Since the question has come up... Here's a few notes, offered as a starting point for discussion. Feedback and dissenting opinions are not only welcome, they're encouraged.


Occasionally a Fenspace writer may wonder whether something in a story violates the boundaries of what the Fenspace Collective have agreed is good for the setting or welcome in the current scheme of things, even if it's within The Rules. These guidelines may help writers in this predicament.

The easiest case is when the story element is grounded in real life and agrees with the Genre Directive. If the story element is something that makes things better or easier for people (that means everybody, not just your favourite character) and it's a cautious extrapolation of real-life technology, then go ahead and introduce it. Nobody's going to raise an eyebrow at a DVD that holds two terabyes of data, since that's a reasonable extrapolation of current technology as adapted by handwavium. (However, some things simply aren't available for lack of raw materials. It's been established that one of the First Fen grabbed all the easily-available fissionable materials in Fenspace before most folks made it Up, for example.)

If the story element is grounded in real life, but doesn't agree with the Genre Directive, there's a problem. This isn't necessarily a story-breaker, but it requires a lot of work and the agrement and support of the Fenspace Collective to pull off successfully. An example of how to do this is Cobalt Greywalker's Paving the road to Hell - it's a dark, almost dystopian, story, but it serves as the beginning of a story arc describing the "redemption" of the story's lead character. An example of how not to do this is murmur the fallen's FTL Newsfeed #235 - it's equally dark, but in its original form it didn't give any way for the characters to come back into the light. Paving the road to Hell and its sequels make up one of the better story arcs in the Fenspace setting, while FTL Newsfeed #235 is barely mentioned by the Collective even after its substantial re-write. (It may be important that Cobalt Greywalker was willing to listen to criticism about his story and work with the other writers to make the story fit into the setting, while murmur the fallen was not.)

Now we get into the trickier cases.

Does the story element exist to make one character as good as (or better than) other Fenspace characters in their own field of expertise? This can work, but is very tricky to pull off, and it's best if you don't trump the other character's specialization. For example, the Soviet Air Force (introduced by Mal Fnord and company nearly at Fenspace's Day 1) is very good at space exploration. That didn't stop Rob Kelk from later introducing Project Artemis, another group that's very good at space exploration but in a noticeably different way. However, Rob got Mal's help in defining Project Artemis before the group was fully introduced into Fenspace, and both writers have been part of the Fenspace Collective for a long time.

If the story element ignores established continuity, then it would be best to re-write the story to remove or revise the element. There's plenty of Fenspace history and social dynamics still unwritten; there's no reason to ignore what little has been defined. Especially since the timeline is available on the FenWiki.

...there must be more cases, but it's past my bedtime...fill in the blanks and continue the list, please, folks...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

I smell next years
hit anime!

-----------------

Epsilon

But they already did Bleach...

Big Buck Bunny, available from http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

I enjoyed it, but then, I like animated shorts.

(Edit: Link code was broken, fixed it. -- Bob)
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

I know what I want, I just don't know what it's called, or whether anybody makes it...

What I want to do is put my new printer/scanner on the home network so that it's available to everything else on the LAN. Back in the day, one could buy an
adapter with a parallel port on one end and an Ethernet port on the other. This is a new, USB printer/scanner, so what I want is an adapter with a USP port on
one end and an Ethernet port on the other.

While I'm at it, it would be nice to put a USB hard drive on the LAN.

No, I don't have room for another, dedicated PC to handle this.

What am I looking for, does anybody make one, and where can I find one available?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat ... st10842146

Quote:Hi folks,
For a bit now we've been tracking
an issue we call the "Sync Bug" although some players call it ghosting
or out of body experience. It's an issue where the player will say they
are moving around, but their team mates will never see them move. They
just see them standing in one spot. If another player teleports them in
the zone, or they use a zone moving power, or they log out and back in,
they will usually get re-sync'd and back to working as normal.
In
order for us to resolve this issue, we really need to hear from players
who are having the problems with it. Ideally, this would be in the form
of a support ticket that the user having the problem can enter one of
two ways:
1) via the /petition command in-game
2) on the website at http://www.plaync.com/us/support/ask.html
We'd
really appreciate if you hear about someone complaining about this in
game (in your team, in a global channel, in the help channel, etc.)
that you let them know we need to hear from them and for them to use
the above methods to do so.
We have a thread about this issue in the Technical Issues / Bugs forum, but want to post here about it to help spread the word.
Thanks very much for your help!

--------------------
Lighthouse

Community Relations Manager

One would say you could've heard a pin drop, and it wouldn't be that far from accurate. From the expressions of some of those at the board room table,
they might keel over in fright at the rather loud sound of a pin dropping.

It wasn't exterior threats these men had to fear. Crey Industries' central headquarters was the personal stronghold of the Countess Crey, and possibly
could outgun several third world countries put together if its entire security detail were taken account of and still have the manpower to properly convert
said third world countries into effective and profitable factories afterwards. It'd long been considered that the principal reason that a loose cannon like
Manticore or others like him hadn't made an outright attack to get to the nasty secrets inside was that it was impregnable in the purest sense of the word.

It wasn't the grim faced bear of a man standing behind the chairman's seat that these men had to fear. Though Hopkins quite literally had the power of
life and death over them, figuratively and literally, the man was not one to hold a grudge for any affront to himself and his actions were almost always linked
to the interests of The Company. In fact, that was entirely the problem.

In the chairman's chair at the end of the table sat the woman known to the world at large as the Countess Crey. Beautiful, really, in a cold sort of way,
but that wasn't on the minds of anyone at the table. Truth be told, it was never on the minds of anyone in the room with her, given the rumors that her
acute perception was actually a meta-talent of some considerable power. But if Hopkins was a dog on a leash, the Countess was the one holding it, and everyone
at the table knew she was not pleased.

"A complete....loss," she said, and the entire table winced as one. "The resources expended to hire the squad of Protectors that recovered the
technology. The resources spent analyzing and finishing their armor. Spent properly resequencing their neural pathways. Spent fruitlessly attempting to
replicate the technology. Spent hiding the paper trail to each of them. All....a complete loss. That is what you are telling me we should look at this
as."

The board member who had voiced this opinion was probably a step away from doing something undignified in his fright, but managed to find his voice. "All
four are registered heroes now, Madame Crey. And involved in a small but increasingly growing supergroup that has ties to one of the largest and most well
established supergroups in the city. And they've been avoiding us since the fourth was stolen. We can't make up the legal fiction necessary to even
bring the Protectors into this to recover them. They know we have to keep our masks up and they're exploiting it, and they're unfortunately
right."

"Unacceptable." The single word could've been a gunshot, so many looked over at the Countess as if they expected to see her shoot the man on the
spot. "You are telling me that we cannot find them. With all the resources at our disposal, working under the very nose of Statesman and the Freedom
Phalanx, that we cannot erase four heroes that have the potential to bring everything down around us because they are
avoiding us?"

The board room slipped into quiet again as the Countess looked inwardly, thinking. "Hopkins."

"Yes, madame?"

"What is the progress on Project Hammer?"

"Contacts have been made, but given our reputation and Arachnos' tight fisted control on their so called Destined Ones, we've had few seem
genuinely interested."

"Yes, a problem. Redirect 50% of the resources to a new project, codename Scimitar."

That got looks from several of the men at the boardroom. Project Hammer had been an ambitious attempt to recruit the various supervillians Arachnos had been
busting out of the Zig on a regular basis to work for Crey, with the enticement being access to Crey's substantial technological and research base. To
slash its funding thus...."Madame, if I may ask..."

"You may."

"What would this Project Scimitar do?"

"We seized more than suits when the Protectors raided that lab, Smithers. We seized whatever was in the computers at the time. Terabytes of data. If we
cannot perfect their machinery to the degree they could, then we will adapt it. And these....Sabres....will find themselves hunted. Not by the Paragon
Protectors. We could never justify it. But by the products of Project Scimitar. Armored vigilantes with no known prior criminal record. If Longbow knows of
their origin, they may assume they've escaped through Portal Corps to chase after their arch foes. If not, they'll assume they're villains from the
Sabres' previous heroic careers outside Paragon. Either way, we have plausible deniability. If anything, they'll suspect Arachnos or any of a dozen
other groups. The technological designs will be untraceable to us. And we will. Have. Those. Rogues. Back," she
said, emphasizing each word with a tap of her pen on the table.

"Be grateful, Smithers, that you work for a company with enough vision to spot the ways out you cannot seem to think of for yourself. You might be looking
for other employment otherwise. Still, while you are more practical to run this project than training someone from scratch, I advise you not to make such
ill-considered suggestions in my presence again. You are not irreplaceable."

"Y-yes, Madame. Th-thank you."

The Countess looked over the board with an appraising eye, most seemingly more in sorts now that blame had been assigned and they were not under fire. "As
for the rest of you, full cooperation is expected. If this company goes down, you go down with it, so I want your best efforts into resolving this fiasco. Am I understood?"

A chorus of "Yes, Countess Crey" brought a tight smile to her lips as the board members filed out of the room. They included some of the most
powerful men in this city, but Crey controlled each and every one of them. These four heroes would not stand in her way any more than any of the others had.

"Hopkins?"

"Yes, madame."

"If we have another rogue prototype by his division, kill him."

"Of course, madame."
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

Tomorrows downtime will grant a free respec to all existing characters, so if you wanted to use the ones you got from the I12 update, now would be the best
time.

Offer her some of http://www.kittyhell.com/2008/05/28/hel ... /#more-805]this, then stand back.

"It's too childish - I won't take it!

"But it looks so good - I want it!

"But... it's too childish...

"But... it looks so good...

"But... it's tooooo chiiiildish...

"But... it looks soooo goooood...

"But..." (etc., etc. ad infinitum)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

I just noted that this forum has sprouted a set of tags. If this is the doing of a regular, no prob, but I've seen an inappropriate drive-by tagging here
at least once already, and I'm ready to delete them if this is a repeat. I just want to know which it is.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

As noted in the Updates thread, the new chapters are on MediaMiner along with teh fixed version of Search for Gero-Sennin - http://www.mediaminer.org/fanfic/view_st.php/153627/
Is this acceptable? Tentative background on local-you is that he arrived in the Leaf at the same age TGNH-you physically were, the only survivor of a merchant caravan that was otherwise wiped out before a Leaf patrol came acros it. Possibly Minato's, Rin remembering him enough to recognise his name when she made jounin and it came time to match up senseis with the academy-organised genin teams at his graduation and take that one.

I also have an important question for all co-conspirators down at the end.

Previously, Kakashi has just told the girls that he's arranged personal tutors for each of them before the finals, so he won't show favor to either of them, and told Tenten that she already knows hers quite well. Included is also a little clip from Sakura's meeting... which didn't go so well, at least in her opinion, as you can see.

 ----- 8< ----- cut here ----- 8< -----

*Noooooooo...* Inner Sakura spiralled away into a black pit of despair, as her reprieve vanished like a popped bunshin. She shuddered violently again as she saw herself in a green body suit and orange leg warmers, praising the power of youth as she was presented with a pair of huge pink eyebrows in a velvet lined box.