Rich McGee

For all of you RUSH fans out there, I just wanted to let you know that Aaron Allston's Strike Force Universe had a hero named By-Tor and another (a canine) named Snow Dog.

I know that. But the references to Rush songs...

In Meta-Earth, we make armor from Bronsonite (3rPD/3rED), Collapsium (18rPD/18rED), Durium (15rPD/15rED), Flexalloy (10rPD/10rED), Orichalcum (12rPD/12rED), Questite (10rPD/10rED and it is comprised of dizzy molecules and fibers of raw confusion. It adapts to a meta-human’s power and abilities), Talosium (It has 20rPD/20rED and tends to hum Ronnie James Dio tunes when it thinks you aren’t listening.), Turgenevite (8rPD/8rED), Onyxium (9rPD/12rED and is totally blacker than black, providing Stealth levels in the right circumstances), and Multifarian Memory Metal (15rPD/15rED and is totally weird, often phoning up at night to ask if you're thinking of it). There are also generic materials that cover values in between these. 
 
And... none of the stuff never gets torn up in any meaningful way. I'm too 1970s to scratch the paint. 

A month later Frank and Gabriella were no closer to getting in touch with Vixen.  They had put out feelers and greased some palms and still no luck.
 
Then one day Max and Frank got a notice that Mace’s old base was being occupied.  And a message “Nice place.  Heard you were looking for me.  Might as well meet here!” Signed “V”!
 
Frank looked at Max who looked at Mocker.  
 
“Might be a trap!” Mocker said.
 
Max answered, “There are easier ways to set us up!  So do we check it out?”
 
“I Will.” said Mocker.
 
“Alone?” said Frank.
 
“Nope.  The rest of you will be around for back up!  If this is a trap, I want it to be as painful for them as possible!”
 
A few hours later they were at the old farm house.  
 
Mocker entered the Lab and found a little lady in a black and red leotard sitting a work table eating dinner.
 
“I have a bottle of wine cooling, but I don’t know if you drink.. Wine?” she said.
 
“Yes I can, but it has no effect on me.  You went to a lot of trouble to get us here.  You could have just talked at the bar.  Why all the trouble?” Mocker queried.
 
“Well I needed to have you check out.  I brought extra food, you can call the others in if you want, and we can discuss the terms of my contract!” she said.
 
“You seem awfully sure of yourself young la…”  “Please!  Call me Vixen!”

Oh, it's just a pipe dream - Freedom Force has a much smaller fan base than CoH - but one can always hope.  Just the fact that the big-ish supers MMOs are still going in 2024 is heartening even if the populations are small, and there's always the chance that someone will risk developing a supers tactical game that isn't tied to a Big Two IP.  There's one much like FF based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse setting, which benefits from decades of tech advances but isn't as ambitious in scope.

Although unlikely, a relaunch/sequel to Freedom Force would be great. I loved the game and the Character Tool feature that allowed fan to create character modifications. Some fans did some amazing work creating DC and Marvel skins along with their own.😀

Interesting.  What's next, another sequel to Freedom Force? 

Every day is somebody's birthday, even the fast-approaching February 29th.  Whether you think it's significant or not, they certainly do. 
 
January 7th, 1610 was also the date Galileo first spotted four moons of Jupiter, as well as more stars than he'd ever thought the sky could hold.
 
 

Despite the modern onus that term carries, the "hobo" part is actually a pretty legit description for many adventurers.  Where a tramp travels but only works under duress, and a bum neither travels nor works, a hobo is properly defined as a migratory worker, one who travels from job site to job site as needed.  Adventurers are usually wandering around on a quest with some form of remuneration, even if it's just looting the losers in fight, as military men did for millennia - as expected a benefit as US waitstaff getting a tip to supplement their wages.  That sure sounds like a temporary job that one might travel to and from (and for, even), so "hobo" is a title some might wear with pride - or at least acceptance.  Just don't call them tramps - or worse, bindlestiffs.  Everyone hates a bindlestiff.
 
Now, the "murder" bit is a little harder to stomach unless your quest is an actual assassination, but for some reason most PC groups don't get offered a lot of targeted wetwork even when just putting a crossbow bolt in the evil vizier who usurped the throne really would be the sensible thing to do.  Still, perhaps that's simply due to lack of advertising.  A party that's actively seeking work as vitality reduction experts willing to travel might well choose to call themselves "murderhobos" to make the point abundantly clear.
 
"Inc." is clearly an abbreviation, perhaps of a fitting distinction or boast.  Since the concept of corporate ownership doesn't appear in most fantasy settings, one presumes it's short for "incredible" or "incomparable" or even "incarnadine" if you want to be highbrow about it.
 
A fine name for a band of footloose professional killers indeed.   

Every day is somebody's birthday, even the fast-approaching February 29th.  Whether you think it's significant or not, they certainly do. 
 
January 7th, 1610 was also the date Galileo first spotted four moons of Jupiter, as well as more stars than he'd ever thought the sky could hold.
 
 

January 7th 1979 The Vietnamese army captures Phnom Penh. January 7th is now commemorated as Victory Over Genocide day.
 
January 7th 1939 the last element to be discovered in nature rather be synthesised is identified as Francium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francium
 
Nicholas Cage turns 60 today
 
EDIT: Would you believe that there is still about a third of the year that we have nothing for ?
January, September and June are the worst months for missing dates. November and December are missing 3 dates each. 

The novel Braking Day had a sport involving teams from different hab-rings of a generation ship piloting customized EVA craft in a sort of obstacle derby race, although I think the "course" was a VR creation rather physical for safety reasons.  Running one of these little souped-up one-man worker bees into one another was an acceptable risk, but ploughing into a ring itself not so much.  Pretty much an STL long-hauler community's version of motocross, I guess.  The sport proper plays a very minor role in the plot so the specifics aren't made 100% clear.  There's also some less involved competition involving individual zero-gee maneuvering skills inside the ships themselves, since transiting between hab-rings is generally done by simply jumping after calculating a route with internal software running on your cybernetics (which are universal-from-childhood, to the point where few things operate manually any more - the POV characters struggle to understand how a hand-cranked plumbing cutoff valve works at one point, they're so used to interfacing with everything wirelessly).
 
Pretty great read for an author's debut (and so far only) scifi novel.

According to the comments, this scene shows Cirque du Soleil acrobats practicing their routine instead of some extreme competition as the narrator claims. It looks almost like a scene from the Flash Gordon film.
 
 

3150 words written! In fact, the background information for ARL is pretty much complete. Now, all I need to do is clean up the character sheets, build the base, a vehicle, and get some location keys polished.

Just for fun here's my ill-fated party.
 
 

 
I created a new party, but I haven't decided on a party name. The working title for the group is "Murderhobos Inc."

Classic Batman story with Neal Adams art
 

There's the "White Knight" reality from DC's Black Label line that has a "heroic" Joker...

I wonder if that particular problem might be a habit acquired from playtesting too much in the past.  When you playtest an adventure (even a short con game that isn't going to be sold commercially) you're kind of expected to do what you can to break the game by ferreting out likely plot holes, wrong turns that won't drive the overall adventure forward, NPC motivations that don't make sense and other things.  You aren't expected to be as vicious about it with RPGs as board or minis game playtesting because you just can't catch every bizarre thing that real players might do, but some stress testing does help.  If you do a lot of that sort of thing it can become a habit that's hard to shake, or even notice yourself doing.  The guy may subconsciously think he's helping by finding points that break easily.
 
Or maybe he's just kind of a jerk.
 
Sympathies on the frustration, regardless.

This news just . . . floored me. NC Soft has actually licensed City of Heroes to one of the private servers, Homecoming. I found out yesterday, been making heroes since. It looks like Homecoming doesn't have any major changes over the old live version. It's essentially the live state, with the planned issue updates implemented. Not a huge problem getting back into it. The old cash shop is now a "P2W Store" which lets you buy things from the old cash shop for Influence (in game currency instead). The game always needed an influence sink, so that's a win win. I snipped the announcement post from their forum, but there's also a FAQ and more info in the thread linked:
 
https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/47223-ncsoft-homecoming-license-announcement/
 

From Wikipedia, if you're wondering which to consider for your character...
 
 
English – 245 million (78.5%)
Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%)
Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%)
Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%)
Vietnamese – 1.52 million (0.5%)
Arabic – 1.39 million
French – 1.18 million
Korean – 1.07 million
Russian – 1.04 million
Portuguese – 937 thousand
Haitian Creole – 895 thousand
Hindi – 865 thousand
German – 857 thousand
Polish – 533 thousand
Italian – 513 thousand
Urdu – 508 thousand
Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 472 thousand
Telugu – 460 thousand
Japanese – 455 thousand
 
This does say "spoken at home" and not those picked up as a second language, so it may reflect immigration over the last 40-odd years more than anything.  Still interesting that, say, French and German are down so low.

India has half the *reported* deaths.  With India, there's always a serious question about the completeness.
 
Brazil's medical care, considering the population as a whole, is several steps behind Germany's.  On that basis alone, a higher death rate could be expected.  
 
And...OK, yeah, it's nice they're down...but...WorldOMeters reports 1800 deaths in the last 7 days;  over 1900 in the 7 prior days.  We're still talking 90-100,000 deaths per year, world wide.  So it's still a significant problem...just not a major crisis.  And it looks like we may have reached a steady state.
 
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#daily-deaths
 
That's a good 6-7 months of steady numbers, with just expected random variation.  Unless something dramatically changes insofar as treatment goes, it's likely this is the norm.  The GOOD!! news?  This should be lower than deaths from the flu.

It's probably better that way. 
 
Although a re-watch of some Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee or whoever your personal ideal Doctor is might remind you of why you once thought of him more regularly.  There's something to be said for a bit of nostalgic low-budget scifi.

What is this thing about realistic costume damage you speak of, kemosabi?

No, but adblocking services are also updating regularly.  It's going to be an arms race for a while to come.  There are a number of youtube creators who've noticed significant dips in views and are already lobbying to reverse the change, with the quite reasonable threat of leaving the platform if they don't - if their revenue from YT proper becomes a fraction of what they get from direct donations why stay?  Their paying audience will follow them wherever they go.  Between that and folks like myself who are simply boycotting it should be interesting to see where things go.  Youtube probably won't change, but you never know.

Actually no, but I do imagine them doing Inexces' "I Need You Tonight".