Cancer

More than ever, I regret that the boat-slamming-into-wharf bits from The Boatniks, featuring Ernest Borgnine's inarticulate series of grunts and subsequent impact, is not present on YouTube.

Interesting suggestion that T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) may undergo outburst sometime in the coming 5  - 6 months.  It is a recurrent nova (similar outbursts having been seen in 1866 and 1946) and there is a report that it has undergone its foreshadowing "dip" that was seen prior to the 1946 outburst (see the light curve in the linked Wikipedia article).  If the suggestion is right, then it will go from about 10th magnitude (rather below naked eye brightness) up to 2nd magnitude or so (comparable to the stars in the Big Dipper).  Cor Bor itself doesn't stand out (it has only one 2nd magnitude star) but is quite convenient for observation from the US and Europe.  Once it undergoes outburst it will fade fairly quickly -- a few days -- back below the naked-eye threshold.

One can hope that someone who actually has done engineering will take over.  Probably a pipe dream on my part, though.

Well, yeah; I recognize the situation.  Remember, I taught students who weren't hard math or physical science majors.

Think of it as mental agility tests for GMs.

On 3/22/2024 at 12:17 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

Check with the government in your state to make sure that's legal. In many states, and provinces in my country, introducing unsecured human remains including ashes into the environment is barred by law. You don't want to potentially cause your kin problems after you're gone.

On 3/22/2024 at 1:16 PM, BoloOfEarth said:

I told a friend of mine that I wanted my remains scattered from an airplane over Ann Arbor.  But that I didn't want to be cremated first.  That should wake people up, I'd think...

In at least my state, you can have your remains composted.  Whatever your inheritors don't claim goes into a tree farm.  What they do claim can be used like any other compost fertilizer.  There are limitations on what they will accept, but aside from an upper limit on body weight (250 lb) they make sense.

On 2/15/2024 at 1:43 AM, Doc Democracy said:

I think the problem with magic is that it does not usually feel magical - it is like technology/science that has arbitrary rules.  Now that is because it is a game rather than a real-world thing but if magic was capricious, mysterious and challenging, then it might be much more fun.  Nightmare to game with though.

Short of creating a large, scattershot table of wildly different "unintended effects" and having the player dice off it blindly, I don't know how to game with that sort of randomness.  I can't do it as a GM; I can make up stuff on the fly, but it's way too correlated with what I've been doing or thinking about for the last few minutes/hours/days.  And, it's inevitably filtered through my own preconceptions about what is appropriate to do to characters in my game.

The problem with really unknowable of that sort is that it gives the GM carte blanche to do whatever s/he wants with the characters whenever s/he wants, and there are GMs out there who can't resist yanking that chain (or pulling those wings off of those flies) in ways that are to my thinking completely inappropriate.

I admit that I am notorious in our group for never allowing my character to be captured.  NEVER.  Doesn't matter how far along in the campaign, it's suicide when that approaches, and (in HERO terms) I pay the cost of that mechanism at character creation so it is present (if, perhaps, unexplained) from Time Zero.  As a player I admit it is irrational and it's there, and it's drawn comment before on these boards in threads that no longer exist.  And it's there because one of my earliest extramural RPG experiences was one where capture inevitably led to the functional equivalent of mind control earworm, and the GM relished abusing people (players, not characters) via that channel.  And no, that SHOULD NOT BE PART OF THE GOALS OF ANY GM'S GAME.  Got something you as a player object to doing in a game, and you express that objection in the session?  It'd happen, guaranteed, in the next session or two, if the GM could fabricate a reason to compel the character to do it.  No, that's not what an RPG should be about, but at least at the time I encountered such a GM, these made a nontrivial fraction of the RPG community.

(That experience was part of what led me to absent myself from RPGs for most of a decade, but the bigger part of that was that it coincided with most of grad school and the first couple years after it, when I really needed to focus on Other Stuff.)

On 3/5/2024 at 6:21 AM, Cygnia said:

NASA made an RPG!

 

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/online-activities/the-lost-universe/

I know already that there is at least one RPG player with NASA (and in the astronaut corps, in fact).  Hope he had a hand in this.

Hm.  Didn't realize that 'black pudding' was a RL phenomenon; as a benighted USer I had only heard of it as the old D&D cleanup crew monster.

One Christmas back in the early 1970s my brother was given a beanbag chair with a dark brown upholstery.  He squinted at it in the pre-dawn gloom and said, "It's a black pudding."

On 3/17/2024 at 9:37 AM, DShomshak said:

To be fair, I wouldn't automatically discount a retired pro athlete for federal office. IIRC Sen. Bill Bradley also had a distinguished career with the NY Knicks. A friend told me that a local fellow called Marshawn Lynch has mad skills at money management, which the federal government could probably use, and I gather he also played football pretty wall.

Also from our neighborhood is a famous football guy who served a number of terms in the House, Steve Largent.

Still lots of cap room to be generated for a bunch of teams. 

Basic circuit puzzles

"Abdominal" covers so many different things, there's very little information on which one can base speculations.

Prisoners of History, by Keith Lowe (St Martins Press, 2020)

An examination of 25 selected monuments for WW2 phenomena, ranging from things ranging from the  specific to much broader memorials.  Locations span Asia and Europe, with two in the United States (the Marine Corps memorial in D.C., and the mural in the UN Security Council Chamber).  Monuments tell stories about the cultures that build them, perhaps even more so than they tell about the events they memorialize, and those stories are usually complex, have very deep emotional and political loading, and often strong controversy both international and internal -- controversy that some cultures choose to ignore or suppress.  Highly informative, though I suspect that the political and social contexts described in the book are broader and deeper than the book lays out. 

Superficially, I wish it had better illustrations.

If you rot15 (not 13) "Bazza", you get "Qpoop".

United Liberty Paper, from Grand Theft Auto IV

On 3/13/2024 at 8:20 AM, death tribble said:

((my Vidkun Quisling))

 

Surely you jest ?

You got another Q?

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival starts on April 1.

12 hours ago, Asperion said:

A: That was actually hydrogen dunce oxide. 

Q: What do you mean that wasn't done by chloromoron?

A: Besides, the dunce was wearing ox hide, not suede.

On 3/11/2024 at 10:29 PM, Old Man said:

True gaming story: Long ago (roughly 2005, IIRC) our group was playing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign and i proposed building a device based exactly on this sort of thing.  A binocular watch camera, one arm of which included a mirror, while the other was pure refractive optics.  Since it would have stopped the GM's so-called plot in its tracks, he stonewalled it, even after I pointed to available off-the-shelf optics and gave URL pointers to astronomy image analysis software that would be able to do the almost-real-time image comparisons for detection of vampires.

Death Tribble spends his summer holidays in Weed, California, picking dandelions.