I really am not happy with how the world has turned out. I spend a lot of my time gaming not because I want to be different but because I don't want to exist in THIS world. What a great answer for this fun filled thread!
Active questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Donner: Do you enjoy parties? And have you spent much time in the mountains? (Those are connected, I promise)
@Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)
Stop lurking, it makes you look like a villain target When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all
I enjoy parties with my friends both those usually involve games. I enjoy hiking and rock climbing. But I don't enjoy mountains and parties combined. Not since the accident.
Active questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@BlueHairedMeerkat Why do birds suddenly appear everytime Expatriette is near?
@Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)
"Deja-fu? You've heard of that?"
- Lu Tze, Sweeper, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
Everything.I really am not happy with how the world has turned out. I spend a lot of my time gaming not because I want to be different but because I don't want to exist in THIS world. What a great answer for this fun filled thread!
A world that spawned Sentinels and chocolate and fossils and clashy challenging-but-fun-to-sing choral music and that bird that can perfectly mimic the sound of a chainsaw can't be all bad.
One thing I love about Pittsburgh is I can go down to some old industrial ruins and see all the beauty that has already sprung up, and how nature just seems to treat it as just another thing to grow on, and break up, and make beautiful. It helps remind me that no matter how badly we screw up, things will go on, and will be beautiful again, we just have to get out of the way for a little bit.
Everything.I really am not happy with how the world has turned out. I spend a lot of my time gaming not because I want to be different but because I don't want to exist in THIS world. What a great answer for this fun filled thread!
I second this completely!
And I third it, although I would like to change myself a bit along with changing my reality greatly.
phantaskippy wrote:
One thing I love about Pittsburgh is I can go down to some old industrial ruins and see all the beauty that has already sprung up, and how nature just seems to treat it as just another thing to grow on, and break up, and make beautiful. It helps remind me that no matter how badly we screw up, things will go on, and will be beautiful again, we just have to get out of the way for a little bit.
Nature is sometimes very beautiful, but only sometimes. And I'm pretty sure it's within mankind's capacity to make a mess bad enough that nature will never recover from it; it just has yet to happen on a global scale. We can always hope it never manages to, but I definitely believe it's possible.
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
@BlueHairedMeerkat Why do birds suddenly appear everytime Expatriette is near?
Because Expatriette has super-secret bird powers that will mean that when the Big Cosmic Whojamaflip apears and The Matriarch ascends to... wait, no scrap that. Expatriette is The Matriarch from the future, after most of her powers are gone. Dawn killed the real Amanda Cohen, and The Matriarch took her place. You heard it here first, folks.
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)
I don't really ever feel lonely, or miserable. Sometimes something may annoy me or whatever, but I get over it pretty quickly. I'm usually either neutral or happy when it comes to mood, as far as I can think of. Listening to music can change my mood - I play Audiosurf on occasion and may listen to several calm tracks in a row, or upbeat ones, or whatever, if I feel like listening to that kind of music at the time (or just random tracks otherwise). Generally if I'm at home and not eating lunch, having a bath, being asleep, or playing Sentinels with Ja'Ph', I'm doing something on my computer. Right now I'm on his computer because the trains are buggered so I can't get home right now after spending the weekend at his house (he's just gone to work). So that's a bit weird. But umm...yeah. The last time I can remember being actively sad was when a friend of mine died a few years ago. I was kind of unhappy for a couple of days (especially right after the funeral) but then decided I was getting fed up with being unhappy because it was making me miserable (or something like that) so I stopped thinking about it so much and thought about happy things instead :). If something ever annoys me (usually something at work, and then usually a rude customer...but especially the new manager who started a couple of weeks ago and who seems to do nothing except go around telling everyone how he thinks we should do our jobs, and as a result has pissed off/upset pretty much everyone at least a little bit, as far as I can tell), I tend to just mildly rant (ie I don't get all shouty or aynthing) about it to someone else until I feel better ;).
@Ronway
If you had to play Ab'Zero a different way, which didn't result in your trying to basically murder yourself as quickly as possible (since I've heard that's how you play him), what would you do?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Ronway If you had to play Ab'Zero a different way, which didn't result in your trying to basically murder yourself as quickly as possible (since I've heard that's how you play him), what would you do?
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
@Ronway If you had to play Ab'Zero a different way, which didn't result in your trying to basically murder yourself as quickly as possible (since I've heard that's how you play him), what would you do?
Hmm... I would murder myself as quickly as possible, but without the murdering part! As I would start to massively heal right before AZ takes his final breathe. Then I would go back to the murdering! Mwahahaha!
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
My mum makes the best waffles (Scandinavian waffles, not Belgian ones), so I'm going to have to go with that. Waffles with ice-cream :D
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@jagarciao: How do you pronounce your username, and what does it mean?
I don't know what makes me different and I don't care. Maybe it's not my problem, but why do they stare? - The Living End, Strange
It's pronounced "Gabriel", oddly enough... and it's the name given to me when I first appeared to Daniel way back in the day.
Not buying it? OK. It's simply J. A. Garcia O.
It's just my first and middle name initials followed by last name and then second last name initial. It's my gmail address so it was the default name when I signed up to the forum and I didn't know you could change it. By the time I figured out the username could be changed, well I just couldn't be bothered anymore...
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
t's just my first and middle name initials followed by last name and then second last name initial. It's my gmail address so it was the default name when I signed up to the forum and I didn't know you could change it. By the time I figured out the username could be changed, well I just couldn't be bothered anymore...
I'm a little dissappointed, I've been trying to figure out the pronunciation for a while now.
Ha. Sorry to disappoint... if it were a word though, I would pronounce it Haggar-See-Yao.
I honestly thought it was an alternate spelling of the words "Jaeger" and "Ciao". I pronounced it as "Yay-ger chow" until I heard about its origin.
Ra, God of the Fun
Draw, God of the Sun
The Matriarch's Psychic damage is her forcing a gratuitous amount of Snapple facts about birds into a hero's brain.
After chasing Carmen Sandiego for years, James Flynn of Interpol, finally, got a solid tip on her location. With the safety off, he entered the building...alone. However, realizing the educational potential of her travels, he couldn't bring himself to kill her. Instead, he broke both her legs, ensuring she would never walk, or run, again. After serving a lengthy prison sentence, Carmen Sandiego currently resides in La Fayette, Illinois, where she teaches geography at the local elementary school.
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Nope. But no such restrictions on emoticons or pictures.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
Not having incinerated any enemies I can only speculate on the basis of abstract knowledge (much of it gleaned from reading XKCD What-If?), but here goes. Logically, even if you have only one enemy, it's fairly unlikely that they will be a 98-pound weakling. The human body is 99% water and that will evaporate in the fire, but the chances are very good that this will still leave more than 1 pound of ashes. Whether either the ashes or the feathers are floating on the wind has no effect whatsoever on their actual weight; they'll simply be spread out across a broader area the more wind their is, with the total mass remaining unchanged, and the effects of gravity on their weight almost certainly being microscopic across any Terrestrial distance. I suppose that since the ashes are finer than the feathers and thus more susceptible to air currents, it's conceivable that they could eventually drift far enough into the high atmosphere that their weight measurably diminishes with distance. But I'd say that in the vast majority of cases, the incinerated remains would still weigh more, assuming of course you had any method of weighing them while they were dissipated across several hundred square miles.
I was pretty stuck for a question to ask or a person to ask it of, but I noticed this, so hopefully nobody will mind if I run with it.
jagarciao wrote:
Ha. Sorry to disappoint... if it were a word though, I would pronounce it Haggar-See-Yao.
Okay, I'm assuming that you speak Spanish because of the two last names thing (if you're actually a Portugues-speaking Brazilian, I apologize for typecasting you), and there's something about the language that I've always wondered about, so perhaps as a native speaker you can explain it to me.
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
@jagarciao: Is there any pronunciation difference, invisible to my ignorant Anglophone self, between the letters "h", "j", and "x" as they are used in Spanish words? To my ear, they always seem to be used for the "h" sound. Would words such as "jacienda" or "Mehico" make any sense? What do Javier and Xavier have to say to each other when they meet? (This is still all one question, I'm just framing it several different ways in an effort at clarity.)
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
First of all... Great answer. I was waiting for it knowing it would be very detailed.
OK. I'll give this a shot... I AM a native Spanish speaker, but that doesn't make me an authority (my formal Spanish education was pretty much done when I moved to the States back in the 6th grade), so take my answer as more of a viewpoint than a definitive guide.
There are differences between the pronounciations of those 3 letters:
H is silent in Spanish so hacienda in Spanish is actually pronounced "acienda". The only times the H has a sound is when it is used in combination with a C to form CH which is usually given its own letter status in Spanish (fun fact #1: there's a "ch" tile in Spanish scrabble), or when it is used in a word that was borrowed from another language (usually English), such as hockey or hobby.
The J sounds varies slightly regionally, and it most closely resembles the H sound in English, in fact, where I am from it sounds pretty much exactly like the English H. In other places, particularly in South America, it has a stronger, throatier sound (think "loch" or "Hanukkah").
Then there is the X and that one has all sorts of identity issues. Most of the time it sounds like "ks" just like it does in English. Some times it decides to be sound like a Spanish J (which as stated above is a lot like the English H), which is why Mexico in Spanish is pronounced Me(hee)co. Some other times still it behaves like an S at the beginning of some words (similarly to how it sounds like a Z in English sometimes). And yet some other times ( very few though) it decides to be all crazy and sound like it's an "sh", but this is usually in the names of places of indigenous origin.
So, if Javier and Xavier met each other and introduced themselves they wouldn't hear a difference... and Javier would probably not think anything of it since his is the more common spelling... but Xavier would probably bring up the fact that he writes it with an X since he probably has to make that clarification quite often... and then Javier would think Xavier is a snob.
OK Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
Thank you for the compliment, J.A., and I return the sentiment threefold. X seems to have issues in every language which contains it (see also Greek); I wonder if there's something psychologically fundamental about writing two crossed diagonal lines that results in all these linguistic complications. Regardless, I now intend to put a not-actually-snobbish-but-considered-a-snob character named Xavier in one of my roleplaying games (he may or may not be actually Spanish depending on the context).
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
I honestly learnd more about being a man, a good person and a father from that cat than I did from so many men who tried to take that role in my life. To this day it is a great reminder that we can find what we need in the most unlikely of places.
What a wonderful message. Thank you.
Hi. My name's Andy. Feel free to call me Andy, since, ya know, that's my name. (he/him/his)
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when? If I am for myself alone, what am I? -- Hillel
(I wish I had hours to put into this, but alas, I can only work with a fraction of that... )
I talk about it a bit in this discussion: http://tinyurl.com/SotMwithonlyaiouy, but that’s against Pydro’s aspirations so I’ll (try to) build a list in this location...
Limit good guys folks can pick to about H+1 options.
Usually go against our loving Baron - occasionally that wacky Rat.
Always play in Insula Primalis. Folks favor dinos! Plus, obsidian significantly boosts play.
Start with my pitch for good guys for folks to pick (including lots of data - that's hard to simplify for posting).
Folks draw and talk about our cards.
Talk about our villain, his motivation, and so on.
Talk about a round's configuration, from a high position, with focus on villain and location turns.
Play villain’s first turn.
Play my turn, with focus on configuration of turn, talking about all particulars.
And so on!
Also, lots of clowning around, maintaining animation throughout, with silly play-by-play.
Always allow folks to do cool things - can't succumb to my own wish to win / do cool things!
Naturally, folks usually grasp it - it's fairly straight-forward.
(Wow - that was ing hard! )
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
@Imprimis5: You can have one thing, of all things imagined in gaming, literature, the real world, etc. What would it be and why? (And no fair saying "A bag full of everything I might ever need" or something like that - just a singular thing with an explicit purpose.)
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Wow. What a huge question. That's a little bit of an analysis paralysis moment.
I'm, of course, tempted to go with some sort of D&D-esque Ring of Endless Wishes or some such rot. But that seems a bit of a cop-out answer. It still doesn't answer what I'd really want.
I guess I would probably have to say that I would love to have the Triforce sitting on my shelf. First and foremost, it's pretty and shiny. Secondly, it has the power to reshape the world according to my will. And I'd really love to make the world a true utopia. There's so much strife, and I could make a world where all are equal under the sun. No one would want for the necessities of life, and war would never have existed. Also I'd have a pony.
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
@Reckless: You have been captured by RISE! You have, on your person, three toothpicks, a button, a cute girl's phone number on a slip of paper, and a standard deck of playing cards. How do you escape from your cell on Insula Primalis?
Well, . Knew I shouldn't try to "improve" it this morning after stay up late last night working on it. (Yeah, I wrote the first line, and it ended up not being true, but I thought it entertained me enough I didn't want to remove it.)
Uh, I mean... I have no idea what you're talking about.
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Well, as a musician, being deaf would be a major drag. I could certainly do without seeing a lot of people's dumb faces on a daily basis, but I can't say the same about engaging with music. I would have to pick blindness over being deaf. Being able to interact with others around me would also be much easier, as there would not be any major barrier's when trying to converse with others. If I was deaf, I could only interact with people who knew sign language. Not exactly a large sect of people.
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Reckless: You have been captured by RISE! You have, on your person, three toothpicks, a button, a cute girl's phone number on a slip of paper, and a standard deck of playing cards. How do you escape from your cell on Insula Primalis?
@grysqrl: You have a gun with one bullet. What would you rather have charging at you with deadly intent, a hungry bear or a venemous snake?
In case anyone cares, the inspiration for that question was this novel Gadsby, which has 50,000 words and no "E." It was great trying to figure out which words you were trying to skip.
I also noticed you have a new set of emoticons. YAY!
Two mods down, 1 to go.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Essen is over. Does that mean the admins are fair game now?
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Thanks, Pydro. And thanks for the entertaining question!
Gadsby was a great exercise in constraints. As usual, in this case being constrainted like that really promoted imagination and made it an interesting challenge. I really wanted to find emoticons to replace words, but that turned out to be far more challenging and time-consuming than just finding other words...
Pydro wrote:
I also noticed you have a new set of emoticons. YAY!
-ish.
It's a set of emoticons I've collected over the years for use in emails and such. I've been avoiding using them here as I wanted to allow us to develop our own emoticons, but it seemed like an appropriate time to break them out.
And they're housed in my own service, so it's my own bandwidth I'm using.
Pydro wrote:
Essen is over. Does that mean the admins are fair game now?
It's over, but they won't be back until later today (if I remember correctly) and probably won't recover for another day. I'd say their fair game, but don't expect a response too soon.
With three threads running, though, we should be good-to-go!
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
@Reckless: You have been captured by RISE! You have, on your person, three toothpicks, a button, a cute girl's phone number on a slip of paper, and a standard deck of playing cards. How do you escape from your cell on Insula Primalis?
I'd lure Citizen Dare over by offering him the cute girl's number. Citizen Truth (being the guard, as he's one of the most powerful members of the Citizens of the Sun) would promptly be destroyed and deal one damage to the hero target with the highest (I'd be an Environment target, at best, so I would remain safe). In the confusion, I'd Wraith those three toothpicks at Dare, promptly reducing his 3 HP to zero. From there, I'd use the button as an impromptu cutting tool to shape the playing cards into lock picks. Through trial and error, I'd find one that fit and escape. After that, I'd promptly search for the nearest Hero target and scream in terror in his/her/its general direction until saved.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
Ra, God of the Fun
Draw, God of the Sun
The Matriarch's Psychic damage is her forcing a gratuitous amount of Snapple facts about birds into a hero's brain.
I'll take the venemous snake; it doesn't exist so it can't really do too much to me. I'd have to think twice about a venomous snake, but there are still questions about whether or not it can charge and what that looks like (probably hilarious). Then I would dismantle the gun and weld the parts into a decoy monster to scare off bears.
@BlueHairedMeerkat - What great triumph (or crushing defeat) will earn you a place in the history books?
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@BlueHairedMeerkat - What great triumph (or crushing defeat) will earn you a place in the history books?
The year is 2031; the place, the bridge of the HMS Vertigo - MI5's most valuable weapon, so I'm told - in the skies above Cambridge University. I had been giving a lecture one moment, and the next I had found myself here. They had been looking to assemble a team of the world's finest mathematicians, I was told, but when time became an issue they grabbed the one lowly mathematician they could find. When I asked who 'they' were, I got a whole spiel; MI5, HMS Vertigo, experimental teleportation technology, et cetera. When I questioned time becoming an issue, I was directed towards a nearby monitor.
It showed the city below, or what had once, mere minutes ago, been the city. Now it was a maelstrom of ash and fire.
I felt sick. My wife had been down there, my friends, my cats. The woman in charge - her nametag proclaimed her to be Sophia Red - was speaking, but all I heard was noise. Dead. All dead...
"What happened?" Words came eventually. That was what I needed to know, I had decided.
"The Mellifluous Shades." It was almost funny the way she said it; as if that was it, as if no further explanation was needed. I did get an explanation - I needed to be briefed anyway, I was told - but it wasn't much to go on. The first they had heard of the Shades was when America exploded; a bit of a dramatisation, of course, but that's apparently how it seemed at the time, and it wasn't all that far from the truth. Subsequent transmissions had revealed more - strange mechanical things had appeared in the US, taken control of every computerised part of their military power, and began aiming it at the rest of the world. The US government, in an act of extreme self-sacrifice, blew it up. All of it. They stopped the Shades' plan, but with no weapons of any sort and tens of thousands of nuclear explosions to deal with, they were no match for the army that followed.
Now, that army was spreading. That was the bad news. The good news was that MI5's experts had found the creatures' weakness - a central unit, moored in a parallel dimension, that acted as a sort of hive mind. Destroy it and the Shades would still be dangerous, but unorganised, stupid, and something we could deal with. Which sounded great, but there was of course a catch: their experts had tried to open a portal to the central unit, and missed. Subsequently, Shades had flooded out and killed them all, and so they needed me. Or rather, they needed world-leading experts and they had me, to sort of throw at their myriad calculations with the expectation that I would fix them. Oh, and in the next five minutes would be ideal, since the Shades are on their way to us.
That was four minutes ago. I think I've found - and fixed - the error, but I really don't know. They're gearing up to open a portal now, so this is it - either I'm about to go down in history as the man who saved the world, or I'm about to die horribly and be remembered (very briefly) as a failure, who let humanity be subjugated or destroyed. Right now, either of these outcomes are possible; in a few short moments, I'll know for sure.
Wish me luck.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
While I understand that is not my question, as a person from Indiana, I must say, Daylight Savings Time is completely pointless and silly, and I'm not much of a fan of Benjamin Franklin either.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
I was asked a question early on in this thread. Here is an answer.The name of the next mini-expansion hero is hilarious. (For so many reasons.)
The hero in question is probably literally named [REDACTED]
Active Questions
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
Yes, the lower case first letter is a capital dissapointment.
In that case, I fear this is in the initial stages of becoming another pun thread, unless sanity quickly regains the upper hand.
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
The real reason is to mess with me. My body is bad enough at responding to external cues like daylight as it is, so the world (predicting my future birth) thought it might be amusing to change things twice a year.
This is of course an entirely valid reason.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
and I'm not much of a fan of Benjamin Franklin either.
What do you have against the stove, bi-focal glasses and the city of Philadelphia?
Well, I actually do like many of his inventions, including, but not limited to, the printed press, the glass armonica, and the lightning rod. But as a person and his ideals, I'm not a big fan.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
But as a person and his ideals, I'm not a big fan.
Did he have ideals beyond profit, fame and self-promotion?
Franklin was a bit ahead of his time, he made his money, retired early and spent the rest of his life turning Ben Franklin into a legend. He was clever, creative, and charismatic. Everything about him is overblown and half-myth, but that's because he was skilled enough to turn himself into that. He is a unique character, and a fun one.
Everything.
I really am not happy with how the world has turned out. I spend a lot of my time gaming not because I want to be different but because I don't want to exist in THIS world. What a great answer for this fun filled thread!
Active questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Donner: Do you enjoy parties? And have you spent much time in the mountains? (Those are connected, I promise)
@Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)
Stop lurking, it makes you look like a villain target
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all
I enjoy parties with my friends both those usually involve games. I enjoy hiking and rock climbing. But I don't enjoy mountains and parties combined. Not since the accident.
Active questions: @arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.) @BlueHairedMeerkat Why do birds suddenly appear everytime Expatriette is near? @Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)"Deja-fu? You've heard of that?"
- Lu Tze, Sweeper, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
Oh! I just got that! I can't believe it took so long.
Just assume I'm always doing that.
Damn it, Ronway!
I second this completely!
A world that spawned Sentinels and chocolate and fossils and clashy challenging-but-fun-to-sing choral music and that bird that can perfectly mimic the sound of a chainsaw can't be all bad.
Just assume I'm always doing that.
Damn it, Ronway!
One thing I love about Pittsburgh is I can go down to some old industrial ruins and see all the beauty that has already sprung up, and how nature just seems to treat it as just another thing to grow on, and break up, and make beautiful. It helps remind me that no matter how badly we screw up, things will go on, and will be beautiful again, we just have to get out of the way for a little bit.
And I third it, although I would like to change myself a bit along with changing my reality greatly.
Nature is sometimes very beautiful, but only sometimes. And I'm pretty sure it's within mankind's capacity to make a mess bad enough that nature will never recover from it; it just has yet to happen on a global scale. We can always hope it never manages to, but I definitely believe it's possible.
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
Because Expatriette has super-secret bird powers that will mean that when the Big Cosmic Whojamaflip apears and The Matriarch ascends to... wait, no scrap that. Expatriette is The Matriarch from the future, after most of her powers are gone. Dawn killed the real Amanda Cohen, and The Matriarch took her place. You heard it here first, folks.
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Ameena When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... do what? (Is there a book/film/activity that you always do when feeling a little bit sad that cheers you up?)
“You gotta have blue hair."
-Reckless
I don't really ever feel lonely, or miserable. Sometimes something may annoy me or whatever, but I get over it pretty quickly. I'm usually either neutral or happy when it comes to mood, as far as I can think of. Listening to music can change my mood - I play Audiosurf on occasion and may listen to several calm tracks in a row, or upbeat ones, or whatever, if I feel like listening to that kind of music at the time (or just random tracks otherwise). Generally if I'm at home and not eating lunch, having a bath, being asleep, or playing Sentinels with Ja'Ph', I'm doing something on my computer. Right now I'm on his computer because the trains are buggered so I can't get home right now after spending the weekend at his house (he's just gone to work). So that's a bit weird. But umm...yeah. The last time I can remember being actively sad was when a friend of mine died a few years ago. I was kind of unhappy for a couple of days (especially right after the funeral) but then decided I was getting fed up with being unhappy because it was making me miserable (or something like that) so I stopped thinking about it so much and thought about happy things instead :). If something ever annoys me (usually something at work, and then usually a rude customer...but especially the new manager who started a couple of weeks ago and who seems to do nothing except go around telling everyone how he thinks we should do our jobs, and as a result has pissed off/upset pretty much everyone at least a little bit, as far as I can tell), I tend to just mildly rant (ie I don't get all shouty or aynthing) about it to someone else until I feel better ;).
@Ronway
If you had to play Ab'Zero a different way, which didn't result in your trying to basically murder yourself as quickly as possible (since I've heard that's how you play him), what would you do?
I am the Wordweaver...
Basically, I like writing stuff ;)
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Ronway If you had to play Ab'Zero a different way, which didn't result in your trying to basically murder yourself as quickly as possible (since I've heard that's how you play him), what would you do?
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Hmm... I would murder myself as quickly as possible, but without the murdering part! As I would start to massively heal right before AZ takes his final breathe. Then I would go back to the murdering! Mwahahaha!
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Theta_Sigma: Do you prefer waffles or pancakes?
My mum makes the best waffles (Scandinavian waffles, not Belgian ones), so I'm going to have to go with that. Waffles with ice-cream :D
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@jagarciao: How do you pronounce your username, and what does it mean?
I don't know what makes me different and I don't care. Maybe it's not my problem, but why do they stare? - The Living End, Strange
Mmm... Waffles and ice cream... <Imagine a salivating emoticon here>
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
It's pronounced "Gabriel", oddly enough... and it's the name given to me when I first appeared to Daniel way back in the day.
Not buying it? OK. It's simply J. A. Garcia O.
It's just my first and middle name initials followed by last name and then second last name initial. It's my gmail address so it was the default name when I signed up to the forum and I didn't know you could change it. By the time I figured out the username could be changed, well I just couldn't be bothered anymore...
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Pydro: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
I'm a little dissappointed, I've been trying to figure out the pronunciation for a while now.
Ha. Sorry to disappoint... if it were a word though, I would pronounce it Haggar-See-Yao.
I honestly thought it was an alternate spelling of the words "Jaeger" and "Ciao". I pronounced it as "Yay-ger chow" until I heard about its origin.
Ra, God of the Fun
Draw, God of the Sun
The Matriarch's Psychic damage is her forcing a gratuitous amount of Snapple facts about birds into a hero's brain.
After chasing Carmen Sandiego for years, James Flynn of Interpol, finally, got a solid tip on her location. With the safety off, he entered the building...alone. However, realizing the educational potential of her travels, he couldn't bring himself to kill her. Instead, he broke both her legs, ensuring she would never walk, or run, again. After serving a lengthy prison sentence, Carmen Sandiego currently resides in La Fayette, Illinois, where she teaches geography at the local elementary school.
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Envisioner: What weighs more, a pound of feathers or the incinerated remains of one's enemies floating on the wind?
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
What about "È", or "É", "Ê", "Ë", "è", "é", "ê", "ë", "Ē", "ē", "Ĕ", "ĕ", "Ė", "ė", "Ę", "ę", "Ě", "ě", "Ǝ", "Ɛ", "ǝ", "Ȅ", "ȅ", "Ȇ", "ȇ", "Ȩ", "ȩͤ", "Έ", "έ", "Ε", "Ё", "Ѐ", "ѐ", "ё", "Ҽ", "ҽ", "Ҿ", "ҿ", "ᴱ", "ᴲ", "ᵉ", "ᵊ", "ᵋ", "ᵌ", "Ḕ", "ḕ", "Ḗ", "ḗ", "Ḙ", "ḙ", "Ḛ"?
“You gotta have blue hair."
-Reckless
Nope. But no such restrictions on emoticons or pictures.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Not having incinerated any enemies I can only speculate on the basis of abstract knowledge (much of it gleaned from reading XKCD What-If?), but here goes. Logically, even if you have only one enemy, it's fairly unlikely that they will be a 98-pound weakling. The human body is 99% water and that will evaporate in the fire, but the chances are very good that this will still leave more than 1 pound of ashes. Whether either the ashes or the feathers are floating on the wind has no effect whatsoever on their actual weight; they'll simply be spread out across a broader area the more wind their is, with the total mass remaining unchanged, and the effects of gravity on their weight almost certainly being microscopic across any Terrestrial distance. I suppose that since the ashes are finer than the feathers and thus more susceptible to air currents, it's conceivable that they could eventually drift far enough into the high atmosphere that their weight measurably diminishes with distance. But I'd say that in the vast majority of cases, the incinerated remains would still weigh more, assuming of course you had any method of weighing them while they were dissipated across several hundred square miles.
I was pretty stuck for a question to ask or a person to ask it of, but I noticed this, so hopefully nobody will mind if I run with it.
Okay, I'm assuming that you speak Spanish because of the two last names thing (if you're actually a Portugues-speaking Brazilian, I apologize for typecasting you), and there's something about the language that I've always wondered about, so perhaps as a native speaker you can explain it to me.
Active Questions
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
@jagarciao: Is there any pronunciation difference, invisible to my ignorant Anglophone self, between the letters "h", "j", and "x" as they are used in Spanish words? To my ear, they always seem to be used for the "h" sound. Would words such as "jacienda" or "Mehico" make any sense? What do Javier and Xavier have to say to each other when they meet? (This is still all one question, I'm just framing it several different ways in an effort at clarity.)
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
First of all... Great answer. I was waiting for it knowing it would be very detailed.
OK. I'll give this a shot... I AM a native Spanish speaker, but that doesn't make me an authority (my formal Spanish education was pretty much done when I moved to the States back in the 6th grade), so take my answer as more of a viewpoint than a definitive guide.
There are differences between the pronounciations of those 3 letters:
H is silent in Spanish so hacienda in Spanish is actually pronounced "acienda". The only times the H has a sound is when it is used in combination with a C to form CH which is usually given its own letter status in Spanish (fun fact #1: there's a "ch" tile in Spanish scrabble), or when it is used in a word that was borrowed from another language (usually English), such as hockey or hobby.
The J sounds varies slightly regionally, and it most closely resembles the H sound in English, in fact, where I am from it sounds pretty much exactly like the English H. In other places, particularly in South America, it has a stronger, throatier sound (think "loch" or "Hanukkah").
Then there is the X and that one has all sorts of identity issues. Most of the time it sounds like "ks" just like it does in English. Some times it decides to be sound like a Spanish J (which as stated above is a lot like the English H), which is why Mexico in Spanish is pronounced Me(hee)co. Some other times still it behaves like an S at the beginning of some words (similarly to how it sounds like a Z in English sometimes). And yet some other times ( very few though) it decides to be all crazy and sound like it's an "sh", but this is usually in the names of places of indigenous origin.
So, if Javier and Xavier met each other and introduced themselves they wouldn't hear a difference... and Javier would probably not think anything of it since his is the more common spelling... but Xavier would probably bring up the fact that he writes it with an X since he probably has to make that clarification quite often... and then Javier would think Xavier is a snob.
OK Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Rabit: How do you teach SotM at cons? (Please write a short description without using the letter "E" or "e".)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
Edit: Mistakenly wrote "dead" instead of "deaf"
Thank you for the compliment, J.A., and I return the sentiment threefold. X seems to have issues in every language which contains it (see also Greek); I wonder if there's something psychologically fundamental about writing two crossed diagonal lines that results in all these linguistic complications. Regardless, I now intend to put a not-actually-snobbish-but-considered-a-snob character named Xavier in one of my roleplaying games (he may or may not be actually Spanish depending on the context).
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
What a wonderful message. Thank you.
Hi. My name's Andy. Feel free to call me Andy, since, ya know, that's my name. (he/him/his)
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when? If I am for myself alone, what am I? -- Hillel
(I wish I had hours to put into this, but alas, I can only work with a fraction of that...
)
I talk about it a bit in this discussion: http://tinyurl.com/SotMwithonlyaiouy, but that’s against Pydro’s aspirations so I’ll (try to) build a list in this location...
Naturally, folks usually grasp it - it's fairly straight-forward.
(Wow - that was
ing hard! 
)
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
@Imprimis5: You can have one thing, of all things imagined in gaming, literature, the real world, etc. What would it be and why? (And no fair saying "A bag full of everything I might ever need" or something like that - just a singular thing with an explicit purpose.)
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
Rabit: "Understand" has an "e."
Wow. What a huge question. That's a little bit of an analysis paralysis moment.
I'm, of course, tempted to go with some sort of D&D-esque Ring of Endless Wishes or some such rot. But that seems a bit of a cop-out answer. It still doesn't answer what I'd really want.
I guess I would probably have to say that I would love to have the Triforce sitting on my shelf. First and foremost, it's pretty and shiny. Secondly, it has the power to reshape the world according to my will. And I'd really love to make the world a true utopia. There's so much strife, and I could make a world where all are equal under the sun. No one would want for the necessities of life, and war would never have existed. Also I'd have a pony.
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Foote: Would you rather be deaf or blind and why?
@Reckless: You have been captured by RISE! You have, on your person, three toothpicks, a button, a cute girl's phone number on a slip of paper, and a standard deck of playing cards. How do you escape from your cell on Insula Primalis?
Twitter: imprimis5. Follow away!
Well,
. Knew I shouldn't try to "improve" it this morning after stay up late last night working on it. (Yeah, I wrote the first line, and it ended up not being true, but I thought it entertained me enough I didn't want to remove it.)
Uh, I mean... I have no idea what you're talking about.
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
Well, as a musician, being deaf would be a major drag. I could certainly do without seeing a lot of people's dumb faces on a daily basis, but I can't say the same about engaging with music. I would have to pick blindness over being deaf. Being able to interact with others around me would also be much easier, as there would not be any major barrier's when trying to converse with others. If I was deaf, I could only interact with people who knew sign language. Not exactly a large sect of people.
Active Questions:
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Reckless: You have been captured by RISE! You have, on your person, three toothpicks, a button, a cute girl's phone number on a slip of paper, and a standard deck of playing cards. How do you escape from your cell on Insula Primalis?
@grysqrl: You have a gun with one bullet. What would you rather have charging at you with deadly intent, a hungry bear or a venemous snake?
Once again, great job, Rabit!
In case anyone cares, the inspiration for that question was this novel Gadsby, which has 50,000 words and no "E." It was great trying to figure out which words you were trying to skip.
I also noticed you have a new set of emoticons. YAY!
Two mods down, 1 to go.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Essen is over. Does that mean the admins are fair game now?
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
Thanks, Pydro.
And thanks for the entertaining question!
Gadsby was a great exercise in constraints. As usual, in this case being constrainted like that really promoted imagination and made it an interesting challenge. I really wanted to find emoticons to replace words, but that turned out to be far more challenging and time-consuming than just finding other words...
-ish.
It's a set of emoticons I've collected over the years for use in emails and such. I've been avoiding using them here as I wanted to allow us to develop our own emoticons, but it seemed like an appropriate time to break them out.
And they're housed in my own service, so it's my own bandwidth I'm using.
It's over, but they won't be back until later today (if I remember correctly) and probably won't recover for another day. I'd say their fair game, but don't expect a response too soon.
With three threads running, though, we should be good-to-go!
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
I'd lure Citizen Dare over by offering him the cute girl's number. Citizen Truth (being the guard, as he's one of the most powerful members of the Citizens of the Sun) would promptly be destroyed and deal one damage to the hero target with the highest (I'd be an Environment target, at best, so I would remain safe). In the confusion, I'd Wraith those three toothpicks at Dare, promptly reducing his 3 HP to zero. From there, I'd use the button as an impromptu cutting tool to shape the playing cards into lock picks. Through trial and error, I'd find one that fit and escape. After that, I'd promptly search for the nearest Hero target and scream in terror in his/her/its general direction until saved.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
Ra, God of the Fun
Draw, God of the Sun
The Matriarch's Psychic damage is her forcing a gratuitous amount of Snapple facts about birds into a hero's brain.
I'll take the venemous snake; it doesn't exist so it can't really do too much to me. I'd have to think twice about a venomous snake, but there are still questions about whether or not it can charge and what that looks like (probably hilarious). Then I would dismantle the gun and weld the parts into a decoy monster to scare off bears.
@BlueHairedMeerkat - What great triumph (or crushing defeat) will earn you a place in the history books?
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
Sure! :)
“Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” ~Obi-Wan Kenobi
That is quite the can of worms you just opened there Paul. Glad I brought my raft to this thread cuz the flood gates are about to burst
The year is 2031; the place, the bridge of the HMS Vertigo - MI5's most valuable weapon, so I'm told - in the skies above Cambridge University. I had been giving a lecture one moment, and the next I had found myself here. They had been looking to assemble a team of the world's finest mathematicians, I was told, but when time became an issue they grabbed the one lowly mathematician they could find. When I asked who 'they' were, I got a whole spiel; MI5, HMS Vertigo, experimental teleportation technology, et cetera. When I questioned time becoming an issue, I was directed towards a nearby monitor.
It showed the city below, or what had once, mere minutes ago, been the city. Now it was a maelstrom of ash and fire.
I felt sick. My wife had been down there, my friends, my cats. The woman in charge - her nametag proclaimed her to be Sophia Red - was speaking, but all I heard was noise. Dead. All dead...
"What happened?" Words came eventually. That was what I needed to know, I had decided.
"The Mellifluous Shades." It was almost funny the way she said it; as if that was it, as if no further explanation was needed. I did get an explanation - I needed to be briefed anyway, I was told - but it wasn't much to go on. The first they had heard of the Shades was when America exploded; a bit of a dramatisation, of course, but that's apparently how it seemed at the time, and it wasn't all that far from the truth. Subsequent transmissions had revealed more - strange mechanical things had appeared in the US, taken control of every computerised part of their military power, and began aiming it at the rest of the world. The US government, in an act of extreme self-sacrifice, blew it up. All of it. They stopped the Shades' plan, but with no weapons of any sort and tens of thousands of nuclear explosions to deal with, they were no match for the army that followed.
Now, that army was spreading. That was the bad news. The good news was that MI5's experts had found the creatures' weakness - a central unit, moored in a parallel dimension, that acted as a sort of hive mind. Destroy it and the Shades would still be dangerous, but unorganised, stupid, and something we could deal with. Which sounded great, but there was of course a catch: their experts had tried to open a portal to the central unit, and missed. Subsequently, Shades had flooded out and killed them all, and so they needed me. Or rather, they needed world-leading experts and they had me, to sort of throw at their myriad calculations with the expectation that I would fix them. Oh, and in the next five minutes would be ideal, since the Shades are on their way to us.
That was four minutes ago. I think I've found - and fixed - the error, but I really don't know. They're gearing up to open a portal now, so this is it - either I'm about to go down in history as the man who saved the world, or I'm about to die horribly and be remembered (very briefly) as a failure, who let humanity be subjugated or destroyed. Right now, either of these outcomes are possible; in a few short moments, I'll know for sure.
Wish me luck.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
“You gotta have blue hair."
-Reckless
While I understand that is not my question, as a person from Indiana, I must say, Daylight Savings Time is completely pointless and silly, and I'm not much of a fan of Benjamin Franklin either.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
What do you have against the stove, bi-focal glasses and the city of Philadelphia?
I was asked a question early on in this thread. Here is an answer.
The name of the next mini-expansion hero is hilarious. (For so many reasons.)
"Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hero in question is probably literally named [REDACTED]
Active Questions
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Silverleaf - Is there really any reason why Daylight Savings Time should exist, or is it just pointless and silly?
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
So the next hero mini-expansion's name is hilarious?
Then I can't wait to play as Hilarious...?
You're free to do whatever you want to.
Not Hilarious. I said hilarious. An important distinction.
"Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stop lurking, it makes you look like a villain target
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all
Yes, the lower case first letter is a capital dissapointment.
In that case, I fear this is in the initial stages of becoming another pun thread, unless sanity quickly regains the upper hand.
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
The real reason is to mess with me. My body is bad enough at responding to external cues like daylight as it is, so the world (predicting my future birth) thought it might be amusing to change things twice a year.
This is of course an entirely valid reason.
@McBehrer - Who is your favorite War of Indines character? Your least favorite? What about Devastation of Indines?
@arenson9: If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle? (Please show your work.)
@Paul - What's the weirdest thing you own?
Just assume I'm always doing that.
Damn it, Ronway!
Well, I actually do like many of his inventions, including, but not limited to, the printed press, the glass armonica, and the lightning rod. But as a person and his ideals, I'm not a big fan.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
I know very little of his beliefs. But I respect the mans kite game.
Did he have ideals beyond profit, fame and self-promotion?
Franklin was a bit ahead of his time, he made his money, retired early and spent the rest of his life turning Ben Franklin into a legend. He was clever, creative, and charismatic. Everything about him is overblown and half-myth, but that's because he was skilled enough to turn himself into that. He is a unique character, and a fun one.
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