Cancer

Re: The Last Word Nickel Beer Night

Re: The Last Word Major Major Major

Re: from little plot seeds, mighty games do grow: Share you ideas! [True background information: Modern large ground-based astronomical telescopes usually have two of what are called "Naismith platforms". The telescope has an alt-az mount (a pivot that tips the 'scope up and down is the altitude axis; then that structure is on a turntable that is the azimuth axis), and a flippable mirror in the center of the 'scope diverts the light through either of the two altitude bearings, which are open rings with smaller bearings on the ring surfaces. The Naismith platforms are just chunks of floor, mounted outside the telescope at the altitude pivot. That way, the light comes out from the telescope in a nice horizontally-directed beam that you can feed into an instrument sitting on the platform.] Plot seed: Ambitious observatory director Dr Smith got money from a poorly-identified charitable foundation to build the world's largest telescope, which has been completed and commissioned. Though it was never officially announced, a condition placed by the contributor is that one of the telescope's Naismith platform is premanently dedicated to the equipment supplied by the mysterious foundation, and they also get 25% of the time on the telescope. (Standard scientific instruments are mounted at the other platform, and there's no mystery at all about those or the people using them.) What's on that platform? It's not some rich folks and an eyepiece, that's for sure. It's not even clear whether they are using it to observe; you can shoot beams out a telescope -- which has pointing accuracy unmatched by any other human technology -- simply by pointing the beam out the way the light came in. Test-bed for anti-satellite weapons? Uplink for orbital mind control lasers? Downlink for instructions from Hastur (last known whereabouts: Aldebaran)? What's there? And who is the mystery foundation that gave $300 million for the telescope, and why is it so hard to find out who they are?

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Visit by Loreena McKennitt

Re: The Last Word Magenta.

Re: Evil Corporations I wrote a Shadowrun adventure titled "Diaplessic Industries", which sold novel high-performance computing equipment with powerful associative logic capabilities. They were snatching metahumans with cyberwear (since those had already demonstrated they didn't have the lethal allergy to the hardware), and in effect replacing everything in their bodies but their central nervous systems and turning them into storage-and-processing devices. They had developed a means to force-train a human-grade intellect into an efficient peripheral device during the episode of total cyberpsychosis that resulted from the "coring" and transfer into the tank. Only about 10% of the people they snatched were successfully turned into compliant equipment, but their return on investment was high enough so they could accept that. The failures just got dumped. The name, "diaplessic industries", just took a word I encountered in an article about a kind of rocks. According to what I read, "diaplessic" derives from the ancient Greek "diaplessos", which means "to destroy by striking".

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER What leads you to think I have only one browser window open at a time, Anomaly-san?

Re: The Last Word I remember a dream where my last words were, "You a******s." It was appropriate to the events and setting (it was a very strange combination of the Bart Simpson universe and the Terminator universe, and I think I got waxed on the 9th green of a golf course).

Re: Overwhelming PRE attacks That could be quite correct in general. I've been lucky to play more or less exclusively for the last 12 years or so with a pretty small, stable group of quite reasonable people, and we adapt when the GMs point out via in-game counters that we've become overly specialized and/or exploitative. So it's been a while since I've had to contend with pick-up munchkins, and what I remember of that experience, you are quite right.

Re: Overwhelming PRE attacks Expose them to more classes of villains. Against a team that's over-reliant upon EGO- and PRE-based attacks, mechanicals are the standard "scissors" to that "paper". For instance, large numbers of Automatons who use Coordinated Attacks.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat He brings his golf clubs into the huddle.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Play "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" incessantly and refer to it as "our song".

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I shined my shoes last night. They look good, if I say so myself.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER That, my good doctor, is a come-hither.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings For maximum perversity, we could use a mathematics font on these boards.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER [On the restroom wall:] If you took s**t, put it back. No questions asked.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: And when the Earth Firsters fled from the mink farm into the weasel ranch next door, the captain decided he had nothing to lose, and we saturated the area with phosgene. And to what end? We got the ecoterrorists, but we also got the Fox news crew? That's no loss. And we got the savings and loan executives? That's no problem, either. And we got some corporate lawyers? Who gives a rip! What's making you all dewy-eyed over the affair? A: It's all in the cat-suit thread.

Re: The Last Word GASP . . . *choke* Too . . . . many . . . VOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWEEEELLLLLLLLLSSSSSSSS!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa..... (shattering crash) (thud) (tinkle tinkle tinkle)

Re: A Thread for Random Musings A problem with an interdisciplinary team is that people from different disciplines prefer to see the data presented in different ways. For example, with my physical science background, what statisticians think of as a standard q-q plot I think is just plain wrong, since it puts the observations on the vertical axis and the theory on the horizontal. But, I figured out what a q-q plot was (I'd never head of them before about 11AM Monday), learned how to make them, and now the whole team is happy.

Re: Astrogator's Handbook distance = SQUARE ROOT[ (x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2 + (z1 - z2)^2 ] What's the date on the book, out of idle curiosity?

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Hey, I recall the horrible night at the observatory, without any tunes accessible at all, when the song stuck in my head was ... I kid you not ... Good Ship Lollipop. Man, that was hell.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Pajama Boy and the Boa of Bliss

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Disk one of the "Blue collection" of the Beatles.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I hereby start the vicious rumor that the Secret Decoder Ring works via a Vigenere Cipher using "ANALHEADGEAR" as its key.