Zeropoint

Hmm. Well, exciting new physics would have been nice, but experimental confirmation of our current understanding is also good.

I'm still holding out for FTL or kickass energy weapons, though.

I find it fascinating that when presented with unfamiliar images like that, we can instinctively recognize that we're looking at something very large or very small (probably because we're used to what us-sized things look like) but we can't tell which.

"There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery."

22 hours ago, clnicholsusa said:

It's America. Anything scary, different, or somewhat annoying gets to eat lead. So we give the wasps cute names to make it less likely that we'll destroy our personal property trying to blow the little suckers away.

I ran into a spicy sky raisin outside my house just the other day, and didn't set my house on fire.

In the US, people of the Nazi-esque varieties tend to be the WASP types as well, so I guess it fits.

I don't know if GURPS 4e retains this feature, but 3e had damage in game terms scale linearly with energy in real-world terms. Perfectly reasonable from a pure math and simulationist perspective . . . but it leads to two problems. The first is that die codes get so big that you can't physically roll for them; I seem to recall that a nuclear bomb did something like three million d6 of damage. The second, and actually worse, of the problems is how damage, scaled in such a fashion, interacts with defense values. Outside of a swords-to-small-arms kind of range, it's easy to wind up with a very narrow window between "attacks bounce off harmlessly" and "closed-casket funeral". In fact, with a sci-fi setting, you could get that effect from one shot to the next with the same weapon and target. As defense numbers and damage die codes go up, human hit points become a proportionally smaller piece of the total, and variation between rolls of the dice can easily take you from "under your defense value" to "exceeds your defense value by more than twice your hitpoints".

What an interesting sound. I guess we're hearing the range structures as much as the gun, in that video.

We really need some doctors and vets to team up and settle the centaur anatomy question.

I tried to read it in Chris Hemsworth's voice, but the diction is all wrong.

I saw an image with screenshots and dialogue purporting to be from an interview with Abrams. If accurate--and I have no reason to suspect otherwise--it explains a lot.

Abrams said that when he was younger, his friends all liked Star Trek and dragged him into watching it . . . but he didn't like it, and thought it was too "philosophical". Then he explained that when making his Star Trek movies, he tried to get away from that, and make movies that regular moviegoers could enjoy.

He quite literally set out to deliberately make movies that weren't like Star Trek.

I used to watch TV. Then shipped out to sea with the Navy in the middle of a TV season and didn't pick it back up when I got back to the States. Just before my second deployment, on the last night in my apartment, I went to watch some TV to kill some time before bed, and discovered that the whole time I'd been living there, I'd never connected the cable to the TV--I'd only been using it for watching DVDs and playing video games. I quite watching TV without even noticing.

That was over ten years ago. These days, broadcast TV with commercial breaks just seems like FAR too much viewing time is taken up with ads, and most programming seems too "fluffy" for my tastes; too little content stretched to fill too much time.

I don't watch TV and I don't miss it.

As your Heresy stat goes up, you get bonuses to interacting with xenos, technology skills, and generally everything involving creativity and unorthodox solutions, but you get penalties to interacting with any of the Imperial orders. Maybe you become more visible/accessible to Warp beings? I'm not really up on 40K fluff.

If you switch from calling the stat "Heresy" to "Orthodoxy", then the CoC "Sanity" model works really well. Learning things reduces your Orthodoxy stat. Your Orthodoxy stat is what you roll against to avoid losing Orthodoxy. Exposure to evidence that the world doesn't work the way that the official Imperium doctrine says it does calls for an Orthodoxy roll. When you talk to Inquisitors you have to make an Orthodoxy roll to avoid inadvertently saying something heretical, etc.

You're right, I could have put that a lot less abrasively. We all deserve better than that here. Vondy, I appologize.

Well, I watched the video, and now I understand what you mean by "finite" and "infinite" in this context, at least.

I want to keep America going (infinite), partly because it's my country, partly because I live here, partly because of how America affects the rest of humanity, and partly because of the values ensconced in its system of government. Right now the Democrats don't really seem like they're much of a net gain in those areas, but once again, the Republicans seem like they're rapidly moving the country in the wrong direction.

Vondy, I went back and looked at your list of libertarian values. With the exception of "friendliness and good faith across the aisle", they look like standard Republican/Tea Party points; right-wing ideas very carefully couched in polite terms; what they call "dog whistles". I hope I'm misreading your intent.

Life support for extreme heat, life support to withstand smoke and fumes, and some resistant ED with the Limitation "only against heat/fire".

And, if your character is a hero: some suppress/drain fire effects. Now you can walk into a fire and put it out, which gives you an easy way to demonstrate that you're a good guy. Firefighters will love you!

Hell's Armory: hand to hand killing attack vs. ED with variable advantage. The special effect is that a weapon of your choice, made of solid hellfire, appears in your hands.

If at all possible, I would suggest playing a session or two with a pre-built character in the same genre that you'll be building your character for. You'll have a much better feel for what the bits on your character sheet MEAN after seeing them work in actual play.

Also, if you're playing supers, you simply MUST understand Hero's separation of game mechanics from what it calls "special effects".

As far as I can tell by reading his posts here, Vondy's values are "being above it all" and "contempt for the less englightened". Vondy, note that I'm not accusing you of actually feeling that way; just saying that it's how your posts come across.

Quote

 In the meantime, I'mpointedly voting libertarian with a clear conscience and wagging my ballot in your face.

How does that help anyone?

3 hours ago, Vondy said:

I'm not going to play "pick your poison." I'm going to say "don't drink the poison."

"Not drinking the poison" in this case would mean having neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in power, I suppose. I simply don't see that as a realistic option here. Yes, we need voting reform to make third parties more viable, and yes, at least one state (Pennsylvania, I think) has taken a step in that direction, but we are NOT there yet, and we are going to have Democrats and Republicans running the show for the next six to ten years no matter how lofty your ideals are.

I don't WANT to be stuck voting for the lesser of two evils, because the lesser of two evils is still evil. When that's all you've got to choose from, though, the lesser of two evils is also still lesser.

3 hours ago, Vondy said:

Voting for the dems to spite the republicans won't "put the fire out" in terms of my political values.

You misunderstand, or misrepresent. I'm not voting Democrat to spite the Republicans; I'm voting Democrat to stop the Republicans. If you can't see a meaningful difference between the policies and goals of the two parties, then your understanding of the world is so different from mine that I don't see how we can have a meaningful conversation on this subject.

I sent a resignation letter to the NRA but haven't heard back from them. I guess if the whole organization collapses, that accomplishes the same goal.

You know, I completely agree with Vondy that thinking about the long term is very important, and that preventing fires is better than putting out fires, metaphorically speaking. The problem is that we are currently on fire. The Republicans are running actual Nazi candidates in some places, FFS.

I don't care much for the Democrats. They're too hawkish, too much in the pocket of big business, and too afraid to push for significant fixes. The republicans, on the other hand, are actively opposing everything Vondy says he's for. Anyone who values "maximizing personal liberty and opportunity and prosperity for every single American" needs to be opposing the Republicans wherever they can. Help us put this fire out, and then we can talk about fire prevention.

I'd add a criterion . . . or rather, encapsulate some of his criteria a bit differently: An ordinary person should be able to draw the flag 1) with no special artistic ability, 2) from memory, 3) with just a single pen or pencil. This obviously includes the "works in black and white" requirement, sets a limit on the amount of detail, and sets a practical limit of three colors (blank, filled, and hatched). Equally obvious is that my criterion doesn't fit a lot of real world national flags; we've got way too many flags that are just a set of three stripes.

I assume it's threatening to them to be put on equal footing with other kinds of "people with adjectives" instead of just being "people" by default.

22 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:

Power comes to those who take it, I guess.  Without a care.  The country can burn as long as the billionaires have theirs, eh?

Maybe it's time to start burning billionaires?

Birds. Specifically corvids. They come in a variety of sizes for a variety of missions, they're smart, black goes with anything, and they're menacing enough to be cool and fit evil plans (would you take a supervillain with an army of parakeets seriously?) but not so menacing that they wouldn't fit for a hero. They leave options open.

I discovered electro-swing earlier this year. I've been really enjoying the monthly "best of" collections by Xefox Music and Prestige Vibes. I'm listening to this one right now: