No; more as in, it's not really correct to speak of individual particles; it's more of a population of continuously fluctuating virtual particles, lacking all individual identity.

Re: The Last Word This is beginning to take on aspects of the discussion about what happens with photons around a black hole.

Re: The Last Word More correctly, which no one says they're driving.

Re: The cranky thread I didn't think the bleeding would necessarily be that heavy. I think he has an appreciable chance of having sepsis get to him.

Re: The Last Word The kind you tell Saab stories about?

Re: The Last Word Fjords are valleys or valley systems that were cut by glaciers that are on a seacoast.

Re: The Last Word Olympia isn't excessively hilly, but all of Puget Sound (and Olympia is at the south end of that) has a lot of hills to it. It's a gigantic fjord.

Re: The Last Word "When I get to Olympia [WA's state capital], I will put all the toilets on wheels. And then heads will roll!"

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat It cannot be done. Give us a different theme.