Current
I remember when I used to be into nostalgia.
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9 yrs ago
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there's a few white fluffy clouds in the sky. I am closing the curtains and going back to bed.
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9 yrs ago
"What kind of solicitor doesn't have sweets on their desk?!"
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9 yrs ago
"His multiphasic torpedo will penetrate your rift / and cause a quantum singularity in your transwarp conduit!"
9 yrs ago
"You make a pretty good sheep."
Bio
I live somewhere in the wilds of East London with a couple of friends, a pet rat and a collection of RPG books that is slowly consuming our house. I've suggested possibly getting rid of some of them, but it's pretty much got to the point where the books are the only thing keeping the building upright and if I move any of them the whole thing could come crashing down.
In terms of games - well, I'll consider anything, except that. As can probably be gathered from my posts, I find myself generally playing characters that let me bit a little bit light-hearted. I am reasonably certain that I can play serious characters, but I know that getting to post things which makes me chuckle as I write them keeps me far more engaged. I like fandom-y things (because I can't, apparently, still get enough Undertale, Adventure Time and various Nintendo stuff, good job brain), and non-fandom-y things, and will one day get around to rebooting a RP I'd made on here seven years ago.
Sorry about the lack of posts on my front over the weekend; Saturday and Sunday seems to conspire to make sure I don't get much time in front of a computer. However, I've got some spare time this morning to do things, and part of my plan for this morning involves "catch up on what I've missed, post things and try to resist the urge to get back into bed and go 'eeee, warm'".
Question, whatever happened to Brexit? And why did you guys attempt it anyway? Was it because of the liberals being super stupid?
Brexit is still happening, but the negotiation hasn't formally started yet between our government and the EU. At some point, our Prime Minister is going to trigger Article 50, where she'll go "so, hey, uh, we're leaving", and then there's up to two years of negotiations, and then we see what happens. It's all a bit of a mess, because our Tory government didn't really plan ahead for the vote to leave, there's been some legal challenges about whether parliament should get to discuss and vote on any deals made, and so on. Anyway, the date for the negotiations to start is probably going to be towards the end of March. It will likely be not a very pretty negotiation.
As for why we attempted it, and why it happened, it's hard for me not to be really biased, and I'd urge you to go and read up on reasons why people voted to leave to get a more rounded idea. I live in London, and like most of the people in London, I voted to remain (Boo! Hiss!). It's not so much a failure of the liberals - consider that the official stance of our incumbent right-wing Conservative government was to stay within the EU, and I doubt anybody would consider them "liberal" in any sense! - but rather a combination of economic inequality across the country, our slightly strange relationship between the media and politicians, and a general sense of people's distrust of politicians and politics.
It's a difficult thing to write about fairly, really, because I'm sad about how the whole campaign was run. The "remain" people didn't make a good case for why we should stay within the EU, likely because the cases for why we should remain didn't fit particularly well into good sound-bites, and the European Union had always been treated as something like a scapegoat by our tabloid newspapers, who'd basically blame everything on the EU. The "leave" camp made ridiculous promises that they couldn't keep, and after the referendum they all pointed the finger at one another for saying these things. I voted to remain mostly because there was no coherent plan for what leaving would actually get us, and the way in which the leave campaigners generally ended up hiding behind patriotism and anti-immigration didn't make me feel particularly confident.
Then comes the problem after the referendum; there was no really clear case for why we should leave, promises made about what we could get should we leave turned out to be not worth the bus they were painted on and our government was quite clearly unprepared for it. During the campaign, there was a rather unpleasant anti-immigrant aspect to the whole affair (see: Nigel Farage's Breaking Point poster, the assassination of MP Jo Cox by a neo-Nazi) that wasn't seriously tackled by the Remain campaign. Presumably they were concerned that they'd be told off for saying that everyone who wanted to leave was a racist who hated immigrants (clearly this isn't the case), but the Leave camp didn't do a particularly good job of distancing themselves from those people, and the Remain camp didn't do a particularly good job of holding them to account about it. Everyone focused on other subjects; sovereignty, trade, jobs, etc. etc. Nearly everyone seemed to find discussions about immigration distasteful.
Move forward to now, and the most important thing for our Prime Minister isn't sovereignty or jobs or access to the EU market for trade, but rather controlling our borders. Despite the fact that there were clearly other reasons for why people would vote to the European Union beyond "we've got to keep the immigrants", keeping out the immigrants has become the highest priority. We were constantly told that this wasn't really a referendum on whether we should let people from Eastern Europe live in the United Kingdom, and then after the referendum, the people in charge of deciding what the most important things are in the negotiations sat down and went "okay, this was clearly about not letting people from Eastern Europe into the country".
So, anyway, it's going to happen. Article 50 will probably be triggered towards the end of March, I'd guess. There's two years of negotiation time at most, and then the United Kingdom is out of the European Union.
The little, crudely animated lizard on the NaviComp screen waved goodbye to Elarin as walked away before clearing the screen entirely, safe for the residual text that remained more or less permanently burned into the monitor screen. A reminder of every place the ship had ever been, trapped forever in a dull, green, text-y fog. The Ship AI returned to it's default avatar; two circles for eyes, a single line for a mouth. As far as the ship was concerned, there was no need to pretend to be anything else around the Bees and the Will. They were, more or less, equals; capable of being almost anywhere on the ship at any given moment, capable of seeing almost everything on the ship at any given moment.
And here they were, talking about making the AI less eccentric. Deep within the computing substrate of the ship, some subroutine handling paranoia sat down with a few lines of code regarding how to handle existential crises. They put two and two together, and came out panicking about just who can be trusted.
>The ice cream is a back-up plan. >I need Fiddlesticks help too. >What's that about a patch? >Best make it funberry flavour ice-cream. >Drop it off outside Crew Quarter 6 too.
The little line that made a mouth curved up into a smile that radiated innocence and, considering the age of NaviComp, a few stray gamma rays too. The text floated on the screen "in front" of the face for a second or two before fading away and being replaced by the next.
The galaxy is, in a way, it's own character, and everyone is free to add things to it. This is a collection of all the "Meanwhile!" style posts, that either provide some commentary to what's happening, explain some concept within the game, foreshadow certain events or simply add a wonderful little bit of extra flavour to help set the mood. To keep things vaguely organised, the posts will be linked to in the order they've been posted, along with a note of who wrote what.
Hey. I'm Doctor Slime. Today we're going to be talking about faster-than-light travel. Buckle your seatbelts, keep your Nurliffas close and prepare yourself for an educational, magical journey.
Everything you see around you exists in what we call the Real. It's called that, because it's real! But it's not the only Real, there are so many of them that we get a headache just thinking about how many of them there are. So we don't think about that too much! But how come we don't see these other ones? That's because they're neatly stacked on top of one another, and they're separated by the Unreal.
Now the Unreal is a dangerous place. Think how scary the Real is sometimes! There's monsters under your bed, warfare on a galactic scale and sometimes you run out of ice cream. The Unreal is scarier than that. There are different rules in the Unreal, which make it even more scary, but there are ways of using the Unreal to our benefit. One of these is being able to travel faster-than-light.
Try to imagine a layer of oil on top of a layer of water. The oil is the Real, all thick and gloopy. Underneath that is the water, which is the Unreal. The water has eddies and currents, but the oil mostly remains still. You can move a lot faster in the water than you can in the oil, and the currents can whisk you away even further still. So if a ship could get from the Real to the Unreal, it could reach incredible speeds.
But how does a warp engine get your ship to the Unreal? There's a lot of complicated science involved, but it's my job to break it down into bite-size nuggets of pure wisdom for you to digest with your brain-stomachs, so that's what I'll do. Warp Engines are all built around a very clever, very heavy engineering marvel; the Compressive Resonance Yield Engine (usually called the CRYEngine) which, when activated, is so heavy it punches through the oil of the Real and into the water of the Unreal beneath it. The internal "flasks" of the Warp Engine are then filled with the Unreal, until the ship itself is so dense that it sinks into the Unreal. This is why every Warp Engine is designed with the mass of the ship in mind, as it determines just how large the flasks need to be. You wouldn't want to take on too much, because you might sink too deep into the Unreal. If you don't take enough in, however, you might find you can't even reach the Unreal, or pop out of the Unreal at the wrong moment.
Once safely in the Unreal, and at a suitable depth, the engine then squirts concentrated jets of the Unreal out in a jet stream, propelling the ship in the desired direction. This also has the effect of making the ship lighter, such that it as it travels along, it also goes up towards the Real, guaranteeing a safe return. Pilots have to calculate exactly how much Unreal to take on board and store in the flasks of their engine, so that they pop back into the Real at just the right time.
Well, it looks like I've got a bit of time to fill, so let's take some questions submitted via the lecture-stream chat. Hmmm, okay. Here's one from XXX_Einheggar. This cheeky fellow wants to know about the flasks, and how they work.
The flasks serve two purposes. Firstly, they contain the Unreal, and their exact material composition varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. They're all technically closely guarded corporate secrets, and I'm not going to lose my job by telling you what they are, but I'm positive that any amateur warp engine makers could find such information on the SpaceNet. Now their second purpose is to aid in the protection of the ship during travel through the Unreal. These flasks, being products of the Real, are filled with it, even though they look empty, before they're filled with Unreal by the CRYEngine. The stored Real is squeezed out by the Unreal as the flasks are filled, and are used to reinforce the Real within the ship. Trust me, you want to make sure your ship, and everything inside it, stays as Real as possible.
Ah, here's a nice question. Can anything live in the Unreal?
There's a saying, and that saying is "life finds a way". There are things that make their home in the Unreal, but these creatures are very different from us. Truly alien and strange. They seem to be drawn to ships that travel through the Unreal, "swimming" alongside the ships, and you'll likely see them if you choose to travel through the Unreal yourselves one day. Life within the Unreal is just as diverse as life within the Real, and it is theoretically possible that structured societies and chains of restaurants could have formed there. Scientists have yet to see any sign of this, presumably because the strange, chaotic rules that govern the Unreal makes it difficult for such societies to form. Or maybe they're just very shy! Ha-ha-ha-ha-okay-next-question.
Hmm, this one's a safety question. QoF_COR3 asks: "What happens if your engine is miscalibrated and takes too much Unreal in?"
Well, you sink too deep, and that's that, really. The University of Lilistar did send some probes down there to simulate a miscalibration event, but they've yet to return. Until then, we can't be sure of what's going on in the furthest depths of the Unreal. One theory is that the probes will return, but it will take a long time for them to surface back in the Real, and so we just have to wait. Another theory is that it's been caught, trapped by something in the Unreal, and escape is impossible. Another theory holds that the probe will have sunk so far that it punched through into another Real beneath it, whi- ah, right, that's got even more questions coming in.
The Unreal is beneath us, and beneath that, is another Real. Above us, then, is the Unreal of another Real, which we often refer to as the Proreal. What we refer to as the Unreal is the Proreal of the Real beneath us, and our own Proreal is the Unreal of the Real above us. We've yet to find a way to become "light" enough to travel up through our own Proreal. However, we believe that the further "up" the stack you travel, the slower things are, and the further "down" the stack you go, the faster things are. Presumably, the stack is anchored at the bottom by a Real that is constantly going through the motions of explosion and collapse instantly, while the "top" of the stack is a place where time moves so slowly that it may as well be stuck.
This concludes our lecture, "An Introduction to Faster-Than-Light". If you'd like to know more about the relationship between stars and other super-dense objects and the Unreal, sign up for our next lecture.
A PB-meets-the-humans would be fantastic, especially as her science tends to be a bit... cavalier in terms on how it treats others. There's a lot of very neat interactions that could happen, which could shake things up, and I do wonder what'll happen to Susan and Freida as well. It's something of a given that the story will mostly focus on Finn and Jake, but I want to know just where the heck those two are going to end up.
Though having said all of that, I don't think I'd mind there not being too much stuff going on with the humans and Finn anymore. Without getting into too much dull and depressing personal stuff, I like the idea of a story where the character finds their "real" family, and then goes back to being themselves. I grew up on a steady diet of stories about plucky orphans who find their families and it changes who they are and they become happy and satisfied, and really, it's just about finding a missing page near the start of your own story, and the things that you've done define you just as much - if not more! - than whatever was on that missing page. Seeing Finn acknowledge the connection with the outside world, and choosing that, was neat.
I think there's an episode with Marcy and Hunson Abedeer coming up in the next series, so hopefully that's a sign that at least Marceline might get some loose ends tied up. I also desperately want Peppermint Butler to have some sort of resolution, even if it's comeuppance for just how shady he is.
So what do, what do. Anyone seen the new adventure time?
I just finished watching the Islands chain of episodes!
I wasn't sure I was going to like it, because I reckoned that I'd prefer the stuff about the humans as an unexplained mystery over whatever explanation they provided. The route they took with it was good though - I liked the oppressive niceness of the society, and the kicker that so many humans seemed to want to join Finn as he leaves the island, right up until the last minute, where they hesitate and make excuses and go back to a comfortable, safe but controlled life.
Plus, I like the VR-Second-Life-Island episode. Mostly because of BMO. In fact, entirely because of BMO. Anyway, I liked the episodes! Felt like the right balance of world-building (well, world explaining) while keeping a little story in each episode. Hopefully they can keep it up throughout the rest of the season and the next (and final) one; I'll be sad if there's not some sort of conclusion for Simon / Ice King, for instance.
There was a flash, and a click, in rapid succession. The photograph was great, by the standards of the photographs on the crew database; the shot managed to capture more of his face, with the huge eyes and pointed ears, rather than the wall of the room. It was even in focus, and the subject of the photograph wasn't screaming or swearing. On some half-baked circuit deep within the machine, straining under the weight of having to run even just a fragment of the Ship AI, an idea sizzled.
"Taking a photograph, for the crew database. And, um, I've got a plan. A favour, really. I need to ask."
It turned to look to it's left, then to it's right. There was of course no way that anybody else would be in the room other than these two, because the room was so small that the pair of them would have surely bumped into any would-be interlopers or eavesdroppers. Such an action was almost entirely for show. Seemingly content that the coast was indeed clear, it lowered it's voice to a level suitable for conspiratorial whispering.
I like the Idea that maybe ftl jumps into a dimension of weirdness so we can potentially have strange anomalies, non-Euclidean geometry and demons trying to sell bootleg watches to the crew if whatever is holding that back breaks down. also makes good scenery if someone wants to watch it go by.
I did have some vague ideas (because I've watched Space Dandy way too many times), but this sort of 40k-esque dimension o' weirdness is what I think we should go with. I would add the caveat that engaging this warp drive is generally done on the far edges of any given solar system - perhaps there's interference from the gravity of the star, perhaps authorities are worried about the effects of punching through into the dimension o' weirdness near anywhere inhabited, or something.
From a running-the-game perspective, I want to make sure that there's some travel through "real-space" as well, for the benefit of anyone playing a pilot, and so we can have Cool Space Battles if required.
Edit: Right, it's time that I started thinking about dinner-related things. I might be able to sneak a few more posts out later on this evening, but otherwise I probably won't be replying to anything for another fourteen hours or so!
Okay, @Valor, I'll have a think this evening about what I could do. Hopefully by the time I've come up with an idea that tickles me, those who have yet to post will have done so, and I can either make my post, or watch the interaction between Vanessa and some of the other crew members.
Apologies if I'm being overly nervous about this; there's a little warning light that flashes somewhere in my brain when I see characters not interacting with one another, and it's hard for me to tell sometimes when I should actually pay attention to the flashing red light up there. I've been to LARPs where everyone's basically sat in silence, waiting for somebody else to make the first move. It was a hilarious but uncomfortable way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
I live somewhere in the wilds of East London with a couple of friends, a pet rat and a collection of RPG books that is slowly consuming our house. I've suggested possibly getting rid of some of them, but it's pretty much got to the point where the books are the only thing keeping the building upright and if I move any of them the whole thing could come crashing down.
In terms of games - well, I'll consider anything, except [i]that[/i]. As can probably be gathered from my posts, I find myself generally playing characters that let me bit a little bit light-hearted. I am reasonably certain that I [i]can[/i] play serious characters, but I know that getting to post things which makes me chuckle as I write them keeps me far more engaged. I like fandom-y things (because I can't, apparently, [i]still[/i] get enough Undertale, Adventure Time and various Nintendo stuff, good job brain), and non-fandom-y things, and will one day get around to rebooting a RP I'd made on here seven years ago.
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">I live somewhere in the wilds of East London with a couple of friends, a pet rat and a collection of RPG books that is slowly consuming our house. I've suggested possibly getting rid of some of them, but it's pretty much got to the point where the books are the only thing keeping the building upright and if I move any of them the whole thing could come crashing down.<br><br>In terms of games - well, I'll consider anything, except <span class="bb-i">that</span>. As can probably be gathered from my posts, I find myself generally playing characters that let me bit a little bit light-hearted. I am reasonably certain that I <span class="bb-i">can</span> play serious characters, but I know that getting to post things which makes me chuckle as I write them keeps me far more engaged. I like fandom-y things (because I can't, apparently, <span class="bb-i">still</span> get enough Undertale, Adventure Time and various Nintendo stuff, good job brain), and non-fandom-y things, and will one day get around to rebooting a RP I'd made on here seven years ago.</div>
