Old Man

Re: Musings on Random Musings Yeah, when I was working on developing comet lightcurves two decades ago, I got to hear several long tirades about satellite flybys. For some reason, astronomers get irritated when a satellite flies through the picture during the scope time that they waited months or years to get. Cosmic rays also seemed to have an annoying tendency to hit the detector right where the observed object was, too.

Re: Tens Of Billions Of Earths I'm actually less worried about the existence of extraterrestrial life and more worried about how difficult it will be to go see it.

Re: Blueprints/Maps for sailing or oared ships If you mean the Rolemaster Campaign Classics books, I think both Pirates and Vikings had diagrams, but not deck plans per se. I might be able to check later. It's been a while since I pulled those out.

Re: "Neat" Pictures You missed a spot.

Re: Tens Of Billions Of Earths Related: "Impossible" 13 Billion Year Old Planets Discovered What I find interesting about this article is that I hadn't realized metals and heavier elements were rare in the early universe, forming over in intervening aeons in stellar cores. This seems like it would have obvious ramifications for the Drake Equation.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games I hear and obey.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. IIRC there's a strong metallic taste when you're exposed to lethal doses of radiation. I could be wrong.

Re: Human bird wings Believe me, I was extremely disappointed to learn it was faked.

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) I was leading a group of civilians--the last group of survivors--through the abandoned terraforming colony in an effort to escape the xenomorphs that were pursuing us. There were five or six of us scrambling down metal passageways and through claustrophobic storerooms. I was the only one who hadn't given up hope, and I had to constantly berate and encourage them to keep them fleeing listlessly through the installation. Several times I had to pick up or drag a civilian who'd collapsed in a puddle of despair on the floor. Eventually we came to the edge of the main facility, and furtively crossed some open ground to a kind of portable structure that turned out to be a computer lab. We shut the door, hoping that the creatures wouldn't be able to find us if we weren't in the infested building. But it didn't work. They opened the door and started coming in. We threw whatever wasn't nailed down at them and held them off for a couple of minutes, and I managed to smash one with a metal chair. But they kept coming in. Finally I got irritated and imagined myself some acidproof clothes and an M41A pulse rifle and got to work. The rifle worked beautifully, hosing the bugs out of the portable. Leaving the civilians behind, I walked out, back into the main colony. I was going on the offensive.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. The kids are watching TV when the trailer for the Avengers movie comes on: "Hey, was that Captain America?" "It is! And there's Iron Man!" "Are they going to show Thor?" "There he is! And there's the Hulk! Wow!" To my knowledge, these kids have never seen a Marvel comic book, let alone read one. I am so proud.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Now we know your weakness! Muahahaaaaa!

Re: The cranky thread Is that a request?

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Which is worse--being dealt a bad hand, or realizing you badly misplayed a pretty good one?

Re: Musings on Random Musings How can you be all out? Aren't they indestructible? Unless...

Re: Human bird wings It's a hoax. Sorry.

Re: The cranky thread I know. Baby steps, right? Thanks, by the way.

Re: The cranky thread Whose, not who's. And this method, pleasing though it is, would take forever considering the length of my list of jerks. Meanwhile, I'm not in a good place. My job is still up in the air, I'm pushing hard to try and find another one while still trying to keep up with the day-to-day crap for this one, I'm tired, I haven't started on my taxes, things in the house are slowly breaking down, there isn't any money to fix or replace them, and there's a hell of a lot of paperwork left to do for the insurance claim for the burglary.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games As did I. I think I still have mine in storage somewhere. I don't know if it's canon, but I did enjoy reading about how Alien Queens came in stages from 1 to 10, and the one in the movie was a 1...

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Was there an attempted coup in China?

Re: "Neat" Pictures He put up an answer key, for those of you who can't identify everyone in the picture at a glance.

Re: "Neat" Pictures I don't see any cowboys though.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Is it bad when you're on a conference call with the phone system manufacturer and the conference system craps out and kicks everyone off the call? That's bad, right?

Re: "Neat" Pictures You mean they're not fighting each other?

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) O_o

Re: "Neat" Pictures Thing is, it doesn't belong there--unless there was a cartoon version of Zelda that used to play on weekday afternoons. Admittedly I don't think there were any swords in Transformers, MASK, or Silverhawks.