Cancer

Re: The Last Word Of course, you do hit times when motivation plummets uncontrollably no matter what.

Re: Airlocks are for losers I'm not sure how. Temperature is an absolute scale, in the sense that you can tell the heat content of things by the black-body radiation they give off. Energy flow by conduction scales as temperature difference and by contact area, so the only way heat flow would kill you is if you got a good, full-body contact with something really hot or really cold. I admit you can burn yourself fatally with fairly modest temperature differences (scalding sets in fast, e.g.), though. Electrical potentials are another thing. In principle you could have substantial electric charges built up on objects in space, and grabbing a nice metal hull which happens to have a big charge on it might be lethal. I'd have to look stuff up and push numbers around to decide whether that was a serious concern, but the experiences of human space efforts so far suggest it isn't. Otherwise there'd be something more made of docking with ISS, for example, and bleeding off charge and electrical potential differences early in the docking process.

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right?

Re: The Last Word Yeah, you use what works.

Re: Super tech effects on the world at large. For true evil, all SCIENCE! items need to have at least one subtle, long-term lasting or developing side effect. Coin-size atomic last-forever batteries? Turns out they are weak radiation sources that cause sterility if you keep one on your person for several hours a day, five days a week. High-powered plasma weapons? The muzzle flash puts minute amounts of cumulative toxins into the soil, so battlefields become uninhabitable. Power armor? Lack of adequate redundancy feedback in the control systems leads to them become increasingly inaccurate as they are used in the field, with one possible catastrophic failure mode being the suit tears itself apart (and its passenger) because the two legs misapply the windage corrections independently and jump in different directions to get someplace. Sonic weapons? As the ultrasonic oscillators get mistuned with stress and use, they start broadcasting power in glass-breaking frequencies all around the weapons. Oh, and the local animals would all go berserk, too.

Re: Need ideas for Steampunk Over-The-Top Game There is nothing so over the top that it cannot be raised even more over the top by addition of rocket-propelled chainsaws.

Re: The Last Word Reading something over my first coffee at work, trying to come back up to speed on a task, is a common enough ritual for me that it helps even when the coffee is not all that early in the day.

Re: Lewis Carrol Hero You could amuse yourself for hours by concocting the dialog in the Mad Tea Party from which the PCs had to extract clues. "WTF is a 'treacle well', anyway?"

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Rupert Murdoch as FoxButt, slowly assembling the components for a truly world-wide INT Drain, key to his plans to rule an Earth full of demented sheep. NT: Signs that you personally are living in a Dark Champions campaign run by a brain-damaged GM with severe problems in maintaining logical consistency.

Re: Time Travel help IMO time travel adventures give you unparalleled opportunity for self-contradictory, thoroughly impossible chains of events. Time travel implies causality violation, so you no longer have to have a good reason for things to happen. If you like slapstick on a cosmic scale, here's how to get it. For true chaos, have the PCs go back in time and (apparently) succeed in thwarting the Bad Guys machinations. Then when they return to the present, they find their reality even more bunged up than before, and have something explain to them that they made the situation worse. So the obvious thing for them to do is to go back AGAIN but this time fight themselves (which no PC group relishes at all). There should be a less-obvious but more difficult option to prevent the contradiction from arising at all.

Re: The Last Word Actually, the walk is the calming agent. The coffee lets me re-focus on something else.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Death tribble is the Curator for Quasi-Pornographic Marginalia in the Books & Manuscripts section of the Antiquities Division of the British Museum. If you ask him politely, he'll show you the oldest known graffiti of someone committing an unnatural act with a sheep, recovered from a papyrus scroll in Abu Simbel and dating to the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom; from the accompanying hieroglyphs, it appears to have been intended to be an insult against someone named Wally.

Re: The Last Word I hadn't had any yet, and I bumped into another collateral damage annoyance spawned by our institution's asinine IT policies. So I needed the walk, and the coffee, and I feel better now.

Re: The Last Word Grr. Better go get my coffee.

Re: The Last Word Actually, I've seen work done on astronomy materials for the blind before. It's a tough thing to do.

Re: Fantasy Cosmologies If you want something strange simply for the point of strangeness, you can go browsing here. Though a few of the more interesting-sounding ones just lead off to stub articles without pics. And some will just make your brain hurt.

Re: The Last Word I have posted that recipe before.

Re: The Last Word When we're hosting gaming at our place in cool months, we provide coffee & cream for the table. Which means we buy half & half by the half gallon, and that usually means the last third of the carton goes sour. This is not a tragedy, because my recipe for gingerbread takes sour milk, and when made with sour half & half it is exquisite.

Re: The Last Word This workplace > home > university. That's partly because we rarely have real cream or half & half at home, though.

Re: The Last Word Coffee at one workplace >>> coffee at other workplace. This one hires real barristas. The university just has generic Food Service workers.

Re: The Last Word No, I was confused. Hearing anything 50 times a day will make me hate it. But level-switching I find humorous. The former would trump the latter, though.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I admit part of my aggravation is due to unfamiliarity with the platform. Were it a Windows box, I could do as you suggest, build executables onto the thumb drive and run off that. I'm enough of a MacN00b (and don't have access to another Mac) not have a good picture of how to do that for the other platform.

Re: The Last Word OK, but your vexation is due to repetition, not the level-of-reference switching itself.

Re: "Open-Source" superhero names I am just about certain Dynamo has been used by multiple comics. I'm running down links now. EDIT: yes, link

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What would everyone say to a real Bat-Man? A: And live in a cave full of guano.