Pattern Ghost

Since fruit qualify . . . Q is for Quince

I hope they get hard time. Also, pepper spray followed by TASER is not a good recipe. A TASER will light that stuff up, even the stuff labeled non-flammable. Not that these clowns gave a crap about the safety of their victim.

Thanks! Been wanting to see this one.

Hmm, I'm not seeing it. I'm only seeing purchases for $19.99 and up.

Yep, that's stated. Again, not a huge step away from a .308. The round has better capability out at 500+ yards due to it's sectional density, but at short ranges -- and we're talking about school shootings -- there are better options that are already available. If people aren't gravitating to .308 weapons, then they probably aren't going to spring for the sure to be very expensive hybrid cased ammo. Those cases have 3 components. Normal ammunition is expensive enough these days, so I don't think this is going to turn into the go to round for school shooters. Among those with the mindset to engage the police, it might be some concern. Even if a school shooter were armed with a heavier caliber, I don't see doctrine changing regarding immediate engagement of mass shooters/school shooters. Honestly, I don't see the need for the rules on barrel length for rifles and shotguns. We've had a lot (far, far, far too many) of mass shooting incidents since they hit the market and only one case where the user used a "pistol" with a "brace" on it that I recall. You could just as well build an AR pistol then shove a regular stock on it, or toss a pistol upper on your rifle lower, if you wanted to go commit mass murder. It'd be the lesser offense. But for the decades before these braces were introduced (coincidentally also by SIG), nobody was bothering to do either. A standard carbine already breaks down to a length that can be easily concealed, should one want. Regardless, if it goes to court, it could end badly. (Or well, depending on what side of the debate one falls on, I suppose.) All that aside, I confess to being highly amused at people taking offense to what was obviously a loop hole in a poorly-written rule being closed. Guns are tools . . . that fling a projectile at range, projecting enough force to cause catastrophic damage to tissue. If only we had a simple way to state all that. Like a single word. Maybe we should think of one. While we're at it, we probably need more "w" words . . . 🤔 What guns are not, is toys. My father was vehemently against letting me or my brother have BB guns or pellet guns because they might make us look at them like toys. Even a lowly Daisy or Crosman pump up pellet gun can kill someone. I was looking for a case that happened locally a few years back, with something like a Daisy 880, but instead found a case from November of 2022, in Beaver Dam, KY. Ironically, I lived there a year in high school . . . and used to go shooting my friends' pellet guns (against my father's wishes). Total aside, that, but weird coincidence. Guns may have a recreational use, but no gun is a toy. Flinging projectiles around is a power that requires great responsibility.

It won't change anything in the case of school shootings. Also, this new weapon system's potential civilian version is being seriously overhyped. The scope will be prohibitively expensive, and it's the key component. And there are plenty of things that can penetrate level IV armor already available. Not to mention that actual AP ammunition is already illegal to sell. So, I don't think the concept of engaging the shooter is going to be altered by this. It's a lot of hype, just like "cop killer bullets" were hype. SIG is hyping up their already commercially available piston-driven M4 clones. Which doesn't mean much except releasing them with the civilian version of their new ammunition (see edit below).The civilian version of this magical ammunition will not likely be any more armor piercing than existing loads for the AR platform. SIG is hyping this with typical gun company marketing material, trying to make their new thing sound cool and worth buying. Edit: Here's the spec of the civilian version of the ammo, from Wikipedia: This isn't particularly potent. Not more so than any number of rounds already on the market. Edit: Just for clarity, it's potent for it's size, but it isn't bringing new levels of lethality to the table. .308 win / 7.62x51 ARs have been on the market for decades and are far more potent, for example. The Uvalde cowards were trained on school shooting response. The current doctrine being trained is to engage, not to sit back. So, yes, in this case they had an expectation to act. It's currently far less time and effort to simply buy a gun. 3d printing a firearm isn't quite so convenient as the press leads people to believe. I'm not a huge fan of Vice on these sorts of things, but this video was pretty well put together and gives some good insight to the whole process: It's not quite there yet. Not enough to see widespread criminal use. (Though materials technology keeps advancing.) When talking 3d printing, you either do what this guy did to print the frame of a gun, then finish it by fitting it to the rest of the mechanisms, which gives you a somewhat less than durable frame that's a pain to assemble and get to function reliably, or you do the whole thing on a 3d printer, getting a single shot gun that's no more viable than making a zip gun from parts from a hardware store. Using a home CNC machine will produce a more durable receiver, but is still a pain to get working. Frankly, I'd prefer to be shot at by someone using a 3d printed gun, because it's far more likely to malfunction. I think we don't have to worry too much about future tech, since the government seems to have figured out that the technology needs to be regulated. While it's legal to manufacture a firearm for your own use, making it so easy that any idiot can do it is more than a little problematic. The tech is far from idiot proof, and I think the government (half of it anyway) is wary of letting things advance further without regulation.

Cowardice. The doctrine is to go in and engage ASAP, and not to wait for backup. The new issue weapon isn't a ray gun, and won't change the doctrine. These people were simply cowards with poor leadership.

Adobe's business practices have always been . . . I can't put that word on the forum. Not surprised.

How so? These are two different circumstances. Storage is what you do with weapon not under your direct control.

The matter's a bit far from settled at this point. It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

This isn't the first time they've played chicken with the debt ceiling. I think it's political grandstanding for the ignorant among their base, and they'll cave in after they pushed it as far as the holders of their purse strings will allow.

Ah, I might have noticed, except for two things: 1. You didn't say "LOOK!!!! NEW TRAILER!!!" and b. I don't click on Twitter links.

So, it sounds more like running afoul of something like our ITAR rules, more or less. Here's what Malwarebytes gave me when it blocked the site: And here's the Firefox error message: Sorry for the size of those, the Windows Snipping Tool blows stuff up a bit. Sometimes these types of warnings are overly cautious, but sometimes the site's actually been compromised. I err on the side of caution. An online site security checker doesn't see any issues with it, so it could just be they have a technical glitch going on. On the third hand, the same checker says it's a WordPress site, which tend to be easy to compromise. Their WP version, theme, and most of their plugins are out of date. Those are all security vulnerabilities. So, rolls the dice and take your chances. Seems like a legit site on an iffy platform, I guess. And they exaggerate a bit.

New Quantumania trailer: Kang looks a lot less jokey in this than in the comics. Jonathan Majors was really good in Lovecraft Country and looks to be really good in this. I'm almost hyped about it. Like on the edge of hyped.

I get a security error on that page, and no other news sites seem to be covering the story. Might be suspect.

Some of the older villains books would use that kind of shorthand. Like "Use X's character sheet, with these psych limits and change this or that skill or power." Where they direct the GM to simply swap out a couple things about an existing character. Really not a bad way to do things to save time. The game is more about the special effects and RP than the exact mechanic.

Doing some more experimentation with MJ today. This time, playing around with Neji mode and Image to Image rendering. So, I started with this sketch/color map I made in about two minutes: Uploaded that to MJ with a prompt describing the scene, in the style of Miyazaki. Got some output, found one I liked, then upscaled it. Then, I took the upscale and fed it back into the same prompt, picked another to upscale, and fed that one back with the same prompt, but instead of "Miyazaki style" put "anime style" and added "detailed" because the background was way too muddy. Final result: One thing I noticed is that the ponytail didn't come through from the original to the AI. I don't think it caught the detail because the outer line of the ponytail follows what would be the outer line of the general body. That's actually bad composition anyway. Even when I put "ponytail" in the prompt, I mostly got the short haircuts, and that's probably the AI enforcing genre conventions. So, between the two, I got what I got. Still not shabby for a collaboration with a computer. *EDIT: Forgot to mention: One key here is to generate grids until you get something you like, then upscale one. Then right-click on the upscaled pic and "copy image location." Take that, paste it as the first part of the prompt, then re-enter your text prompt and run it again. Doing this over several iterations will add in details. Your very first result will be a lot less detailed and not look that impressive most likely. The upscale function increases resolution, but to do so must add details to the picture. So, multiple upscales = more details. At least as I understand it.

Sorry for chiming in late, just saw this thread. My condolences to Darren's family, friends, and all those who knew him better. I only know him from the forum, and from his contributions to the system through his writing. The impression he left me with was overwhelmingly positive. He'll be missed. Rest in peace, Darren.

The Scholomance (from passing mention in (Dracula )

I fed a MJ four image spread back into MJ and got this interesting result trying to turn the below into a black and white line art: I didn't really think MJ would do a straight conversion, but the result was interesting.

Congress is the wrong branch to be directing the police in the first place, that's squarely Executive, not Legislative. (I know logic doesn't often enter into things, but still, seems wrong.)

My niece and her boyfriend were renting a cabin in the area where he was arrested, when he was arrested.

OK, so I finally got bitten by the MidJourney bug because I had to set up a Discord account for something else. After a little fiddling around, I made some images for a hypothetical noir planetary romance story I've had rattling around in the back of my brain: Our hero: a troubled war veteran, after catching a minor case of death from getting involved in the wrong situation with the best of intentions, awakens in a ruined city in an alien desert, after dreaming of a woman who has haunted his nights ever since he woke up in that Army hospital tent, our titular Jade Eyed Princess: He's astonished to find his old war wounds healed, but is soon set upon by a group of primitive hunters who don't look quite human. These, he will later dub Big Heads. First, he must escape! Which he does. Fleeing into the desert, dawn breaks and he realizes he really isn't in Kansas (or the Bronx) anymore. The need for water sets in, so he tries to obtain some from a cactus-like plant which lashes out at him with tentacle-like appendages, and nearly takes him down with a fast-acting poison. He manages to drag himself to a cave before the survivor of the Big Head hunting party shows back up with his clan. He awakens to find an unusual, slightly grotesque, yet somehow adorable creature . . . chewing on his wounded leg! He's alarmed, and the creature jumps back and makes submissive gestures. He hears an amused laugh from the back of the cave, and turns to find an ophidian woman with iridescent skin watching over him. She assures him the creature is only trying to clean the poison out of the wound, and in his fevered state, our Hero decides to just roll with it, because none of this is probably real anyway. Some time later, the pair (trio!) are found by the Big Head search party and decide to deal with the situation head on. Which means a trial by combat. The festivities are interrupted before they begin by a Royal Navy airship. The Big Heads have been in conflict with the Empire for some time. This is because the Empire controls the weather machines and has been withholding rain from the desert side for months, forestalling their brief annual rainy season, and the Big Heads have been raiding border settlements. However, it turns out the airship is also looking for their Immortal Princess. Our Hero and Snake Lady (mostly Snake Lady) broker a tenuous truce and enlist the Big Heads to help with the search for the Princess. This, because the ship's commander discloses that the weather machines have been taken over by a rebel faction. All hope that the Princess can help sort this out. Of course, there's that trial by combat to sort out first. Our band finds the Princess. Hero, Snake Lady, and Head Big Head all fly off to The mountain city capitol of the Empire, where Hero is fascinated by the Princess despite the warnings of Snake Lady. Political negotiations ensue. A small force lead by our Hero sets out to secure the weather machines. That's all I have in pictures. Hero will find out some unpleasant truths when he meets older versions of himself in the form of both the Emperor and the rebel leader, and begins to once again question the reality of his situation . . . He's being made a plaything of by the Jade Eyed Princess. Some writing software, like Scrivener, has a feature to save inspiration pics or reference pics for writers while they work on a story. I've always disregarded this habit, but I'm kind of warming up to it! MidJourney is pretty cool stuff.

Hope everyone is having a very Merry Christmas and joyous winter holiday celebrations!

Just want to point out that I was talking about Cavill. Also going to point out two more things: Cavill was runner up to Craig for the role, and lost out to Craig b/c he was too young at the time. He's now 39. Craig was 38 when he was in Casino Royale. So, the Bond franchise runners likely have him in the back of their minds. As for his size? He doesn't walk around looking jacked constantly. He's a big guy without the Witcher/Superman level of muscle, at 6'1" and a pretty broad shouldered build, but he's not super bulky just walking around at his normal fitness level. I've met Sean Connery, who's an inch taller and seemed taller yet, b/c he's also a big, broad-shouldered guy. He had a fair run on Bond. The big question is how they want to go with the next Bond? Do they want to go with ex-military action guy again, or suave Roger Moore type? I'm not overly familiar or a real fan of the Bond character, but I've read all of two short stories featuring him, and the ex-military action guy was stressed more in that material. So, it's definitely a facet of his character. All that aside, I'm not too worried about Cavill's career. He's already got a dream gig, with producer credit, so more creative control, lined up. I'll watch that if it makes it to streaming. If not that, I'm sure he'll be around to entertain us for some time to come. He's talented, and seems to be a very composed, decent sort of guy. Here's an interview with Cavill, where he discusses that bit about his earlier Bond near miss that I mentioned: