I just had a thought (after seeing some of the discussion of Doug Sangnoir's powers over in the Drunkards Walk forums) - esper powers are pretty much superpowers. And it's rare that somebody gets to choose his or her own superpowers.

So... Does anybody want to take a chance on a random powerset? Epsilon lent me his copy of Villains and Vigilantes a while back, I've still got it, and it has rules for random powers generation. I'll ignore the "powers from gadgets", "powers from training", and "weaknesses" rules and just go with the innate-powers rules.

If you have D&D dice, you can use those for generating the random numbers. If not, well, random.org is a perfectly good source of random numbers.

The process:

1. Roll a d6 (or tell random.org to give you a number between 1 and 6). Add 2 to the result.
   
2. Roll that many d100 (or tell random.org to give you that many numbers between 1 and 100).
   
3. I'll consult the random powers table and see what the numbers correspond to.
   
4. If a power needs rolls on subtables, I'll tell you what numbers are needed.
   
5. I'll tell you what the random results came up with, and you get to drop two of the results and make the rest work together.
   

Let it die, let it die
Lay it to rest and let it lie
Let it die, let it die
It's time to say goodbye
I don't care what they're going to try
Star Wars is over
It ended with Return of the Jedi

Well, almost definitely.

I think.

Mind you, I've already given Bob permission (and a royalty-free license) to use anything I post to the forum.


"There is one thing that disappointed me, though."

"Oh?"

"When all of you arrived for the start of the school year, I overheard some of the students talking about a Dada professor. I was loking forward to meeting him, until I realized that 'DADA' was an acronym and they were talking about me."

Hermonie gave me that look of annoyance that only a teenaged girl can reliably pull off. "Did you really think Hogwarts would have an arts department?"

"You never know." I turned on my helmet mic so I'd get a bit of reverb in my speech. "It Can Happen Here!"


(Doug's quoting "Dough for the Do-Do", of course. While that's more surrealism than it is dada, who's going to correct him?)

I was idly leafing through the AD&D 2nd Ed. Players Handbook, and paused to read the specifications for the 6th-level Cleric spell Heal.  "...wipe away disease and injury ... blindness ... heals all points of damage suffered due to wounds or injury.  It dispels a feeblemind spell.  It cures those mental disorders caused by spells or injury to the brain."

I wondered, still idly, how Doug's "I'm Alive" would stack up against that in terms of power, given that "I'm Alive" will also repair people's clothing.  And then I thought again about the curing of mental disorders, and ... oh, Emperor on Earth, Neville's parents....

Finally, I'm about to hit episode 4.

It'll all be offscreen, with Usagi giving Doug an after-action report... but in that episode Usagi originally beat the crap out of a set of musclemen at a gym with just her raw senshi abilities.  Imagine how she'll do with training.

What may be one of the oldest known rocks from Earth has been found in the material that Apollo 14 astronauts brought home from the moon nearly 50 years ago.

He was indicted yesterday for, among other things, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and was arrested at his home in Florida this morning by the FBI.

CNN story here.

Associated Press story, via MSN, here.

New Scientist: We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it

tl;dr: Possibly caused by the same bacteria that causes gum disease, maybe. And the report mentions a possible cure for gum disease - that is showing some signs of also treating Alzheimer’s - is currently being tested.

CBC Op-ed: Donald Trump is the best president the left has ever had

Quote:Not to commiserate over what a pig the man is (calling someone a pig is presidential language now, so that's fair ball, right?). That's just easy. What's fascinating is the reaction when you advance the argument that Trump, judged solely on his actions, is the most left-wing president any of us has ever seen.

By people "on the left," incidentally, I don't mean small-l, bourgeois, reflexive urban liberals. I mean committed progressives; people who believe in collectivism over rugged individualism, in the replacement of social hierarchy with social equality, who advocate wealth redistribution and robust government intervention to restrain the predations of the market. Generally, these people also oppose government austerity and militarism and globalization.

They are generally well educated and serious. And they can be irritatingly self-righteous. Which is why it's such fun to point out that Trump has often been their objective ally.

(non-embedded)

Man, I love PMJ