SSgt Baloo

Re: "Neat" Pictures Despite the analysis given above by another servicemember, I believe that picture isn't necessarily B.S. The flames I can clearly see are shooting from the flare dispenser visible in the underside of the aft end of the landing gear nacelle (there are more on the other nacelle, those dark rectangles), and are probably the ejector charges blasting the flares away from the plane. The shadow on the upper engine nacelle is consistent with the placement of the light source, and the shadows are visibly washed out by the flames, but not completely washed out (the sun is really, really bright compared to flare ejector charges). I can also see what appear to be chaff dispensing devices near the wingtips (the wingtip vortex would help the chaff fibers "bloom", I.E. not stay clumped in a useless wad). I would guess that the plane shown is a Canadian Air Force plane, since it has a false cockpit painted on the underside. I'm pretty sure the above photo wasn't "shopped".

Re: A Thread for Random Videos

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I've been watching No Ordinary Family. It's my favorite new show. Too bad I missed episode 1.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos Rather than cross-post, I'll just post a link: Veteran's day 2010

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine The way I understand it, JPEG format was specifically invented for photography. It's lossy compression algorithm does not add a significant amount of noise to a photographic image, and it is the most efficient at making a photograph file small enough to be useful. PNG was developed to supersede the GIF format (copyright issues over gif images prompted this move), and has far more capability than GIF ever did. It'a better than GIF or JPEG at everything except photorealistic images. PNG'll reproduce photos alright, but doesn't compress them as well as JPEG. History of PNG (link)

Re: A Thread for Random Videos Just a few more: Military guys do a lot of weird things to hang onto their sanity. But none of 'em work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa-aDMrQB0w And just because I think the Venture Brothers is the coolest animated program in the vicinity of Earth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeCW_u6j8Ps

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine So, except for the wings she's like every other woman? *ducks*

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Take it from someone who has a tendency to involuntarily overreact*. It isn't worth the stress to get snippy over someone else's failed attempt at humor. As my nephew says: "It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's hilarious!" Everyone has a different perspective. As long as the person making the "swap cat recipes" isn't serious, someone besides you may have found the quip hilarious. I'd probably say something similar, given the right circumstances, and I would never do anything to harm a fuzzy animal that wasn't trying to make a meal of me. Except cows. And pigs. Chickens, too. The list goes on and on. Of course I'm not advocating for a program of torture and extermination, but as empathetic predators, we should make an effort to not cause any unnecessary distress in the critters we're going to eat. * Depression and anxiety mean I have a tendency to be upset by relatively minor things. I can't watch certain episodes of Doctor Phil due to the intensity of the subject matter, and I really can't enjoy horror movies as much as I used to.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos I don't get out to parties or go trick-or-treating anymore so here's some moosic appropriate to the season: "Mistress of the Dark" Twisted Sister: "Stay Away from Captain Howdy" That's probably more than necessary but I don't know if I'll make it back to the library before Halloween.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Revenge of the Zombies (1943) with John Carradine. John Carradine is a mad doctor working to create zombies for use as soldiers for Hitler. When the doctor's wife dies under mysterious circumstances, his brother-in-law shows up with a detective in tow to investigate. They are accompanied by their stereotypically easily-frightened "person-of-color" driver, but just about everyone in this movie is a stereotype except for the Doctor's late wife, who refuses to obey orders from a "ratzi".

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. In early 1977, my friends and I were watching the weather report on Channel 3's eleven-o'clock news while we were waiting for the Tonight (Johnny Carson) Show. The Channel 3 weather girl was Kristine Hanson, who had, just a couple of years before been a Playboy Playmate of the Month. The guys were making a big deal that she had been in Playboy and had (very) probably been hired for her looks. One of the girls said "I'm sure they hired her for her brain!"* My Reply? "Yeah! Look at those frontal lobes!" * I will be eternally grateful for that gem of a straight line. We laughed so much that we missed most of Carson's monologue.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I saw Hammer Film's X the Unknown. About halfway through I remembered seeing this on the Bob Wilkins Show (a late-Saturday-night monster/horror movie show hosted by a deadpan cigar-smoking guy). It was enjoyable as much for the good, but low-budget special effects as it was for the cultural values (some of them, hopefully are obsolete now). My favorite notion is that viewing anything horrific will drive an English (or Scottish -- the movie was set in Scotland) woman mad to the point that it's important to send her far away immediately so she will have no reminders of what she has witnessed. More important, it seems, than finding out what the horrible thing that killed her paramour was anyway. For a movie about a giant radioactive blob of mud it was remarkably entertaining. I've been watching reruns of the 1960s Batman TV Series. I tivo it so I can watch two half-hour episodes back-to-back. It originally aired on Wednesday and Thursday evenings as two half-hour episodes a week, the first ending in a cliff-hanger and the second having the Caped Crusader wrap things up. I was eight when I saw my first episode (something with the Joker -- I tuned in late) but I was hooked from day one. As an adult I can enjoy the campiness I was oblivious to as a child.

Re: Jokes The Big Orange Head joke disappointed me only because its a lame form of the shaggy dog story (and it took some time for the penny to drop). I prefer the kind which has a punchline that's relevant to the story, but fails to enlighten you as to the main object of curiosity within the joke. Once I told the Blue Preacher to a co-worker after several months of build-up. The actual telling took at least five minutes, and he felt so cheated when he heard the punchline he pestered me for a week to tell him who the Blue Preacher was. Alas, that's not part of the joke so I never learned it. After that telling I retired the Blue Preacher, as I could not imagine a more successful telling of it than the last one. It's been 28 years since I last told it.

Re: Jokes

Re: Your PCs might be Underpowered if... ... Their most powerful allies are the local scout troop. ... Their "motor pool" consists of three bicycles, a bus pass and a pair of roller skates. ... Their greatest nemesis is the guy at the liquor store who won't sell to them without valid I.D. ... The flying hero is acrophobic, the martial-artist's fighting style is "slap-fighting", the mentalist's biggest power is guessing if this was your card, and the energy projector's powers are based upon lactose intolerance.

Re: Campaign tools need editorial review by interested parties. I updated the Golden Age document, adding more info regarding movies that would provide a good illustration of the prevalent culture of those days. I also highly recommend Studs Terkel's oral history* The Good War for its coverage of exceptions to the cultural norms of the day and the racial and cultural tensions which most mainstream newspapers either ignored or relegated to the back pages. Just in case I made changes that I forgot to document I uploaded the latest version of the timeline as well. This whole sentence links to the document(s) in question. * Actually, I recommend Studs Terkel's works for a good read regardless of your interests. He was one of the first people to get the Oral History movement going back in the day.

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) Saturday night/Sunday morning I had several very detailed dreams. A demonic being had kidnapped Darren Stephens. It disguised itself as Darren as part of a plot to force Samantha to participate in a magical form of "Ultimate Fight Club". Apparently this guy's reputation was such that even Endora was worried for Darrin's safety and wanted to help with any rescue attempt. My job, as whatever sort of powerful being they thought I was, was to make nice with the fake Darren so I could learn the whereabouts of the real Darren and so we could mount a rescue. We were looking for the Stephens' house but none of the houses on that street looked right. At some point during the night I had the briefest "nightmare" I can ever recall having. I was dozing between sleep and wakefulness when I noticed a darker shape in the darkness standing next to my bed. In the dream I thought someone had come into my room and was stealing my stuff. I let out a short shout of alarm and that woke me up. Turns out the next room over, the alarm clock had gone off but they weren't anywhere in the house so I shut it off and went back to bed. In the last dream I was riding a motorcycle home from work when I discovered that the road I usually took to get home was blocked off. Along that road someone had built a huge containment facility for supervillains (and other antisocial metahumans). Because I had tried to use the road the prison/asylum was on, they imprisoned me, thinking I was an escapee. While inside, I met the being that had (in the earlier dream) held Darren Stephens hostage. He had the ability to replace body parts with mechanical bits he found lying about (they made him stronger). He was wandering around finding stuff to replace his arms and legs with so he could break out. I was busy helping the guards quell a riot/breakout attempt, and hoping that because of my actions they would realize I was a “good guy” and let me go free.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Crosby, Stills, Nash and Hudson New from Chevrolet for 2011! The Corvette SUV! Memphis Tinkerbelle

Re: Campaign tools need editorial review by interested parties. I'm compressing the time-line a bit because even at sub-light speeds, the Ancient/Krell wars should take considerably less than a quarter of a billion years to resolve (the amount of text remains unchanged, I just moved up the start-times of certain events). Sure, they're glorified snails, but they're not that slow. I removed a redundant event. Nicola Tesla's lab should really only burn down once. This whole sentence links to the document(s) in question. I'm pretty sure I'm done, with the odd exception of missing and redundant punctuation and perhaps a few unclear passages.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore I dunno. I could buy an awful lot of real bacon for 120 clams.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I finally realized I can download public domain video (movies, ads, etc) so a couple of nights ago I watched an episode of the Burns and Allen Show complete with ads for carnation milk, and Yongari, Monster from the Deep, a South Korean Gojira-like monster movie.

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) I dreamed I was back in the Air Force, I had just finished a shift at some sort of upscale chow hall where I had been goofing off and writing instead of doing my assigned work. I was settling in at a new base and my stuff had been distributed among three different dorm rooms and I was in the process of collecting it all into the biggest one so other people could be assigned to those rooms. My supervisor was talking to me about how I shouldn't goof off at work and I told him "I'm sorry, but I'm just so amped to be a writer!" Rather than try to chew me out he helped me get my stuff together in the one room and we talked about doing things you love. He also was pointing out where everything else in the base was, like the NCO club, snack bar/recreation center, etc. Most of the bases in my dreams have the same general layout. I could almost draw a map of it (I just got the Sims 3 Create-a-World tool, so I might just do that).

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... When I was in High School, the common response to anyone saying anything along the lines of:"Hey, I just thought of something!" was "Beginner's luck."

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Well, not Old Man, anyway.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares The Amazing Colossal Man with One Red Shoe The Bad News Care Bears Fantastic Foreplay: Rise of the Silver Surfer Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice's Excellent Adventure Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in: The Road to Perdition Abbott and Costello meet Ben Stein Ferris Bueller's Day After Tomorrow