Today's gaming was interrupted by severe thunderstorms deciding willy-nilly to take out the various nodes of my ISP and just plain being scary in general. Sad, sad panda Foxboy.
''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

Musician's Aid Society
Rumor has it that the Filkers are building or have completed building a space port-sized habitat for use as a kind of "Bardic College". Further rumors hold that this habitat is or will be named "Argo," solely so that the Federation can be banned from it.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

Something that's been percolating in my brain.
Edit: Argh! Tabs don't work.

An acquaintance of mine watches current anime in raw Japanese, and posts his opinions to Usenet. He's been giving most of the summer titles a thumb-down, but is impressed by the first episode of Code E. His full writeup's
here; I'll just quote part of it:

Quote:

---

In 1997 an unusual meteorite lands in a lake in Japan. Twenty years later 17 year old megane-ko Chinami Ebihara leads a very, very low tech life, particularly when you consider that her dad is a techie and her mom an executive. But Chinami has none of the "necessities of life" - no cell phone, no pc, no smart cards - nothing electronic. This is because Chinami "interacts" at short distances with any electronic equipment, causing it to malfunction.
Chinami and her parents have kept this a secret, but this has made Chinami a very nervously self-conscious girl who tries her best to stay away from electronics and has developed a habit of apologizing to anyone very quickly. But Chinami lives in a Japanese city in a Digital World, and there is no way that she can do the "usual" things without interacting in some manner with all of the electronic and electrical infrastructure that is around her at all times.
Chinami transfers schools once again in 2nd year high school and fortunately for her she makes an immediate friend in classmate Keiko Komatsuna who shows her around the school. But problems start as the class techie-freak Kotaro Kannagi develops an interest in Chinami and "in her body".

---

I was just reading a recent acquisition, The Magician's Arsenal by Lee Scott and it just taught me how to make ninja flash bombs. It's all actually simple gunpowder, flash paper and a simple detonator in the form of ball bearings and popcaps and aluminum foil.
Then it taught me how to make flash powder (aluminum powder and potassium dichromate) and flash paper (soak paper in nitric acid and sulfuric acid - leave out to dry)
That is so not definitely how I thought it would be made.
Then I saw in my head how that worked in Naruto. I can see pretty much every ninja in Naruto land being well-versed in practical chemistry - I can just imagine young Naruto experimenting with iron oxide and aluminum powder - oh yeah.
Then you throw chemistry in with all that chakra mumbo jumbo. My head spins.

Megajoule has posted what appears to be all extant parts of Faces of the City over on the Virtue Wiki.
For those who don't know about this, it's a story about the genius loci -- the living spirits --of the various neighborhoods of Paragon City; it follows the Spirit of Kings Row around as he/it pursues... well, why not just see?

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

My father sent me this article. I thought this would be the best place to share it :-) Knowing there is at least one Bugs fan out there. :-) -Cindy
www.thestar.com/article/233518

The Jason eyed me warily from one of the overhead displays as I slammed my Material Defender through a wicked spiralling turn into the depths of the mine.
"So, let me get this straight."
I grunted acknowledgement, fragging a hapless drone.
"You've had a batch of crystal 'wavium brewing for six months."
"Yup" I responded, as I dodged some sort of crackling plasma ball.
"You Quickened an AI in it, and left the poor thing recoding for another two months."
"Ayup." And the ball-launcher, a wall-clinging turret, fell to my missles.
"All so you could play Descent in higher resolution with better graphics."
"Yeap." I cursed briefly as the ball-launcher's brother fragged _me_, then looked up at The Jason in the screen. "It was worth it, too. Works great multiplayer."
The Jason shook his head, and I grinned as I pushed the file over the link and closed the connection. Best to give the poor guy a few days to get up to speed, after all. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

The usual places have the sub of Ghibli's Earthsea out. Three more hours for me before I watch.

That poor white mage.
Actually very well done.
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Epsilon