WRT the aliens who left the bouy that the Miranda found/will find Dec 12 2012, I've had a few thoughts:
A: Two years of travel time back is a long, long way for story purposes, but the Miranda has been following a loose spiral out - it's entirely possible, even probablethat they have in fact circled around behind the aliens' home system, and will pass near/through it on the way back. I personally vote that they don't actually make first contact, or at most do so with some barely-established colonial group rather than any central body, but I'm very open to suggestions on this - my main plot involving them is the ship's holographic navigation and recreation computer AI, actually.
B: How alien are they? Judging by the audio clip played in the 12/12/2012 thread spamfic/scene, they're at least mentally similar enough to be comprehensible once the language barrier is overcome, and use speech and/or song to communicate, but that leaves a LOT of territory. My concept to start discussion is along the lines of cephalopodian/arthropodian, a squid with a hard "helmet" and (2-4) exoskeletal legs plus two more arms, ending in cartilage-skeleton "tentacle" fingers (though technically an appendage is only a tentacle if it's around the creature's mouth) and an elephantish snout that is its food/drink orifice and a separate mouth for breathing and speaking. Their atmo mix is roughly compatible with humans but has about 3x the oxygen, and they like it at heat-stroke-inducing temperatures and near 100% humidity - Like the... Cretacius, was it? ... period when plant life ran wild on earth and there were dragonflies with six foot wingspans... Only around a bluer star as well. This nicely shorts out the clich invasion plot, as they consider Earth a frozen, twilight, desert hell where they'd need an oxygen mask and humidifier just to syrvive, while humans can't take the temperatures in the areas they consider habitable planetary zones and sunburn in minutes under their preferred lighting. (The Senshi would undoubtedly love to get their hands on some of the Squidleigh plants for their terraforming, though - relatively high temperature, high oxy-output, and liking the extra solar energy from a closer orbit!) Close enough to visit, similar enough to get each other's dirty jokes, not really interested in setting up shop on each other's real estate.
That's not to say that militant factions can't find a reason to fight over if it's wanted, but "I claim this land for Spain!" is not an issue, or at least not an immediate one.

C: How long have they had the 'wave, what can they do with it? I say, 20-30 years, and not much more than we can, just on a production basis for the more basic applications rather than having to one-off handcraft everything. Maybe their drive technology is faster, if they are two years away at best human speeds, so that can be shortened. Still no lambent beams of energy to be seen except possibly short-reach, directed gravity manipulation for cargo handling, more's the pity.
D: Goodies! What kind of standard gear do they have!? I'm really not going to comment on this one, I'm a RABID gearhead and want them in meksuits too much. Just... Consider the possibility, as second or third generation Squidliegh-fen (or whatever, bird-men or cat-men or ameobaoid slime creatures, or just guys with a funny skin color and ridged foreheads, though I'm rather opposed to the last), that they've standardized on a van/station wagon with arms and legs rather than wheels as the typical model of small craft. When I get around to writing it, the first scratch-built fencar made aboard Gnarlycurl on camera has no wheels - who needs them when you have a speedrive for hover and flight?

Pi: Timeframe - none of this is urgent, per se - there's a couple years in-'verse and only the beginnings of plots in my head, but for a shared world something as mojar as first contact CANNOT be laid out by one person alone.
- CD
PS: the subject line comes from a trailer I once saw for a Disney-talking-animals version of ... Oliver Twist, I think? ... where they'd edited two lines from the same character together like that - it's just something that amused me and stuck in my head. SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

The Internet Has Crashed!

-- Bob
---------
The Internet Is For Norns.

...And the Secret of Life. Read and be enlightened.

-- Bob
---------
The Internet Is For Norns.

boards.cityofheroes.com/s...ost8721960

Quote:

---

Starting on Tuesday, July 17th, the Training Room Test Server will have two new game features enabled for testing: Character Transfer and Character Rename.
* Character Transfer will allow customers to move characters from one server to another.
* Character Rename will allow customers to rename a selected character.

Both of these features are not part of Issue 10: Invasion. Although we are beginning to test them now, we anticipate that they will not be enabled on the live service until after the launch of Issue 10.
We estimate that both features, Character Transfer and Character Rename, will carry a transaction fee of $9.99 each per use (there will be no fee for transfers to or renames on the Training Room). Should a Character Transfer have a name conflict on the destination server, a free Character Rename will be made available to resolve the conflict and rename the moving character.
These new features exemplify our commitment to improve the quality of the City of Heroes experience. We feel the price of these features is enough to prevent potential abuse, but also reasonable enough to not be prohibitive for those who want to improve their gaming experience by moving servers or changing a character name.
IMPORTANT! Customers who are interested in taking advantage of the Character Transfer service should know that it is possible in the future that we may make changes to the game that would remove the need to Transfer servers. One example of such a change would be a server-less game configuration where all players can group with anyone, without the restriction of which server they play on. We are not committing to this server-less configuration, and in fact there are no plans to implement a server-less environment this calendar year, but because we are charging a fee for these services, it is important that our players understand that the possibility exists. We want to be very clear in this regard so that those who do decide to make use of a Server Transfer, when it becomes available, understand that they may not need it in the future.
For those interested in assisting with the testing efforts of Character Transfer and Character Rename, keep your eye on the Official City of Heroes Announcement Forum for further details. Thank you for your continued support!
The City of Heroes Development Team

---

Okay, so I've got some video files (avi) that I want playable on a DVD player. Ideally, I want to burn a DVD-Video disc complete with a menu.
I know Apple has a nifty program that does this free with MacOSX, is there a *good* freebie program for Windows anyone knows of?--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

For the last week or so I've been operating under the limitations of a laptop that doesn't have enough lifespan (power cord issues) to make playing City a practical option. With luck this should be solved in a day or two.
I probably should have said something sooner. Gomen!

Sony sues the folks who made their rootkit. Because, of course, it's their fault everyone got so upset about it.

-- Bob
---------
The Internet Is For Norns.

Well, I wound up my campaign a couple of weeks ago (with a 100% PC survival rate, no less), and almost everybody else in the group has decided that I should take a break from gamemastering for a while. (I don't know why; I'm not at the burnout point yet... Anyway, that's irrelevant.)
Epsilon's already running a game, and he's posted game logs from it on occasion. He's a good GM, and it's an enjoyable game. (I'm sure I'd enjoy it more if the players could agree not to be idiots in-game. (No, Epsilon, I don't want to hear about the time my character was an idiot. That was with the full agreement of the other player-characters before I made the boneheaded maneuver; I was trying for some party unity.) Anyway, that's irrelevant.) But he's only able to run every other week.
Which leaves the others... No names, for obvious reasons.
Two of them I have no idea whether they'd make good GMs, because as far as I know they've never tried.
One has the attention-span of a mayfly; when he loses interest in a game, he stops coming to the sessions. He doesn't bother telling anyone, he just stops coming. I trust I don't have to explain why it would worry me if he was to try his hand as GM.
Another has trouble telling the difference between a computer RPG and a pencil & paper RPG when he GMs. His last campaign lasted less than a half-dozen sessions; the final session in that one was a carefully-contrived session-long "cut scene" where the players weren't allowed to do anything. (When I tried having my character say something that would have shifted the focus away from the NPCs and back to at least one of the PCs, he said "You don't want to say that" and went back to his prepared notes.) I believe he still doesn't understand why nobody wanted to play in that game again.
The last one brings his favourite character into each game he runs (modified as little as necessary to fit into the setting), and expects the players to not mind that this character is not only more competent than the PCs, but is also an active part of the party. He doesn't seem to grasp that we don't want to play sidekicks to a "GM's character".
(Yes, I have considered finding a different group. I'd send invitations to the better players I know if I had some gaming space and a decent game-plotline in mind... Anyway, that's irrelevant.)
So... What I'd like to do is give copies of a "how to be a good gamemaster" text to the other people in my group. There's no guarantee that they'd read the thing, but at least I'd have done something constructive. The problem is, I don't know of any such works. Introductory texts are a dime a dozen, but most of these folks need something more than introductory texts. (And there's always something in this sort of book that the old hands will find new, so I'd want to read them myself.)
Any suggestions? Printed books, PDFs, web sites, bundles of 80-column punch cards, ... anything?

-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
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

Hey, anybody remember the Max Headroom TV series from the late 80s? Way way WAY ahead of it's time for the time. It's available on DVD now, and you can watch several episodes of it (including the pilot!) for free here.
There are commercials, but they are -amazingly enough- placed at the places in the episodes where the actual commercial breaks originally were! So it's bearable to watch them. Nice long 12-15 min segments apiece.
It's amazing how little Max Headroom has dated over the years. Partially because I think they purposely made it an alternative history anyway. Partially because it was just THAT revolutionary. Some of the humor and satirical commentary is such that - given the censors at the time, I'm AMAZED it made it on the air at all!
Anyway - you might want to take a look. The episodes are pretty high quality, and the sound is pretty stereo quality too.
-Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------

As much fun as most fen have in the Solar System, we shouldn't forget that a few brave folks have ventured outside the confines of the Sun's dominion to see what's out there. And of those who've gone There & back again, a few have shared their experiences with the general public.
In that light, here's a publicity still from Tau Ceti, the 2010 documentary about the 2009 Ptichka expedition: