Cancer

Re: A Thread For Random Links Things to do tomorrow

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER If you've never heard of it before, spywareinfo.com is a HUGE help for the "mere mortal" side of the population. Probably not so much so for the sysadmin types. Still, it might be worth checking out.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER WA is large enough that there are substantial differences across the state. Seattle's pretty pricey, especially stuff like rent, real estate, etc. They deny it vehemently, but Tacoma can be thought of as an outgrowth of Seattle. Spokane is very different and cheaper. I would not advise any sentient being visit Yakima. I know nothing about Vancouver, and I have only very limited knowledge of Richland/Pasco/Kennewick. If you can let us know where in particular, and we can provide more detailed guidance....

Re: The Last Word Heat death.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Vector sum = 0.

Re: The Last Word Is lack of reality transitive? Is there a deficit of true character? If there is a character which is fictional even in the context of the fictional story in which he/she/it appears, is that character real in our reality? Now, swap the words "character" and "reality" in the above (and turn "real in" to "characteristic of") and re-parse. Add anchovies and toss. Serve with warm bread, white wine, and a side of existentialism.

Re: The cranky thread

Re: The cranky thread Grr. I'm adjunct faculty at a local university's Physics Department. This term I taught a survey-level astronomy course. Yes, Solar System astronomy. I give an observing exercise. Very simple. It takes about an hour to do from a standing start. You have to observe the moon. (We really need a moon icon in the smiley set.) I give it the first week of the term, collect it the last week of the term, and I threaten the students weekly and let them know that doing it is their responsibility, weather be damned. In 2.5 months they will sure enough get the hour they need. I don't care so much what answer they get; the procedure, by its nature, is flawed, so only under ideal conditions (which aren't actually that hard to come by, but never mind that) will they get the correct answer. It's the performance of the exercise that counts. I never mark people down for the wrong answer, just for doing things incorrectly. But ... when someone dry-labs it, fakes the data, makes it up ... and I catch them at it ... Although the principle for academic honesty penalties is more or less the same everywhere, the details are always different, and the details matter. So when I found the idiot who faked his data on Sunday evening, it chews up about half a day of my life as I figure out what i's I have to dot and what t's I have to cross before I can toast his lazy, cheating ass to the maximum extent the school regs allow. Because if I have to waste a half day or more of my life to penalize some guilty-of-incestuous-rape low-life, I sure as hell am going to ask for more than a slap on the wrist for my trouble. Unfortunately, no one's regs allow things I want to give ... the pit of starving rabid weasels ... the hornets' nest enema ... re-entry from low orbit with only a vacuum suit ... Grr.

Re: So why do you play Hero? I will repeat the flexibility theme ... anything that motivates me enough to start assembling the power/character/whatever, I can build it in Hero. Also, I GREATLY prefer peaked probability distributions. D20, with its flat p.d.f., drives me absolutely batty. I can live with critical failures, but not every f---ing time I turn around. Gimme nd6 any day.

Re: Finding Invisible Woman A trick that works for protecting places (like evil villain fortresses) against characters with high-end Invisibility powers is have air in the entry routes weakly doped with a mildly radioactive gas, or perhaps dusty with (again) a weakly radioactive substance. Nothing that will trigger defenses against radiation damage, show up as a poison, or anything like that. This isn't all that useful for finding invisible types in a fight, but for handling the ninja-type ultra-stealth intruders doing spying, burglary, or perhaps assassination, it's an inobvious but effective way of doing the burglar alarm function. Especially if you ingest it in any way, that low-level radioactivity will show up easily to pretty standard radiation counters. And it takes quite a while to get it all out of your system. The underlings staffing the inner parts of the fortress either live there full-time, or have to spend a week in the cooling-off area before returning to their duty stations. So when the secret ninja assassin penetrates into the sensitive parts, then the counters pick up the presence of an intruder easily.

Re: Devious Idea that may work once....once... For tech items, the answer is obvious, thinking about how corporations and governments control their hardware even nowadays. Give the focus a password. Authorized user gets the password with the hardware. But, the password needs to be changed at least every 60 days. You need the old password to set the new one. If you are so ditzy that you let the 60 days expire, then it locks out all other function waiting for password reset (so while waiting for the password, the focus is a boat anchor). Flub the old password 3 times, the focus self-destructs. That last could be as harmless as a memory wipe (turning the thing permanently into a paperweight) to the archtypal explosive or incendiary charge. An HKA with the same number of active points as the effect of the focus could be interesting. Of course, if it's a suit of powered armor that goes catatonic with the character in it, getting the character out of it could be an adventure in and of itself. The password update message box could be an annoyingly persistent Mental Illusion that won't leave your field of vision until you complete the procedure. All those annoying messageboxes ... but they're inside your head ... Now, a possibility is that the original owner is as careless about passwords as most real-life people are now. E.g., the armor has the old password scribbled with grease pencil on the back of its left hand. Roleplay that right, and the player has a chance to keep his toy. But if the scribble is in an alien language (remember that handwritten characters often don't look much like their keyboard equivalents), or if the focus has seen a month of hard use and the password has got smudged, that makes it a lot harder.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings

Re: Two Game Master's Our group does the two-GM thing quite often in a number of campaigns. In fact, in one campaign it's even weirder than that: two GMs do "tag team", each yanking the plot in not exactly the same direction, and when one is GMing the other is playing their own character! We started doing it when the group got larger than one GM could conveniently handle. Also, the group practices this often as we do a regular team-GM event at a local con each summer. In my opinion, two GMs can work extremely well. The only really adverse case in our group's experience is the one time I was one of the co-GMs, and a main plot architect ... from which I've carried away the lesson that on a scale from one to sucks, as a GM, I'm closer to the sucks end than I'd prefer to be. (I have lots of interesting ideas, but that doesn't have to translate into what others find to be an interesting, playable campaign, as I found out.) The biggest single criterion for success, I think, is that the two GMs have to be in sync in terms of what the plot and the campaign atmosphere are supposed to be, and you both have to understand and agree on what your players enjoy in your game. If you don't have those things well worked out between you, then you will confuse your players and send them unintentionally mixed signals. That is a rather worse thing to do than you may imagine... it can get everyone confused and even hostile. On the other hand, two GMs are great when you are trying for convergent action lines with a split party. Run the two groups simultaneously, keep the pace fast and furious, and all they hear from the other group will be chaotic, interesting snippets, and when the subgroups reunite they will have interesting experiences to tell each other.

Re: Class in Fantasy Class also wasn't strictly a matter of ranking. I haven't noticed in this thread anyone referring to the clergy in the feudal system, which was approximately a parallel structure which the clergy tried hard to keep out from under the authority of the lords/kings. At least officially, it was also non--heriditary. Yes, there was a coupling between the clerical heirarchy and the secular feudal one as lords could buy offices for their relations (though technically this was the sin of simony), but joining a clerical order was both a way out of the rat race (that is, a place for a noble to retire to) and a way for a bright lower-class lad to rise by work and ability, at least nominally free from secular authority. There were plenty of ambitious clerics, and many of them lacked a noble pedigree. Those with technical skills of clear worth always have been able to get (often grudging) acceptance from their social "betters". Miners were always despised, but no one abused the mine foreman who produced a regular flow of silver (or tin or copper). Shipbuilders and bellmakers also were valued; since bellmakers were the people who first cast artillery pieces, at the right technological era, they could rise drastically in the social order.

Re: Alternate Fantasy "Earth" For fun, put one of the moons, a tiny one, in geosynchronous orbit. A geosynchronous moon has the same effect as a pole star for navigation purposes. As most people know, observing the pole star gives you latitude (assuming you're on the hemisphere that can see it). Observing a geosynchronous satellite can give you your longitude just about in the same way (again assuming you are on the hemisphere that can see it). Having a moon like this will make transoceanic navigation MUCH easier, so that intercontinental civilizations are possible without use of magical means. That way you don't have to be a wizard (or use wizardly means) to go from Europe to North America, which makes ocean-going barbarian raiders a more common threat.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings In another identity, I teach part-time at a Jesuit university. The end of the term approaches, and today was the last real lecture (there's one more lecture period, but I reserve that for review, the obligatory course evaluation, and so on). The course being an astronomy course closing with the topic of life elsewhere in the Universe, today I talked about Habitable Zones, SETI, the Fermi Paradox, and a few of the unanswered questions having to do with extraterrestrial intelligence. I had a student -- a philosophy major -- shake my hand and thank me at the end of today's lecture. It's been a good quarter.

Re: Answers & Questions

Re: Answers & Questions Q: "So after you ran out of blood plasma, what did you transfuse into that wounded Ork Berserker?" A: Three cubic kilometers of rancid tofu accelerated up to point eight lightspeed.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat NT: Plays Shakespeare would write if he were alive today. A Midsummer Night's Wet Dream (I'll let someone else pick the next theme. My attempt at an interesting one just about killed the thread.)

Re: Blowing up the Earth Did you really need to disrupt Earth to rubble, or would sterilization be adequate? Arranging for the impact of a 1000-km planetoid would do that, boiling the oceans off (among other things). Lessee, sphere of radius 500 km, density 3 tons/m^3, impact velocity 30 km/s, hm, about 1.4e+28 J. Not nearly so much energy needed. And if you just want single places erased, well, go to http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/tekton/crater_c.html and dial up what you need. A pity there's no graphics on that page.

Re: Fashionable Character... Is Kyoona vicious enough to make belittling snide remarks at those around her who just aren't as well-presented as she? (That fits in the "Total bitch" rep, but that could be just rep, not reality.) If so, then you should add something like a low-power Presence Drain with an Incantation required ("That is *so* last year, darling"). I'd also expect a higher PRE and COM in this character, probably at the expense of STR (take that down to 8, normal level), BODY (ditto), and (especially) INT. Of course, that last could be just me expressing my opinion of Total Bitches I've encountered in real life

Re: A Thread For Random Links Cosmic Rorschach test I suppose this could be turned into an "anti-smiley" of sorts.

Re: A pulp picture...the USS Manhattan You know, depending on how the propellers are arranged, this thing could carry, say, a company of parachutists and a few artillery pieces for them instead of small fixed-wing aircraft, or perhaps mixtures of the two, giving you a rapidly deployable multi-threat force. A very versatile heavy-lift platform.

Re: Idea for a legally-blind NPC and her guide dog Ginger is likely to have a well-defined spot in Carol's office which is out of the way. My guess is a "doggie bed" next to a file cabinet. She will come on voice command, after all. That way Carol can scoot around her office from desk to file cabinet to copier to whatever without Ginger having to move to keep out of the way. A limitation to remember (and possibly use in novel ways) is that dogs don't have human-normal color perception, so even by Mind Link Carol will be helpless with certain color-coded information. Similarly, if Carol reads Braille, then assuming the appropriate texts are available, her ability to do library research is unaffected by darkness, power outage, Darkness effects, etc. Again, a detail that may be useful.