Cancer

Re: Hello

Re: Earth's core For a while the Earth's magnetic field will not be a simple dipole field like we're used to. It will be much weaker, and a more complicated geometry. This will naturally bollix up magnetic navigation, of course. I wonder what happens to migratory wildlife that use the geomagnetic field when this happens. I'm not really worried ... this type of event happens "frequently" over Earth's history, so it's not like all the ducks will get lost or anything ... just curious. For a while, the magnetosphere will be rather weaker. This means more of the charged particle flux from the Sun -- the "solar wind" -- will hit the upper parts of the atmosphere. This is likely to mean many more auroras world-wide. It is also likely to mean increased radiation exposure to everyone. (This is going to be a modest effect relative to anthropogenic exposures, though.) Also to everything, though it is unclear how much impact this will have. A lot depends on how long it lasts.

Re: Who's door do you knock on to borrow a time machine? Sounds good to me, and no criticism implied at all. Heck, I've co-run time-travel adventures.

Re: The Last Word

Re: Pulp-era resources, if anyone is interested. I have an heirloom at home that I have used as both gaming and teaching resource. It's a turn-of-the-20th-Century "Contractor's Handbook", about a thousand pages of on-the-verge-of-modern construction and raw materials information, for the practicitioner on the job site. Literally an heirloom (it was my great-grandfather's) with raw data of all kinds of utility. I would have to look and see what it says about concrete and so on; I never thought to look at whether it would have things to say about constructing 1900-era fortifications. My brother (The Monster on these boards) has another heirloom, a 1928 (I think) World Book encyclopedia. Sort of scary reading that; the intoxicated euphoria from the US, post-WW1 but pre-Great Depression, is astonishing to see.

Re: Earth's core There are a number of suggestions that we are in the process of a polarity reversal now. We know such things happen "quickly" by geophysical time, but that doesn't say much when compared to human timescales. I've read a couple of decent articles, in the last year or so on the problem of MHD and figuring out what's going on with the Earth's magnetic field. It's a nasty computational problem. Right now, at least, the Moon is receding on average at about 4 cm per year. You have to take a long-term time average to get that; the Moon's orbit is elliptical and precessing and nutating and all sorts of other cyclic and quasi-cycling things, so at any given moment its velocity will be different from that.

Re: Who's door do you knock on to borrow a time machine?

Getting punchy late on a Friday afternoon A hand tool made of hard steel for abrading things into proper shape is a file. If you have a cabinet where you keep those, you have a file file. If you have several such things, and keep them in a row, then you have a file of file files. If you consider such an arrangement disgusting, then you have a vile file file file. If you keep dossiers on people who have such things, then you have a a file of vile file file filers. If you put that in microform and put that in a small bottle so you can swallow it lest it fall into the wrong hands, then you have a vial file of vile file file filers. And if you are sick enough to find that whole concept perversely alluring, then you are a vial-file-vile-file-file-filer-phile.

Re: Silly question, How much damage do nukes do With absurdly large numbers of dice like that, the resulting probability distribution is so narrow relative to the allowed range that taking the average result (number of dice * average one-die roll) is more accurate and faster than any physical dice roll you might try.

Re: The cranky thread See? I told you. He didn't even have to resort to the old pubic-hair-in-the-tomato-juice glass joke.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Down in the lobby they were playing Pachelbel's Canon in d. We had a disk of that, and used it as a lullaby (even I can hum the bottom line of that). The CD got beat up and eventually pitched as unplayable, so it had been a few years since I'd heard it.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I just learned where the plague of tiny flies is coming from here in the office: someone else's plants. It doesn't help with the irritating little things, but at least I now know it's not me, which is a relief. At the same time, at home we have a plague of fruit flies coming from somewhere we can't figure out. My private theory at the moment is that one of the kids pushed some grapes down somewhere, perhaps (e.g.) through one of the heat registers, and so the flies are coming from somewhere out of sight. We've taken to leaving a shot glass with a finger of cheap white wine out on the kitchen counter in the evening. Come morning, there are scores of the little b******s drowned in the wine.

Re: I need a name for a Robin Hood-like fantasy character Coyote, Jay, and Crow all seem to enjoy the same underlying connection as Fox with cleverness and trickery, so you might swap one of those in for Fox. Jays and crows are both corvids, and most of the rest of that family seem to be thought of as tricksters as well, so that could add in Magpie, Rook, Raven. USers tend to forget about rooks (they're Eurasian), though we're used to using the word "rook" as a synonym for "defraud". Since there's multiple levels of ambiguity in the term (drawing on the bird, the game of chess, a distinction from "White Knight"), I might suggest White Rook as a name.

Re: Alien Invasion I had a fantasy campaign based on an alien invasion, but I took a longer view. Base assumptions: Basic sci-fi concept of a Galactic Council. Every race is represented there, but every race is sovereign. Habitable worlds without existing sentient races are fair game for colonization, but worlds which have evolved their own sentient races are Hands Off, with "Prime Directive" like laws. There are races that get around that "Prime Directive" thing by subtle long-time-duration interference, by outright conquest-and-extinction, and other means. One of those races is a theocratic empire. Their modus operandi is to insert their own theocracy into developing worlds with a minimum of off-world aid. Once the world reaches interstellar tech -- which takes a couple of thousand years -- the infected world joins the empire "of its own free will". The campaign takes place on one such world, about 500 years after the injection of the "infection". Very loosely, that "infection" happened around the equivalent of 800 AD. The empire has (after the initial jihad-like establishment) expanded slowly but unstoppably, using every means available. For hand-waving reasons, magic exists on the world (and the empire's off-world tech "looks like" magic), but the indigenous magic cannot directly affect anything of true off-world origin. That's not as big a limitation as it sounds, since all the empire folk now are home-born and approximately all the equipment is manufactured on-world. Note, though, that the off-world sci-fi tech is not subject to the same limit. The PCs are from a relatively isolated part of the world which had its initial contact with the empire about 50 years previous; that contact was incredibly violent and unified their homeland and made it implacably opposed to the empire. The PCs are sent out to scout, seek out allies, and do maximum damage to the empire. By themselves, the PCs cannot hope to win, though before it went on permanent hiatus ten years ago they had dealt the empire three serious strategic defeats, the only ones in its history. I have the concept for a one-shot (probably three-session) adventure to close the campaign, which involves some off-world aid for the PCs. The backstory for that involves a key NPC, himself an off-worlder (in fact, a human from Earth) having a conversation with his off-world backers that runs: "Instead, you will use this." A softball-size object materializes on the console. (picks it up, looks it over.) "Heh, what is it? A nuclear hand grenade?" "No. That is an antimatter bomb." (He puts the device down with exaggerated care.)

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Most of the rest of my gaming group is at Dragonflight starting today, and among their other activities, they're doing a two-session multi-table event. (Yes, it's Hero system, though that isn't a big part of it.) I contributed a lot of ideas in the preparation -- and there are some really weird ideas -- but I'm unable to attend, and once I realized that I stopped doing much for it and became a peripheral kibbitzer. We deliberately tried to construct something you could not do except at a con. When a PC gets "killed" --and it's intended to be pretty "lethal" so it should happen a lot -- they get sent to a "floating GM" and then sent to one of the other tables and re-constituted there. Every table has important missions to fulfill, and the tables are all running in parallel with payoffs to all the tables as things are accomplished, so that no one can experience the whole event/campaign. If it goes well, it could be possible to create an atmosphere like the multiple-simultaneous-essential-action-sequences aspect as the climax of Return of the Jedi, which would just be unspeakably awesome if it works. I'm looking forward to the after-action report next week.

Re: The Cutting Edge SuperBase...what's in it? I'd probably go geothermal rather than fusion, but it's got to have its own power plant, that's for sure. Almost all my concepts for bases are more underground than aboveground, anyway. Unfortunately, they also tend to have 4-digit Character Point costs. Hangar(s), garage(s), drydock(s), silo(s) for vehicles, as others have said. Sensor arrays like no one's business.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Come Away With Me by Norah Jones. Can you say, "torch"?

Re: Hero with a bad ticker? Reduce his REC, harshly. You may not need to cut his END, depending on how large that is to begin with. An actual strong heart attack is adequately modeled by a large BODY Drain, probably. Minor attacks would be large END and probably STUN Drains, with delayed recoveries.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Vice Wars II: Harbor City Hookers

Re: The cranky thread Very easily. I wouldn't challenge him on this one. No indeed.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I can believe that yes, there are a lot of lawsuits. And I believe everything Duke might say about users.... One of my previous jobs was support of custom email apps for an insurance company, among these being a set of tools to route emails (usually from adjusters or agents) into the databases-of-record for policyholders, which were on an entirely different platform. We were having reports of sporadic failures-to-store, so I was trying to track down specific instances so I had specific enough information to try debugging. At one point I found a time interval where counts looked discrepant, and for a long litany of lame-a** reasons I ended up having to do visual comparison of items in the DB of record to captured copies of emails on the email server. So I'm reading emails in two places, comparing timestamps and other header info as well as message text. One item completely derailed my train of thought and sent me outside to walk off the giggles. It said, "Insured does not use best judgment. Owing to back problems cannot open garage door, so uses front-end loader."

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan.

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ... The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, by Brian Fagan. Very interesting book; lots of stray data on how medium-duration (several years) climate shifts shaped human events. If you accept three premises: Population expands until it is limited by the production of food, and stays at that limit Substinence-level farming always operates at the "bleeding edge" of its capabilities Humans will continue to count on recurrence of the most favorable event in their experience, no matter how freakish that was Then you can imagine that shifts in weather patterns could powerfully affect history. As gamers, we perhaps over-acknowledge three of the Four Horsemen (War, Death, and Plague). But we seldom think about the other one, Famine. This book lets you see just how important that one has been. PS: If, like me, you are/were ignorant of the Irish Potato Famine, be prepared to be appalled.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat He is his own pale-blue nightlight. And, all the photographs of him are burned out where you know he should be.