As it is only polite to introduce myself...
Science Fiction fan for forever, Anime fan since an accident at an SF con in the late 1980s.
Consumer of fanfic since the early '90s, when Megazone was god on what's now RAAC.
Occasional indulger in excessive RPGing, particularly superheroics, if available.
Long-term amateur tinkerer with RPG rules, mostly extending things.
High Tech fan, Programmer with strange ideas, and mostly British.
Is that enough to get started with? [grin]

Ah, and non-drinker! [grin]
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

While I fight with my writer's block, here's a little something I wrote some months ago.
-- Bob
(edit: ezcode, not html!)
----------
In other news, I found out who the mysterious "KS", designer ofthe boomer brain, was. Despite my best efforts, I had to filterthrough a lot of Knight Saber drek to find him, but there he was,practically a footnote in the history of boomer development aspresented by GENOM: Katsuhito Stingray. (Talk about your goofynames... Or maybe not, considering pots, kettles and apparentreflectivity indices...)Something of a latter-day Renaissance man, he worked for anoutfit called Whiz Laboratories (which GENOM later took over,natch) until he died in what the official biographical paragraphdescribed as "an accidental explosion". Parsing *that* throughthe GENOM-to-Truth converter gets us "assassinated after hiscritical breakthrough so we could nick all the rights when webought the company."Except that GENOM *didn't* get *all* the rights to boomertech --according to certain other databases I consulted, Stingray hadfiled for and received a few key patents before his death, andthose were still in the hands of his two children, Sylia andMackinnison. (*Who* in their right mind names their kid"Mackinnison"? God only knows what damage that did to the poorboy's psyche growing up, especially combined with having his dadmurdered...)Anyway, out of a kind of paternal interest in these two probablevictims of GENOM's greed, I looked into their lives. It turnedout to be harder than I expected -- both kept a very low profile.However, I found enough. They were doing well for themselves --for some reason GENOM hadn't tried to cheat or lawyer them out ofthe remaining patents (probably because it would have been a PRdebacle even GENOM's spinmeisters couldn't have fixed), andthey'd been worth a lot. The girl -- well, woman, actually,since she was now in her middle 20s -- was a multimillionaire whoapparently split her time between running a lingerie shop anddabbling (rather successfully) in real estate. The boy was anengineering prodigy who was attending college in Germany, but hadpreviously lived with his sister in their penthouse home. Theycertainly weren't suffering, despite their father's probablemurder at GENOM's hands.(*"They killed your parents, didn't they?"*)The memory of my own voice whispered to me from the back of mymind, and I stopped for a moment to consider what it had to say.Then I pulled up what precious little there was on Sylia Stingrayin the public databases -- suspiciously little, come to think ofit. I supplemented it with material I had eased out of someGENOM files I really wasn't supposed to know about. I added invarious news shots of both the White Knight and Stingray. Istudied the combined results and thought.Allowing for those stupid heels and the general increase indimensions imposed by the nature of the armor, she'd be about theright height and build. Her brother had clearly inherited theirfather's genius, so why not her? But either one could be theKnights' technologist. She had more than enough money to start(if not continuously fund) a private mercenary force. Sheclearly had enough pull to ensure her online profile was smallenough to overlook easily. She had the free time. And she had amotive that tallied up nicely with Lady White's obsession withboomers.Add to that the fact that the name I'd overheard in their radiochatter as "Celia" could easily have been "Sylia" instead, and Iwas pretty sure that I had found the leader of the Knight Sabers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Looks like something's happening behind the scenes - Shapeshifters (specifically, and animation related to the cover art) made the daily illuminator today - www.sjgames.com/ill.
Offsides
Drunkard's Walk Forum Moderator and Prereader At Large

Many thanks to fellow MIB Erik Zane, who let me know this weekend that the book's page at the SJG website now shows the cover. Go there and click on the thumbnail; you'll get a nice, big image. There's also a wallpaper linked off the same page, and you know it's already on my machine at home.
The color scheme is a little monochromatic, but that's okay with me. However, after all the crap I took from the playtesters over the book being "werewolf-centric", the cover of course has a wolf on it. Someone in the art department doesn't pay attention to playtest groups, eh? Go fig.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Hey, Bob? I saw that you just updated the DW page, but couldn't figure out what you added/changed...."I was an Otaku before those kids came along and changed the meaning of the word."
-- HM "Howling Mad" Wilson to more than one team-mate.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
When you call my name it's like a little prayer
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour I can feel your power
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there
I hear your voice, it's like an angel sighing
I have no choice, I hear your voice
Feels like flying
I close my eyes, Oh God I think I'm falling
Out of the sky, I close my eyes
Heaven help me
When you call my name it's like a little prayer
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour I can feel your power
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there
Like a child you whisper softly to me
You're in control just like a child
Now I'm dancing
It's like a dream, no end and no beginning
You're here with me, it's like a dream
Let the choir sing
When you call my name it's like a little prayer
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour I can feel your power
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there
Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there
Just like a muse to me, you are a mystery
Just like a dream, you are not what you seem
Just like a prayer, no choice your voice can take me there
Just like a prayer, I'll take you there
It's like a dream to me
-- Madonna, Like A Prayer
(Written by Madonna and Patrick Leonard)


-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

The link to 'Vocal reader/fan Rob Kelk has included DW2 on his list of the dozen best fanfics on the Web.':
robkelk.tripod.com/links.html
is no longer valid.
try:
robkelk.ottawa-anime.org/links.html

In going over material relevant to a little bit of new text I was writing last night, I realized with a shock that I had, without intending to do so, inserted an in-joke when I initially wrote the book.
One of the sample races is a carnivorous morph lightly inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing. Only after rereading their description last night did I realize that I had made their unshifted form look just like the Vermicious Knids from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (that's the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, aka "Willy Wonka", for those who don't know)...
I suppose I should have included a racial quirk which compels them to spell out "SCRAM" any time five or more of them see members of other races...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Except for the Bibliography, which I continue to hack at, I believe I have gone through the last round of major input from me on the book. My editor's deadline is the 21st, which means we're mere days away from permanently putting down The Book That Would Not Die...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Well, not specifically.
But I was browsing the Oxford English Dictionary SF project (www.jessesword.com/SF/sf_citations.shtml), and I noticed that the earliest cite they have for the word 'morph' is 1995 as a verb, and 1994 as a noun.
This seems oddly late to me, and it occured to me that if anyone would have reference material on this, it'd be Bob...
('Shapeshifter', by the way, is 1967, though 'shapeshifting' is 1884.)