Cancer

Re: I need a team name The Justice D00ds

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Superintendant of Undergraduate Laboratories and Chair, Tantric Studies Dept.

Re: Nanotech! And the inverse: The Pan Am logo on the commuter spaceship.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Boston's debut album.

Re: Ideas for Cliched Cartoon Powers I agree, Damage Reduction is essential, though I'd make it "resistant only": it reduces BODY damage but has no affect on STUN damage at all. Also you need the obligatory Triggered Images of stars, birds, etc. dancing around one's head, with its own END reserve, where the trigger condition is being reduced to negative STUN.

Re: The Last Word At least at one time on a certain multi-user timeshare Unix system.... the command 'yes' repeated its argument infinitely (until you killed the process manually). (There are times when you want this behavior for debugging certain processes.) ^G is the "beep" character. So yes ^G produces unending beeps. You could redirect the output to raw devices, including ... other people's terminals. That's what the "> /dev/ttyha" did. & puts it in the background, so all this goes on while you do other stuff and look innocent. Result: the target's terminal floods out unending beeps, and there isn't a lot they can do about it (unless they know what's going on, and usually they don't). Think of it as the early 1980's Unix weenie's version of an atomic power wedgie.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Why would Swedish chainsaws have that warning and not genuine American Made-in-China chainsaws?

Re: The Last Word yes '^G' > /dev/ttyha & (You may need to be an old-time Unix geek to recall that one)

Artist's conception of our Galaxy, viewed from "above". More and more people seem to be joining the barred spiral bandwagon. Click on the image there and you'll get a wallpaper-worthy version. Click on the "this artist's illustration" link in the image caption on the linked page and you'll see where in the picture we fit. Very briefly, 6 o'clock from the center, between the spiral arms # 2 and 3, counting outward. No, I don't have a good handle on what it'd be like to traverse the "bar" in a starship, whether it'd be different at all from any other part of the galaxy. I'll have to think about that. (In general, if you're in a large galaxy, you never want to go near the black hole at the center, but I think most of the bar is outside the hazard zone.)

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.