Old Man

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! Did you ever run into a question as to what was considered 'adjacent' for the smartgun sweep rule? We eventually ruled that diagonally adjacent bugs didn't count, just to make the game a bit more balanced.

Re: I love me some xenomorphs!

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! I am tempted to come over to your house and demand to play that. That was such an awesome game.

Re: Musings on Random Musings As if any of our org charts had any bearing on reality to begin with.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! The funny thing is that Giger's designs for the Alien film were really tame for him. A friend of mine once gave me a coffeetable book of his art for Christmas. I kind of wish he hadn't.

Re: The cranky thread Egad. Well, if you need to vent or commiserate in the coming months, we'll be here. It does put yesterday's who-left-the-freezer-door-slightly-ajar-overnight screaming match into perspective. Or not.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Fantasy City-Ship? It probably has, it's just that internet searching for images is really not that great. Plus, copyright is nearly always enforced for decent imagery of any kind.

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ... The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I think everyone's perception of World War I is horrific trench warfare, but I was not up to speed on the circumstances that led up to that situation. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which details the first thirty days of the war, takes a truly dizzying amount of source material and turns it into a pretty gripping tale of interpersonal relations and high level European politics. It's a lot like watching a train wreck--the arbitrary German decision to invade, French personality conflicts, British hesitation to get involved, Winston Churchill the dangerous loose cannon, the hopelessly rotten Russian government, and a lot of dumb luck combine to create this inevitable and fascinating tragedy. I was surprised to learn just how close the Allies came to losing the war in those first thirty days. The book is a bit dry; since it's a historical work, there are no conversations, just the occasional quote. And the experiences of the people actually doing the fighting are not really detailed here. It's beyond the scope of the book, true, but it would have helped to get a sense of what WWI non-trench warfare was like. As a work of history, though, it's incredible; the list of sources and references in the back is about as long as anything written by Steve Long. I give it four out of five stars.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I literally spent the entire morning adjudicating a heated debate over whether we should store the marketing trinkets in plastic bins or cardboard boxes. These people were visibly upset with each other. I calmed and soothed and commiserated, while the whole time the voices in my head were screaming "seriously?!"

Re: Fantasy City-Ship? I poked around on images.google.com, but you may be kind of screwed. Best I can suggest is taking an aerial city image and 'shopping it.

Re: Another weird science post: Laser Recoil! Momentum is easier to compute because momentum is always conserved whether the collision is inelastic or not. Energy is often wasted in heating, deforming, or breaking up the colliding bodies. Well, that's not always "wasting", but you know what I mean.

Re: Valuable info for your Star Hero Campaign! And knowing is half the battle!

Re: New information about Hot Jupiters They must be captures. It seems to me that there are probably more stray sub-stellar gas giants floating around in space than people really think about. But logically, not every accreting body will reach the critical mass necessary for stellar ignition.

Re: Another weird science post: Laser Recoil! Yes, but it would be a much bigger problem for the victim. Muahahaaa!

Re: The cranky thread That's a bad one. Hope she pulls through.

Re: Anyone else want one of these? They should have take preorders and developed one, then. Stupid Caterpillar.

Re: Sneaky GM Thing: Healing + other effects with Transform? Man, what kind of GM are you? Here is a perfectly good opportunity to screw over the players and you're blowing it off on a technicality.

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) Sifu didn't like me. Of course it hadn't been my idea to seek him out in the first place. The meeting had been arranged by an associate of mine who was sort of a combination friend, employer, and customer. I was already known as one of the most deadly assassins on Earth, but gun combat was my forte; my associate had strongly hinted that I should bone up on my hand to hand. He pointed me toward the best martial arts master he knew, who ran his operation out of a luxury resort that he happened to own. So I strode into the lobby of that luxury resort, well dressed but anonymously, for our prearranged meeting. It was a nice place, clean and well maintained for its age, though a little cheesy in the way that tropical resorts tend to be. I was in something of a hurry, because I knew that I was being followed. I didn't know who it was--agents from one of my former victims? Subordinates of the sifu, testing my abilities? In any event I had to hurry. I strode purposefully through the hallways, down the elevator, to the designated office. I gave the unattractive secretary there the code phrase, and she told me to head down to the restaurant on the back side of the resort. I'm afraid I was short with her, but I didn't want her to get killed, almost as badly as I didn't want me to get killed. Taking a detour I headed further into the employee-only area of the hotel. They were close. I ducked into a side door that turned out to lead to a dimly lit storeroom. Perfect, except for the lack of exits. I waited, but not for long. The first two burst through the doorway that I'd entered through. Ninjas, but the modern kind, the ones that wear black suits and sunglasses. Knives out, they advanced into the room as they squinted into the gloom; their eyes struggling to adjust after leaving the well-lit hallway. Stupid. Two brief bursts from my silenced MP5K submachinegun put them down. I heard a noise behind me in the corner and spun around. Another one. How the hell did he get there? Well, he wasn't going to tell me, so I didn't bother asking. Another burst, another body. That was all of them. I left the room and headed further down the hall, away from the secretary. The door at the end. A bathroom. Again, no exits. Wish I knew that ninja's trick. I climbed up on the counter and pushed up the ceiling tiles. There was enough space up here to hide, and it looked like the drop ceiling could hold my weight. But I didn't want to be cornered here for however long while law enforcement searched he hotel. Better to play innocent and go on with the meet. I walked back out, as quickly as possible without seeming like I was in a hurry, past the secretary. I did not make eye contact. So I headed down to the restaurant. It was still pretty early, so the place was deserted. It was an open-air restaurant, ceiling fans, looking out over the well-manicured grounds. The sifu stood there, surveying his property. He was not happy with me. I still didn't know if it was because I'd whacked a few of his guys in his base, or if it was because I'd brought a few outsiders with me and whacked them in his base. Either way, the discussion was frosty, and brief. He didn't seem to want me on the premises let alone teach me his kung fu secrets. I shrugged, said something about us both needing time to think it over, and headed out into the grounds. The place was kept up like a very nice oriental garden, but it fell steeply away from the building, like a rocky cliff. I practiced my escape and evasion techniques, bounding down the cliff face from ledge to ledge to gravel path. Pretty quickly I wound up at the bottom, where there was a nice little fish pond, but green, so I couldn't see any fish in it. I sat down for a while to try and figure things out. Though I still had a bunch of unanswered questions, all the reasonable answers to those questions meant that this guy was going to be pissed off at me. I realized that there was probably no way to salvage this situation, so I headed back to the hotel to tell the sifu goodbye. He met me in the lobby and, oddly enough, he was all smiles. Apparently he'd just gotten off the phone with my associate. He handed me a sheet of paper--a menu from the downstairs restaurant. What? I flipped it over. On the back, under the heading "donations", he'd written a bunch of (large) numbers with associated "belt levels". So the frostiness earlier was just because he didn't think he was going to get paid? I couldn't believe it. This guy was just running some sort of belt factory for world-class assassins. What a waste of time. Doing my best not to roll my eyes, I smiled and walked out, telling him I'd be in touch. But I was lying. I didn't have time for this guy. I had people to kill.

Re: Musings on Random Musings ...but safety is okay.

Re: Musings on Random Musings "A quarter of eight" is 2 P.M., sillies.

Re: Sneaky GM Thing: Healing + other effects with Transform? Cosmetic? "Hey, why is your arm all bandaged up? Didn't we heal it with that orb thing?" "Yeah, but the flesh was all black, right? And now it's... growing..."

Re: Shadowcats Vehicular Insanity Shop: A-10C Warthog I would expect an A-10 to be humble but very ornery and protective.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. "Hello sir, would you like to join us this thursday at our sex trafficking workshop?" "What? Is that like a how-to?"