Cancer

Re: Musings on Random Musings That reminds me of a story from England, some 6-8 years ago, about some minor criminals who were sentenced to a couple of hundred hours of community service. They were given the chore of planting flower bulbs in the public areas around the town, but they weren't supervised all that closely. Several months later, the bulbs came up, spelling out things like "SHAG" and "BOLLOCKS" in letters about 1.5 meters across.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: So, Professor, you have captured on infrared video a swarm of were-bats flying through a fog bank. What's your point? A: We don't do that here anymore. It got sent offshore.

Re: Repulsive Odor I've made chili that's done it to people, though it takes a little while to work.

In the published Hero system canon, are there point-cost guidelines for gravity manipulations? I assume this would be an Alter Environment, but I welcome comments about other possibilities. Specific examples: Leave the direction of local gravity unchanged, but alter its strength from its natural value down to zero, including any value inbetween those. Simple reversal of direction of the local gravity vector. Introduce a new gravity field in the area, directed towards the person/item with the power. Net gravity would be the sum of normal plus this induced field. I'd like this to be of arbitrary magnitude (anywhere from 0 to 30 g's, for example). Manipulate the magnitude of the gravity alteration on a phase-by-phase basis, not just turn it on/off with selected value. Obviously there's the possibility for lots of collateral damage when this kind of stuff happens, and those collateral effects are an important part of the powers. Yes, I want to include the ability to cause someone to "fall up" against a ceiling; or "fall up" for 10 seconds, then turn the effect off, and let them fall down from the approx 500 meters up, with the attendant effects of either one. Also, I recognize that these should be bought on a per-volume basis, either in terms of per-hex with a definition for the vertical extent of a hex, or a radius to the effect. The character concept I started with had density manipulation and the attendant gravity effects ... and I couldn't figure out how to "cost out" the latter.

Re: The Last Word "Oh, the humanity."

Re: Musings on Random Musings I don't know the XTC song ... the one that came to my mind immediately was the old Yes song. I may have to take the CD wallet home and load Fragile into it. I'm comfortable with the concept of roundabouts, since I saw lots of them in my years in Germany. But that was before I was old enough to drive. Realizing that it's saying more about where I've been as an adult than anything else, that one in Lacey is the only one I can recall driving on myself. Given that limit to my experience, I don't think I could tell if it was badly designed or not. Assuming Old Man's comment about a minimum size applies to the inner radius of the driving surface, I think it's below his 50-foot figure; my guess is more like 10 or 12 meters. I haven't paced it off, though.

Re: Telepaths Must Die! I had the idea for a novel, where the protagonist was persecuted by someone who could read his mind. (That was the only non-standard-Earth thing in the whole situation.) The telepath was obnoxious but doesn't take any clearly life-threatening actions, just nasty sanity-threatening ones, and communicated with the victim only via mail, email, phone calls from public phones, etc. In other words, he's a complete unknown to the victim. The flip side is the telepath's story. He wakes up one morning and cannot help but read that one person's mind, full-time, all the time. No explanation, no apparent mechanism, never heard of the victim before in his life. Sort of a Twilight Zone situation. He can't read anyone else's mind, and there's nothing else unusual about him. Both Telepath and Victim are otherwise perfectly ordinary individuals. I couldn't decide how to resolve it, nor how it would develop. Would Telepath hound Victim to his death just so that he'd have peace and quiet in his own mind? Would Victim figure out a way to deduce Telepath's identity and do something about it? It's an idea that's been sitting on my mental shelf for, oh, 20 years now....

Re: The Last Word "Red meat isn't bad for you. Fuzzy green meat is bad for you."

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER There. Man, that took longer than it should have. I am still not thinking clearly after the vacation. Takes about 20 seconds per 1000 primes, and I'm sure a bunch of that is i/o, not to mention using the first sucky algorithm that popped into my naive head...

Re: Musings on Random Musings If I encountered traffic circles more often than once a year, I'd probably like them also. As it is, the only time I encounter one is going to a particular friend's house in Lacey for their annual Labor Day barbeque, where a circle is the next-to-last direction change before arriving at their place. It takes me a while to haul unused stuff out of deep storage, kinda like how you always fishtail your car a bit after the first snowfall because you've forgotten how to take accelerations as slow as they need to be.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Poo. I didn't test the thing. Well, maybe I should code it up and run it in the background.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Hm. This list has primes with fewer than 11 digits. Sigh. Looks like here you can cook 'em up.

Stinky stinky stinky! I'll endorse that one. When we got back home Sunday after a week's absence the place stank ... really stank. My wife finally found the source the following morning. All I can think is that before we departed, while rooting around in the chest freezer downstairs, one of us pulled out the nondescript plastic bag that had some trout that my mom had given us, and left it in the heap of other (but empty) nondescript plastic bags next to the freezer. So the trout were left a week (at least) to, well, stink up the joint.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings There is joy to be found in watching the unplanned collision between differing levels of reality. This is, I suppose, the point behind the best haiku, but it can happen elsewhere too. E.g., doing the mouse-over at the appropriate place on these boards and seeing the words "Onyxclaw is a splendid one to behond"

Re: Human Computer This thread may be a little different from what you have in mind, but the character works in our campaign.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings While out fishing at a reservoir in Idaho last week, we had a beaver do an alarm slap in the water about 15 feet from my wife, who was helping my daughter cast her line at the time. Someone with us, who'd witnessed such a thing before, told us what it was (it wasn't for half an hour that we saw the beaver). Startled the bejeezus out of us. I wouldn't have thought a creature that size could make that much noise without fully breaching the surface whale-style, and I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. I'd have to chuck a sixty-pound rock into the lake to make that much noise.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "That's Doctor A*****e to you, buddy!"

Re: A Thread for Random Musings A ten-year-old with an arm in a cast in summer is most disturbed about being unable to participate in aquatics.

Re: The Last Word When my wife tells me we are roasting a turkey, I ask if it's anyone I know. Often, she just smiles sweetly and says, "No, dear."

Having trouble concentrating the last afternoon before vacation Ever have a thought that just fades away as you try to think it?

Re: Answers & Questions Q: Five questions in a row in this thread that have mentioned Mightybec by name? What is everyone thinking? A: Banana on the bottom, cherry on the top, and enough chocolate inbetween to gag a boggie.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Finally got over 50 posts on the gaming threads, so my Rep Power is no longer zero. Time to start spreading it out with the generosity you folks deserve. Of course, I'll be on non-wired vacation all next week, so I'm about to go dark for ten days. Figures.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Another by definition random musing. Choosing a random number generator for your microsimulation code is a highly non-random process. I've rejected two candidates so far. I think the winner is one I will end up having to code myself, since it doesn't seem to be readily available out there in Python; I may be able to turn the available C++ code into an embedded module, though.

Re: Driving through barriers I can think of a situation where post-move-through velocities matter: if the vehicle is trying to crash through multiple walls. A sequence of spaced, identical barriers is a relatively inexpensive (compared to a more massive single barrier) and effective real-world defense against e.g. terrorist vans full of explosives, but without velocity attenuation then such a defense is merely equal to the first barrier. Conservation of momentum would be the physical principle that governs the post-impact velocities. I'll have to re-read the basic rules for details and see if I can derive something that would work.

Re: Answers & Questions