Lawnmower Boy

Re: The cranky thread So I got to kick a bum out of the store last night. Manager's privilege, yay. Not much to see. Tall man, wasting away till his sweatpants hung like a would-be gangbanger's jeans, incoherent, open wounds on his face, swearing, hands and fingers curling inwards in that weird retracted position that gives away severe nerve damage. He got a bottle of mouthwash because neither the security guard nor I wanted to touch his incredibly dirty clothes. And besides, it was cold out, and he's not going to live much longer. All par for the course, but look him in the face and you see teeth like ...I've seen the mouths of Punjabi peasant women come over to live with their descendants, women who walk like they had to wait 20 years to have their fistula repaired, and I've never seen teeth like that. They were so snaggled that even the healthy ones ought to have been pulled. He was otherwise a youngish White man, but evidently in all his years of life no-one, not parents nor social services ever took him to see a dentist. Way to go, society. Which I guess is a way of saying, "way to go, me."

Re: Time Travel Wish List? Earliest times: Teotiuuacan c. 200AD, Cahokia, c. 1200AD; Uruk c. 3100BC, Erlitou, c. 1700BC. Ancient Middle East: Hattusas, c. 1300BC; the Egyptian Delta, c. 1185BC, because I so want Alessandra Nibbi's theory about the "Sea Peoples" to be true; 610BC, Assyria, c. 610BC. Classical times: Miletus, c. 550BC, Athens every generation or so to watch a new layer of manure laid down. Massilia, c. 210BC to get a well-informed neutral's perspective on what is really going on with this Roman-Carthaginian War. Old India: Harappa c. 1500BC; meet Asoka, and the Buddha, wherever/whenever; Nailandia, c. 1200AD. Old Europe: Lindisfarne, January 8, 792AD (Old Style): "Viking raid" in January my arse. Whodunnit? Inner Asia: Semipalatinsk, c. 1600AD. Semipalatinsk doesn't have a history, you say? That's what happens when history (in this case the Zungarian Empire) gets erased. The Reconnaissance: Calicut when da Gama arrives; and I want to launch a massive surveillance operation all up and down the east coast of North America from about 1492 to 1700. The mystery here is mass history, not individuals, but it is a real one nonetheless. That's enough for now.

Re: WWYCD Fantasy HERO Edition #1: The Princess Shell Game Monsters=melee=XP. Or loot. Stupid Hero with its session awards. Anyway, the key thing is to make sure that the last one released is the real Holly, so you get all the encounters. Hmm, that might require some thought... Nah, thought hurts. We kill stuff.

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? Everyone loves to trace things to origins, even 19th century German liberal historians. Hence this here myth of "primitive Germanic democracy." 'Tis better by far to trace things to the moment of debate. For the "divine right of kings," that moment is the 1590s--1600s, when the French were fighting a civil war over whether kings were elected by the Estates or whether the slightest drop of legitimate blood made one a king according to the laws of primogeniture. Meanwhile, the dominant view in London was that Elizabeth had the free right to choose a successor, Rome gave that right to "the people," and Edinburgh argued that Elizabeth could choose, but Henry VII could not. There's no right answer written into the nature of things. In a fantasy campaign the old "the king's health is the land's health" thing works perfectly well, but so does the "snakepit of conspiring interests." Depends on whether you want light tones or dark ones. If I were doing it I would go for both, starting with conspiracy and intrigue, but with the PCs discovering that it is as true as it is corny that only the rightful king can heal nature and defeat Deuse Baaj.

Re: Officially, is Teleios Canadian? I have it on good authority that Teleios loves the Leafs, tunes in Sheilagh Rogers at 10 am every morning without fail, voted for Pierre and can't wait to vote for Justin, wears a Tilley hat on his walks, longs for the days when King of Kensington was on TV, has all Rita McNeill's CDs, prefers Sylvia to Ian (and late Ian, at that) . . . Because he's an evil Canadian

Re: How we taught the Internet to dream "I dreamed it was still 1999, and I went to a dot.com IPO that I didn't even know I was scheduled for somehow, and I was the only massively distributed computing resource there that was naked, and this new database I really, really like was kissing Microsoft."

Re: Pulp-Era Futuristic Space City That's my place, fifth spire on the left. 382nd floor, apartment 22b Well, technically, anyway. The elevator's been out of service since before Christmas, so I'm living in the stairwell, instead.

Re: Lost cities under Russian lake... Now I just anonymously denounce Keith Curtis to the Assyrian-American Anti-Defamation League*, and I get all his neat stuff! Uhm...you do have neat stuff, don't you, Mr. Curtis? *Doesn't actually exist, but nevertheless is fairly active on Wikipedia.

Re: Lost cities under Russian lake... Pierre Briant argues strongly in his history of the Persian Empire that there was no "Bactrian civilisation" as once proposed, that the archaeological remnants date to Persian times. Issyk Kul is far north of Bactria, anyway. That said, there is something called (IIRC) the Bactria-Margiana Oasis Complex that is now attracting attention, and really, six of one, half-dozen of the other. And "Mesopotamia" is the Classical Greek name for a region that the natives have been calling "Iraq" for above a thousand years. Archaeologists are usually careful to distinguish when sites fall into the territories of modern Iran, Syria and Turkey, so why exactly are we saying "Mesopotamia" instead of "Iraq?"

Re: Deathstroke Vancouver thriller writer Ian Slater ran off a quickie in the 90s about a sudden landslide into the reservoir behind the Mica Dam on the Canadian part of the Columbia river. The Columbia is copiously dammed way down into Washington State, and the resulting rogue wave knocked down every dam along the way right down to the Hartford Nuclear Reservation, where a great big flood picked up all the nuclear waste, carrying it to the sea and Ending the World! While rivers don't work that way, there's no reason that they couldn't in your campaign, and the disaster would happen out West, and so would be far more interesting than the nuclear reactors in Ontari-ari-ario blowing up. Given Ontario's weather, I can hardly see how background radiation would make it any more unliveable, anyway.

Re: Lost cities under Russian lake... This is way cool and possibly very important, since it may shed light on links between Iraq (isn't it really time we stopped saying "Mesopotamia?") and China at the dawn of equestrian cvilisation. That said, I doubt that there are any historians who believe that Lake Issyk Kul, as distinct from a hypothetical Inner Eurasian disease reservoir, was the source of the Black Death. It would be easier to find a historian who didn't believe in the Black Death. What?

Re: Submarine Aircraft carriers of the world! Actually, K-boats did "fight" in WWI. Turns out that vessels designed for low-observability surface operation don't exactly mesh with fleets of 40+ battleships, and it gets worse when it takes 20 minutes to submerge. There's an interesting study of the naval architecture of very large conventional submarines published in the interwar Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (I'll admit that as a citation that's a little light, but to do better I'd have to walk all the way across the apartment and fire up the work computer, and then I'd have practically nothing left of my day off!) oh, yes, my point: abstract: "Youse guys are insane. These boats will capsize more often than they submerge."

Re: The Secret History of America. Oh, thank Heavens; I thought I was the only person out there who couldn't get through recent Stephenson. As for "secret history," it is my understanding that recent DNA studies suggest what was already pretty implied by the record. Native Americans east of the Mississippi integrated into American society pretty invisibly --at least from the outside. Andrew Jackson has the broad, flattened head of Catawba nobility. Not to say that he was a halfbreed Catawba Indian rather than Scoth-Irish as he claimed but the suspicion is there. Perhaps the clans of Cahokia (or more likely Kaskaskia) survive today, carrying on their old secret agenda....

Re: Steampunk/Victorian fantasy setting questions Bronze will work fine in cannons. There were still bronze guns in WWI, not that far behind the curve. Muskets/rifles are another matter. The same properties that give iron alloys superior tensile strength and hardness also give it enhanced resistance to chemical attack. the relatively low melting point of aluminum is also a concern, and I doubt beryllium is much better. Magically obtained titanium should work just fine. But that's a pretty humungous magico-technical leap. Poul Anderson used "degaussed" iron in one of his steampunk fantasies. Why not just do the same?

Re: Champions Of The North I've seen it snow in July, specifically Bastille Day, on a ridge 500 metres above Barriere, British Columbia. That's south of Edmonton, but they sure don't root for the Leafs there. Vive le Club d'Hockey Canadien!

Re: Glassy Mars I'm 43, too, and perhaps because I have longer to wait than Bygoneyrs (my parents haven't died yet, so logically I'm going to live forever!), I just ask that no-one rushes into this. I do not want to hear about the first voyagers to Mars dying miserably halfway there.

Re: Rail gun damage? I think an extrusion press would work better than casting. Gives you that much more excuse for describing the inside of your starship as smelling of hydraulic fluid, too.

Re: Turakian Age Q: Gunpowder? According to my good old Eleventh Edition of the Britannica, people used to use saltpetre as an inhaled treatment for asthma and whooping cough. Take a piece of paper and soak it in a water-saltpetre solution (and that may be as easy to make as draining off water from a really fetid swamp and letting it evaporate for a while). Let the paper dry, put it in a brazier, and put it under the patient's mouth. Light the paper and -poof- a blast of black smoke with considerable amounts of stimulative nitrates (plus carbon black and sulphates in my example above) are released. Breath in, and, presto, instant symptomatic relief as air passages dilate. I have no idea when doctors started doing this, but it's all pretty much old fashioned materia medica. Point is, fantasy authors sometimes make a big deal of the "invention" of gunpowder. The issue here seems to be one of inventing a new use.

Re: [Review] Hidden Lands The Empyreans are cool, even if a whole army of them done got beat down by Takofanes. But give me them Lemurians any day!

Re: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Bunnyverse Wait --that dowdy green stuff the tourists use is your real money? I thought it was some kind of prank you were pulling. Also, it is currently worth a couple pennies more than ours again.

Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska Poor Siberian primitives, limited to the crudest battle management radars, made of fur and flint. I can just imagine the hand-oiled parabolic antennae, the yelping huskies pulling, pulling to keep it rotated on the meteor. Oh, I'm sorry, I think I interrupted a serious conversation. I'll go away now.

Re: Weather Generator You could use current weather forecasts for a geographically appropriate region. Nothing's more random than weather, and this Internet thing seems to have lots of weather forecasts on it.

Re: Oh baby In America, bikers change gears with an up-and-down peddle and handlebar clutch. In Soviet Russia tank, gears change you! The great thing about imitating Yakov Smirnov is that you don't have to be funny. I'm probably going to have a nightmare about trying to ride this thing tonight.

Re: The cranky thread Politics is far less important than I once thought. You can't change the world by campaigning to bring about the perfect system. It only exists in your head. Want to make a contribution? Raise a child. (But don't look at me. I can't even get a date.)

Re: [Review] Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks Also, a very large proportion of them are 350 pointers, making CKC an excellent set of character example builds.