Old Man

Re: A Thread for Random Musings The damage to the car seems like no big deal, considering my wife and kid were in there. But it's still going to be expensive to replace the bumper. Expensive for the other guy, anyway.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Ah, fond memories of bad pixels, severe cross-array sensitivity variations, cosmic ray strikes, bad filters, craptastic Blackwatch 9-track tape, elaborate shell scripting to reformat data output from one app so it'd be accepted by another... sometimes I'm amazed we got anything useful at all.

Re: Musings on Random Musings That still sounds better than how it was back when I was working in the field, when the arrays had to be made pretty much by hand, I had to process a lot of flats to take the CCD noise out of the data, and in some cases you had to aim the scope slightly off so that the photons you wanted would land on a good part of the array.

Re: The cranky thread Nothing gets adopted faster than cute kittens. Not the best time of the year for kitten adoption, but still.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Well, my defenses are pretty high, so it could matter.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Is that normal or killin'?

Re: The cranky thread Haven't had it yet. I'm putting it off until later next week, so as not to be a complete grinch. The guy's a short-timer anyway. Anyone who works with him comes away with a... very bad impression. I just love it when I am given responsibility for employees that other people have hired.

Re: The cranky thread Free advice from the Old Man: If you're going to welsh on a payment and have that company refer your account to a collections agency, do not put your boss' phone number down as your work number. Especially if I am your boss.

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so I thought all elves were thieves. And magic-users.

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread Footage of waves lapping on a black sand beach, where a turtle sleeps.

Re: Rail gun damage? You could rig the extrusion press so that it extrudes the rails straight into the railgun. They could be cooled as they enter and then remelted and piped back to the molten alloy reservoir for reextrusion. Gives a new meaning to "weapons hot".

Re: Weapon Familiarity and Reality This is one of the funny things about melee hit locations, yes. In real life, just about any melee attack is a called shot. Even if you subscribe to the "where the openings are" interpretation, the numbers are still skewed--realistically most blows ought to land on the arms. And then there is the matter of weapon length--when you throw a punch in-game and roll 18 for location, it seems a little odd. But, yeah, game balance must triumph.

Re: Retiring a Character Alternatively, Errandis could trick his enemies into "tricking" him and sticking him with the Forest rather than some other, more "desirable" lands. Once it comes time to actually let go, I find it is best to employ the retired character as an NPC; an older Errandis would be the perfect patron for a new band of adventurers bent on helping to clean out the Forest. Once in a great while he can even emerge from retirement to help them out of a jam.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Arrived at the hotel for the hacking contest. It was being held in the hotel next door, but it was booked, so we wound up in this one. Elevator buttons were very strange--white, like very tall and narrow rocker switches. Checked in, headed up to the room to drop off the bags, and then went to the hotel next door for the kickoff dinner. It was a pretty standard event, the usual hotel food, some meaningless speeches and polite applause. There was one sour point where one of the women working the buffet line opined that "these are the only kinds of customers that ever give us trouble." I shot her a dark look. Dropped off the wife in our hotel room and headed back to link up with Steve, my teammate. Going back and forth between the hotels was quickly getting old. It was late, but this was a hacking contest; it had to happen late at night. Found Steve and without further preamble we jacked into the network in the lobby. The hack was pretty straightforward, just time consuming since we had to do a bit of custom coding. Getting the key back from the target also required some odd rerouting, to evade the intrusion detection mechanism. The hack completed, we hung out in the lobby waiting for the competition to finish. Before long one of the event staff came by to let us know we'd placed 11th out of 24 teams. Pretty unremarkable, way back in the pack. I briefly wondered what the other teams had done to get the information faster. She handed us our prize, which was plane tickets to Canada; Steve and I laughed, because in order to get the information back from the hacked system we'd had to route it through a travel agency's system and had bought plane tickets to Canada in the process. At this point some oddly dressed Japanese people started to wander in. Here was young man with bleached hair and a pinstriped suit with no shirt; he'd left the bottom jacket buttons unbuttoned so as to show off his well-defined abdomen. Another girl walked in with far too much eyeliner and mascara; it clashed with her intentionally-torn wedding dress. A tall man followed in a suit with broad black-and-white stripes that made him look something like a circus clown. Even his bowler hat had matching stripes. As more of these gaudily dressed people streamed in, I reasoned that they must be here for some sort of style or fashion expo. Sure enough, some of them were beginning to set up booths to sell jewelry and accessories. One strangely-dressed girl, staring at me, asked her friend, "What is he doing here?" Her friend, a petite girl with a bob cut held up to the side with a large black velvet ribbon, said, "It's okay, he knows me from the Pearl Salon." Which was a lie, of course; I'd never seen the girl before in my life, nor heard of the "Pearl Salon". This is about when my kid started to cry, waking me up.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Arrived at the hotel for the hacking contest. It was being held in the hotel next door, but it was booked, so we wound up in this one. Elevator buttons were very strange--white, like very tall and narrow rocker switches. Checked in, headed up to the room to drop off the bags, and then went to the hotel next door for the kickoff dinner. It was a pretty standard event, the usual hotel food, some meaningless speeches and polite applause. There was one sour point where one of the women working the buffet line opined that "these are the only kinds of customers that ever give us trouble." I shot her a dark look. Dropped off the wife in our hotel room and headed back to link up with Steve, my teammate. Going back and forth between the hotels was quickly getting old. It was late, but this was a hacking contest; it had to happen late at night. Found Steve and without further preamble we jacked into the network in the lobby. The hack was pretty straightforward, just time consuming since we had to do a bit of custom coding. Getting the key back from the target also required some odd rerouting, to evade the intrusion detection mechanism. The hack completed, we hung out in the lobby waiting for the competition to finish. Before long one of the event staff came by to let us know we'd placed 11th out of 24 teams. Pretty unremarkable, way back in the pack. I briefly wondered what the other teams had done to get the information faster. She handed us our prize, which was plane tickets to Canada; Steve and I laughed, because in order to get the information back from the hacked system we'd had to route it through a travel agency's system and had bought plane tickets to Canada in the process. At this point some oddly dressed Japanese people started to wander in. Here was young man with bleached hair and a pinstriped suit with no shirt; he'd left the bottom jacket buttons unbuttoned so as to show off his well-defined abdomen. Another girl walked in with far too much eyeliner and mascara; it clashed with her intentionally-torn wedding dress. A tall man followed in a suit with broad black-and-white stripes that made him look something like a circus clown. Even his bowler hat had matching stripes. As more of these gaudily dressed people streamed in, I reasoned that they must be here for some sort of style or fashion expo. Sure enough, some of them were beginning to set up booths to sell jewelry and accessories. One strangely-dressed girl, staring at me, asked her friend, "What is he doing here?" Her friend, a petite girl with a bob cut held up to the side with a large black velvet ribbon, said, "It's okay, he knows me from the Pearl Salon." Which was a lie, of course; I'd never seen the girl before in my life, nor heard of the "Pearl Salon". This is about when my kid started to cry, waking me up.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Yeah, there's two levels of catfight: silly, and extremely-dirty-to-the-death.

Re: What is Your Favorite Item? Going further back, there was also the Deck of Many Things that got turned into a weapon. After a few lucky draws we realized that we'd pulled most of the good results, leaving a deck with an 80% chance of something really bad happening to whoever pulled the next card. So there were a few instances of the cleric trying to convince certain people to "pick a card, any card." GM let us get away with it a couple of times.

Re: What is Your Favorite Item? Had a character once that got hold of "the Strongsword". It was essentially unbreakable but otherwise unremarkable as a weapon. However, its wielder gained like +10 STR, CON, and BODY, and several defenses as well. The character in question was a total loser rogue/mage, who upon learning just what he'd picked up, had the thing tethered to his wrist (and often bound his hand to the hilt with leather straps as well). Many amusing situations ensued, like only ever having one hand free, trying to use its abilities in places where swords were frowned upon, and not being able to drop the sword lest he die instantly.

Re: Musings on Random Musings The second rule of Fight Like A Girl Club is... "Not the hair!!"

Re: Rail gun damage? How hard would it be to employ disposable one-shot rails? Not very sexy, but might be more feasible than using magic superconducting unobtainium that doesn't exist.

Re: Do any of you still play 4th edition and FH Circa 1990? The magic system discussion on that second link is extremely interesting.

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads

Re: Musings on Random Musings No, he meant tribblers.

Re: Musings on Random Musings But do they double dip? No salsa for them!

Re: A Thread for Random Musings We should have company over more often. It forces the wife to clean up, and the house actually looks nice when it's clean.