Anyone looking to clean up some closet space? I'm looking for Captain's Log issues in the 20's and 30's.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

The 1969 AMC 400 show car:




Now edited for hosting that won't turn it into an antihotlinking shunt image if you don't already have it in cache.
--
"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

When everyone seems to see the car crash coming, but the gobshite holding the wheel. I mentioned Otakucon a few months ago. Well, it's supposedly running right now.

What is is, really, is a demonstration of how not to run a con and pretty much every single way it is possible to fail at holding an event. It's a full-blown plane-crash of fail. But it has given us the LIST.

How to make a convention Fail, in 25 easy steps.

#1: Freehose your con's webshite on a server that serves up shitty abnoxious popup ads with a malware side-dish.

#2: Pick a name for the Con that ensures you'll be well down the google rankings, below the last crowd to infringe on Otakon's trademark

#3: Run it the fuck out of your own pocket 'Like one of the Big Boys'

#4: Turn it into a temple of your own Ego.

#5: Advertise a whole load of events that you never really had an intention of having, or advertise as coming, people you made contact with who dind't immediately say 'no'

#6: Threaten anyone who wonders how you plan to pay for it with a lawsuit for 'deformation'. Mispel defamation repeatedly.

#7: Threaten to sue 4chan.

#8: Promise to pay for it 'like the big boys', and make the guests 'take a cut on their appearance fees'

#9: Announce a venue you haven't actually booked.

#10: Not realise you haven't actually booked the venue, until 6 weeks beforehand. When it's been booked by someone else.

#11: Move to a hotel in the middle of the worst traffic snarl in Ireland. And wait weeks to update the website to tell anyone.

#12: Be so sceevy that the guests who do agree to come ask for appearrance fees up front.

#13: Still manage to loose one guest with about 4 weeks to go. Apparently, by 'negotiating for a better rate'

#14: Try to let this quietly slip by unnoticed by announcing it on Twitter during the middle of the largest con of the year, when they hope nobody will be looking.

#15: Hold your con in the 4 weeks between the largest con of the year and Christmas.

#16: Loose another guest by bollicking up the Airline reservation.

#17: Give the one guest who does show up exactly one event.

#18: Promise to announce a timetable 'tomorrow', 2 weeks before the event.

#19: Finally Announcing it 4 days before the con. Listing events for people no-longer coming.

#20: 3 hours of Cards against humanity 'tournament'. 3 hours of Flux. As an advertised 'event'.

#21: Geek Eire (A crappy Bootleg of Geek Ireland so bad, they consider 'Cowboy Bebob' an obscure anime)

#22: Get in such a childish strop over a comparison to DashCon, that you actually buy a ballpit and advertise it as an event

#23: No Ballpit in the timetable. After being promised. Other advertised 'big ticket' events missing too.

#24: A grand total of 35 people managed to pre-register. Most not even for the weekend.

#25: Get repeatedly told by multiple independant sources that your security officer is a a bit of a known cunt, with a history of harrasing con attendees, and decide to stand by him instead.

So, it seems, if you want to run a succesful event, take a look at what this gobaloon did and then do the exact opposite on every point. I do feel bad for the guest and traders, who're showing up solely to demonstrate they're reliable people, if at all.

And we do have succesful cons. Eirtakon has just surpassed it's tenth year - even if that was somewhat of a melancholy experience for me in a strange way. And Kaizoku con next February hitting the difficult second year promises to be interesting. (Even if some of us are packing so much Whiskey and Scotch into the RX8 that it'll be more a private whsikey festival, with some anime events, than a convention). There's a couple of others, and the odd failure to launch, but none that have managed quite this level of failure.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Two, actually:
Ken Weatherwax, aka Pugsley on the original Addams Family, died of a heart attack over the weekend.
And Mary Ann Mobley, former Miss America and actress, has died from cancer -- exactly when isn't clear from the CNN article, but presumably within the last few days.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

I was browsing through my copy of IST and couldn't find any mention of Japanese metahumans in WWII, was there one I missed or did it end up getting trimmed for space?
Also, were there ever any write-ups for any of the named metas from WWII?

Thanks,

M
Michael R. Smith (lastfreehuman@gmail.com)
GURPS IST Aleph Wordpress (http://istaleph.wordpress.com/)
GURPS IST Aleph Twitter (http://twitter.com/IstAleph/)
Trek This! Wordpress (http://dthiller.wordpress.com/)
My Blog (http://lastfreehuman.wordpress.com/)

Anyone watched the launch yesterday?
The good news is that we no longer have to rely on the Russians for to go to the ISS.

Better news..on to Mars!
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

Is anyone else seeing a massive slowdown for some sites on the net?  Since last evening, sites like Amazon.con. IMDb, and the Huff Post are responding so slowly for me as to be unusable.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

So I was in the process of trying to determine where all the characters from the original books are now and I managed to get stumped on one I just could not, for the life of me, come up with anything interesting for. Icepick.
There are no obvious hooks for her character and I didn't want to just go "dead" or "in prison" or what have you, but she's just not...interesting...at all. She is basically her power, and I guess I could do something with that...except I've got a Russian super that I already used my "man becomes elemental force" card on.

Any ideas?

M
Michael R. Smith (lastfreehuman@gmail.com)
GURPS IST Aleph Wordpress (http://istaleph.wordpress.com/)
GURPS IST Aleph Twitter (http://twitter.com/IstAleph/)
Trek This! Wordpress (http://dthiller.wordpress.com/)
My Blog (http://lastfreehuman.wordpress.com/)

Notice of Intent to Incorporate under section 74656.1864 of the Galactic Charter Regulations for Colonial Expansion

The aliens were among us

The galaxy is teeming with life; the leading theory being that the earliest self-replicating molecules formed by chance late in the life cycle of the first-population stars, then spread on the shockfronts of novas and through hyperspace fractures formed by the sudden shifting of their mass-shadows. Essentially anywhere something can survive, something does.

We never knew they were there

The great Galactic Wars lie tens of thousands of years in the past, the treaty organizations and trade councils formed in their wakes having grown and merged into a massive interstellar bureaucracy that governs all with a papery grasp, impersonal and pedantic.

When their survey was complete, they acted

"Seriously, they speak how many languages on the at planet? It'll take weeks just to read the formal notice of intent in all of those, and it's not like the locals even have receivers to hear the broadcast!"

"There's nothing saying they have to be listening, just that we have to broadcast the notice in language understood by every local inhabitant thirty duty cycles before the motion is put to vote, so regional representatives have time to arrive. It's doubly pointless, since the review meeting is at the sector capital, but the forms have to be followed and all the entries filled. It's why we sent a fleet's worth of observers down there for the last seventy orbits."

Only one man heard the warning

Dr. (name) was, frankly, a nerd. He did number puzzles, studied foreign languages, and traded cryptographic challenges with an online group for fun, had his own personal server room (Well, a room where he kept the still functional older computers as he regualrly replaced his current primary one, running protein folding and SETI clients) and had originally been aiming to work in high-energy experimental physics until the US canceled the Supercollider and shut down the Tevatron, leaving the only remaining operational hardware overseas. Not that he was a rabid flag-flapper, either, but his family and friends were here, and staffing needs in the field were never large to begin with. With that avenue largely closed, he had instead pursued string theory and the design of sensors capable of detecting tiny fluctuations in the fabric of space itself. That was how he came to be the first sapient native to Earth to decipher a hyperwave broadcast, when the regular "noise" he'd been trying to show had a connection to the mass shifts of solr wheather and prominences was suddenly drowned out by a far stronger signal, one that was immediately recogniseable as carrying basic amplitude modulated sound in the normal audible range. The fact that it was in Chinese when he set up a program to convert the measurements back into sound was slightly concerning at first, until he found that the message was simply being repeated over and over by descending order of the population that spoke it, but then it started playing in a language he understood, and he didscovered that there was good reason to be alarmed.

There are thirty days left to build a hyperspace-capable shuttle, gather representatives of the nations of Earth, and attend the Colonial Review Board, or else

If the Motion to Incorporate is passed as laid out in the aliens' broadcast, Earth will become an Expendable Resource Extraction and Processing Outpost, and any inhabitants not registered as Galactic Citizens (meaning, in effect, all of humanity) considered outlaws and claim jumpers, subject to suppression and removal from properly registered claims (i.e. anywhere there's something remotely valuable, like oilfields or mines or factories) unless they comply with the registered owner's terms.

Can human civilization survive?

You decide!

... 'cause I ain't go no more on this. I was reaching just to put it together this much.
--
"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

I know very little about Warhammer 40000 (war games aren't my cup of tea), but I recall there's at least one person here who is familiar with the game...

I've come across a few pages of free WH40K 3D-art resources, and I'd like to say more than just "assorted items" when I index them on the freebie wiki. If you know the game, how would you sort what's listed on these pages?

http://www.vanishingpoint.biz/freestuff ... ationID=15
http://www.vanishingpoint.biz/freestuff ... ationID=15
http://www.vanishingpoint.biz/freestuff ... ationID=15
http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads. ... e=jibicoco
http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads. ... &s=dd&pn=2

(I'm not even sure whether everything on the last two pages is for WH40K. I think the majority of items are, though.)

I'm deliberately not suggesting any categories, because I don't know what divisions are important in this context.
--
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