It's easy to forget, but under the depression and angst and judeo-christian mythology, there's the guts of a genuine grand science fiction plot spread over aeons of time. Maybe that's what I like about it so much.... there's a lot more going on. Or hinted at.

----------------
When we stared into the desolate abyss of annihilation, we created the Evangelion. It was our hope that, long after we had gone, some marker of who we were would remain, that someone would find it and the human within and know that this is what a human being was, and what humans had accomplished before time overtook them. It was eternal proof of mankind's existance.

Now, we know our existance was planned. Humans are not a natural species. The roadmap to our evolution is written in our genes, our past and future development encoded aeons before the first basic proteins came into being.

That's a staggering thing to process. For many people, it's a frightening concept. Thoughts turn to Gods when such things are suggested.

But, whatever they were, we call them the First Ancestral Race.

They were a people who were born on a world formed when the Galaxies themselves were young and the Universe was filled with brilliant stars. They grew and evolved beneath this shining new sky until they reached point where they could leave their homeworld behind and turn outwards to worlds beyond theirs.

They reached out, searching for others like them in the vast cosmos of possibility, certain that sheer probability guaranteed that somewhere, someone else had to exist.

And they found no-one.

The cosmos that greeted them was a desolate and empty place, scorched barren by the death-spasms of hypergiants.

Gradually, they came to realise that they were an accident in time, a race born billions of years too early in a universe actively hostile to life. They were an infinitesimal fluke so unlikely, that the chances of them ever finding another civilisation like themselves were so small as to effectively be zero.

They carried on nevertheless, striving towards new heights and new understandings in the hopes that they might somehow find a way to find someone out there. They mastered the clockwork chaos of the cosmos in ways that would be like Gods compared to us.

But they were still mortal. They were still fallible. They were lonely. The inevitability of entropy, that all things must eventually run down, finally caught up with them. And they were faced with the knowledge that, not only where they alone, but that every single thing that they had ever achieved would be lost. Everything they had done and achieved would be gone, and nothing and no memory of who and what they were would remain because there was nobody to remember them.

And faced with the stark desolation of time, they made one last great effort to leave something behind – some marker that they once existed, and someone to know that they once where. They created these automated terraforming systems we called Seeds of Life and launched them across empty space towards young stars which looked like they might one day in the future form worlds capable of supporting life.

Five billion years after they passed into the ashes of history, at least one little ember of who and what they where still burns.

Us.

And with us, their hope that someone, somewhere might grow to a point that they could reach to the stars and maybe find some evidence of who they once where. And hopefully, a universe teeming with life for us to meet.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

All I can say (because I'm laughing so hard) is:

YES!!!! (NB: trying to set size to xx-large here)

(NOTE: Watch through the credits)

As if we didn't have too many ways to waste time already... archive.org now has dozens of video-arcade games online.

http://archive.org/details/internetarcade

(We may need to update many of the pages linked from http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Category:Arcade_Game ...)
--
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

Wonderful... 
Youtube's new copyright rules and reporting structure were incredibly bad when they were implemented last year. Now stalkers, terrorists and other dangerous sorts have found loopholes in the new system to get personal info on their enemies or potential victims. If youtube doesn't do anything to address this problem, could it be the end of the platform?
EDIT: Here's the original article link: 
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/dmca-y ... -al-hayat/

As a result of recent developments in the Pottermore thread (namely, JKR posting Dolores Umbridge's biography, which holds a couple surprises), I've decided to post the following scene as a teaser.  It was written before Rowling posted the Umbridge bio, and I was... darkly amused at how close I came to the new canon with what some prereaders said were exaggerations.
Enjoy.

Specifically, three days in February - which is all that it'll be open anyway.

http://www.sjgames.com/general/press_re ... 41106.html]SJGames will be opening a Munchkin store in NYC (specifically, 353 West 46th Street) on Valentine's Day weekend. Apparently, SJ will be there.
--
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

This is a collection of ideas that's been bouncing around my head for some time now.  Over the last couple days, they've been coalescing into part of a tabletop RPG.  I'm a lot better at worldbuilding and general design than I am at mechanics, so bear with me, please.Setting:  High fantasy.  Civilization exists, but is constantly under threat.  Monsters- stronger, faster, tougher than mortal man- roam the wild places of the world, striking out against towns and villages.  Magic is fairly common- maybe one in ten has the talent for it.Character System:  This is the core of what I'm going for.  The thought that prompted this whole thing was basically 'How do I make fighters and wizards feel distinct, badass and balanced?'  The answer was pretty simple.
There are three general character classes.  Casters are your wizardly sorts- inherently gifted with magic, focusing on casting spells in battle.  Clerics make pacts with supernatural entities- primarily gods, but demons and unaligned spirits are also options- who use magic on their behalf.  The magic they get is more refined, more complex than Caster magic, but also less flexible.  Finally, Combatants are, on their own, entirely mundane.  They compete with Casters, Clerics, and the superhuman monsters of the world through unparalleled martial skill, borrowing the magic of others (in the form of stat-boosting enchantments and magically empowered equipment), and finding non-magical ways to get things done.
Note that this isn't a class system.  Instead, character development is done more like the way White Wolf handles it- characters earn XP, which lets them buy skills, spells, proficiencies, martial arts, spirit pacts, enchantments... basically, every form of character development possible.  Certain purchases- the unique features of each class- tend to be mutually exclusive, but everything that isn't directly excluded (or dependent on an excluded purchase) is available.  The rub is that class features synergize.  Investing in a class gets you discounts on further purchases tied to that class, and investing in skill/spell/martial art trees gets you additional discounts on the rest of that tree.  The more you specialize, the more you get out of it.  Ironically enough, some class features can offer discounts on out-of-class features that synergize well.
I'm envisioning each class as being very wide- wider than any one- or three- characters can possibly master.  There's room to specialize, to play each class several different ways, even before you start to consider multiclassing.  The Combatant, for instance, can be played as a traditional thief, ninja, fighter, ranger... basically, as any mundane class.  Cleric encompasses the D&D cleric, (parts of the) warlock, druid, and artificer, just off the top of my head, and Caster can be played as a wizard, sorcerer, (the rest of) warlock, and many more.
Magic System:  Here's the other bit that really inspired what I have.  'Magic' is the ability to 'push' against the fabric of the world.  If you wanted to put it in sci-fi terms, think of it as an inherent ability to make 'waves' in the quantum foam.  Each wave has a limited- and incredibly blunt- impact on the world; useless on its own, but when you put enough waves together in the right positions... you get a spell.
'Spells' are four-dimensional patterns, drawn out of magic, whose creation has a useful effect.  This isn't easy to do; casting a spell is a lot like drawing a picture on the surface of a lake by running around the edge of it with a wave generator... only in 3D, instead of 2D.  Half the effort involved isn't even spent creating the pattern, but neutralizing the bits of the waves that aren't part of the pattern.  When you don't do that, you get the effect you want... plus a menagerie of other, random, side effects.
This is where the name comes from.  The people of this world think of it as, metaphysically, a tapestry.  Magic is the act of reweaving it into a new pattern.  Gods, demons, and spirits- technically all the same thing- are repeated motifs.  A god of fire, for instance, is the pattern of fire, shaped by belief into a sapient being.  This is why Clerics are different from Casters; instead of doing magic themselves, they have spirits (who, existing only as patterns, are not limited as mortal beings are) performing magic for them.  Spirits can shape patterns more complex than even a dozen Casters working in unison... but each Cleric can only get a fraction of their attention, and they don't quite understand the mortal mentality.  Clerical magic is less flexible than Caster magic because the Caster can cast what he wants at the time; the Cleric can only receive the precise boons their pacted spirits have agreed to provide.
More on this later, as I think of it... and as people ask questions.  Please, offer anything that comes to mind.  Questions about what I've written?  Elaborations?  Suggested game mechanics?  Quibbles?  Even suggestions on where to ask?  Post it!

http://www.youtube.com/v/P9-FCC6I7u0&ve ... tube_gdata
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/06/showbiz/m ... ?hpt=hp_t2]The Force Awakens.
I doubt it's going to run into a name collision with any other project in the near future, so unlike Jedi we can probably rest assured it's not going to change.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Okay, the positive:

1. the folks I voted for won
   
2. The f$cking negative ads are DONE... for two years.
   

1. In a lot of other states, the Negative ads worked
   
2. The swarm of smug incoming due to the total Senate results.