So, I was rather surprised to find that this song wasn't listed in the arsenal, and a forum search didn't turn it up either.

Quote:This Land Is Your LandWords and Music by Woody Guthrie

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;

From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,

I saw above me that endless skyway:

I saw below me that golden valley:

This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;

And all around me a voice was sounding:

This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,

As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:

This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."

But on the other side it didn't say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Supertemps says that "Rynkar is located on the opposite side of the Milky Way from Earth", so we probably don't need to figure out its location more specifically than that. My brain, however, has found itself doing the math on the location of the Confederation home cluster, and in the process, I started trying to figure out where Myrr's primary is.

I actually narrowed the latter down first. P.IST36 says it's "ten light-years from ours, toward the edge of the galaxy." In OTL, there are only five stars at that distance (at least according to Wikipedia), and only one that's on the side of our sky away from the center of the galaxy: e Eridani.

Identifying the Confederation cluster is a little harder; Bob says only that it's "over a thousand light-years away, towards the center of the galaxy" (p.IST35). Getting more specific than that would require knowing how much over a thousand light-years, and whether it's a globular cluster or just an open cluster. (I picked up the terms from the 4e version of GURPS Space, then went to Wikipedia to find out what the known ones are. Then again, I'm assuming it is one of the known ones, if only because I have trouble believing that many stars could hide from our sight.) If it's a globular cluster, the nearest one of those in the right general direction is M4, a "mere" 7200ly away. If it's an open cluster, there are several in the right direction at the right minimum range. (I'm tickled by M23 myself, but that's probably over-egging the beer...)

Story here, along with Guillermo del Toro making the announcement himself in a video.

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

Looks like they would like to. It would make life so much easier. I'll just leave the link here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... ords-laws/

Finally got around to scraping it together after two yars of crazy work deadlines and general life suck:
http://istaleph.wordpress.com/

If anyone is interested. Not much yet, but I expect to add to it bit by bit...

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/)

Okay, this kinda bugs me.  What, you may ask?  I'll show you - a snippet of a translation for Book 1 of the Log Horizon Light Novels.

Quote:After Henrietta joins in, the 4 of them talked about
their experiences so far and summarize their situation... But it has
only been half a day, they don't really understand what is happen.

I'd guess someone forgot to pay the domain name registration, but it's not even going to a parking page. Thee was still a bunch of stuff on there I'd never gotten around to reading, dammit.
--
"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

Bob Schroeck in the outline Wrote:             D-BOX  IST Placements - Things have changed since
                    1990; population has grown, countries have
                    dissolved and new ones formed.  The IST has
                    changed with them.

 

• Occupied China: has enough population to support 30 extra teams. Does this mean it's divided into a total of 31 units?
  
• India: Delhi + 28 teams (including the ones that were active as of IST1, at what are now known as Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai).
  
• USA: DC + 7 teams (one of them new; did Seattle get its own IST?).
  
• Indonesia: Jakarta + 6 teams (the three that were already in place as of IST1, the one that opened in '91, and two more).
  
• Brazil: Brasilia + 5 teams (one of them new).
  
• Pakistan: Islamabad + 4 teams (Karachi, Quetta, and two new ones).
  
• Bangladesh: Dhaka + 4 teams (Chittagong, Khulna, and two new ones).
  
• Russia: Moscow + 3 teams (chosen from the USSR teams, spaced to provide nationwide coverage; Murmansk has to be one of them for the sake of its role in protecting the northern latitudes)
  
• Japan: Tokyo + 2 or 3 teams (Osaka, Sapporo, and possibly a new one, unless the Hiroshima and Nagasaki teams count toward the national allotment).
  
• Mexico: Mexico City + 2 or 3 teams (Monterey, Mazatlán and possibly a new one.
  
• Philippines: Manila + 2 teams (Davao and one new one).
  
• Ethiopia: Addis Ababa + 2 new teams.
  
• Vietnam: Hanoi + 2 teams (Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh and one new one).
  
• Egypt: Cairo + 2 teams (Aswan and one more).
  
• Turkey: Ankara + 2 teams (Malatya and one more).
  
• Iran: Tehran (or wherever they set up the provisional capitol) + 2 teams.
  
• Germany: Bonn + 2 teams (Berlin and one more).
  
• Congo: Kinshasa + 1 or 2 teams.
  
• Thailand: Bangkok + 1 or 2 teams (established: Ranong and one more).
  
• France: Paris + 1 or 2 teams (established: Marseilles)
  
• United Kingdom: London + 1 or 2 teams (established: Edinburgh)
  
• Italy: Rome + 1 or 2 teams (Milan)
  
• Burma: Yangon + one more.
  
• Sudan: Khartoum + one more.
  
• Spain: Madrid + one more.
  
• Colombia: Bogota + one more.
  
• Tanzania: Dar es Salaam + one more.
  
• Kenya: Nairobi + one more.
  
• Ukraine: Kiev + Odessa
  
• Argentina: Buenos Aires + one more.
  

Literally because I've been having trouble sleeping these last couple of days. I might aswell inflict share the results with you.

Quote:When I was biomodded - it wasn't a 'woman' as such that the 'wave created -it created a Knight Saber. It created what I'd trained it to think a Knight Saber was - a female-appearing hardsuit with a human face on it. I'm everything that Priss, Sylia, Nene and Linna are, in one single package. Sylia's mind. Priss' voice. Linna's athleticism and Nene's spark of pink hair - and more. Priss' Gung-ho nature, Linna's love of conspicuous spending, Nene's love of things sweet and subversively punk and Sylia's appreciation of the female form.

Which reminds me. There was one thing all the Knight Sabers are, and I wasn't.

So there's always been that tension there, a little dissonance in myself. It's around these little concentrations that fractures in the mind can happen, the beginnings of a split in personality. My training helped to hold it together. I made it a part of me, by allowing it a quiet voice through a puppet body.

I suppose though, maybe the 'wave thought it's job had been left unfinished for all these years.

I had been fucking around with replacing a shipmind with a DNI. Instead of just interfacing, the computer decided to boot itself from my actual mind. It was a total and literal meatfuck that'd be a crime if I did it to someone else. I've seen people get prison time for it. It left me dazed and confused and wodering why my brother was inside a computer after he started beginning for help.

I didn't notice anything was wrong with myself until I saw the 'M' on my ID card, and people started asking me why I'd suddenly started using female personal pronouns.

When I first launched to space, and met with AC, the first thing we did was a thorough quiz - establishing both who I was, and who I remembered being. It's a backstop - a way to detect memory damage or interference, either contamination from hardware or malice. The answers I gave, are a matter of medical record. I took the same quiz again, and gave the exact answers I rememebered giving a seven years earlier. I was certain I was fine, right up until they showed me the comparison

The very first line told me I was wrong.

The first reaction is disbelief. The one thing we never doubt is our own mind. Even though I knew better - even though I'd seen just how malleable and unreliable memory is. Take something out and the brain naturally plasters over the cracks. You never even noticed it's gone until you poke the plaster and it crumbles away. It forces you to ask that horrible question;

Am I really myself anymore?

Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. And if something changes that recollection - in a real way it changes who I am. Anything that damages that, or mutilates that, is an attack on the self. It's a violation of a person's fundamental being.

Mackie was created from me - he was created from the man I used to be, seperating that part of my mind from my self, removing it and then slathering over the holes with cheap wallpaper and poster-flashes from each of the Knight Sabers. From a distance, it looks normal. But when you get up close, you can see right through the holes.

I don't think a 13 year old girl from Megatokyo would use the boy's locker room at her school, for a start. And if she did, I don't think she'dve been ignored week-in-week out.

I still remember growing up. I remember school. I remember college. I remember my first girlfriend in much the same way. The basic events are mostly the same. And then, my brother being born the same year Jurassic Park came out - twenty years later, he's ten years too young for that. My father died in a lab accident when I was young. But I helped organise his 50th Birthday party when I was 22. I even bought him a bottle of whiskey.

I remember joining the anime society that created the Ciara, and building the control systems for that ship's engines and generators. I remember cosplaying as Yuri of the Dirty Pair at a con, the same year there's a photo of me taken in a TF-2 Engineer costume. I stayed behind when the ship left, because I hated being cooped up in the thing. An archived post on AFBGC shows my original Skyknight-inspired hardsuit drawings, even as I remember forming the moulds to fit my chest. The promise to make a purple variant once I got the technique down was still unfulfilled.

I made test-castings to be certain, then fired them in a kiln fired by an old gas boiler. It was trial and error to get it right, then another week or two automating everything to make it consistent. In my mind's eye, it was Mackie who really built the railgun I used to test the prototype panels for my armour.

I cast the armour from a solid mix of handavium, steel wool strands and powdered ceramics with a glaze on top. In total, it must've weighed nearly two tons wet in the bath. Compression, weeks of careful drying and then being fired in the kiln dropped the weight to a small fraction. No matter what, my first attempt is always a failure. I remember the first result being a horrible bodge of Sylia and Skyknight, warped and mutated and unusable. I tried again, and got the suit that became my body.

The truth is, the opposite happened. This was the first armour. My attempt to correct the mistake was the second. I can see the posts on the Newsgroup.

I worked for Wright Stuff Mechatronics as an engineer. I saved up to buy an Rx8 - with a handwaved Tachikoma on the dash that acted as a speed camera detector. The first thing I ever waved was the ignition coils on that car - and a little in the engine oil. I looked at the sky and longed for the party I was missing zipping over head. And then one night I had friends over, got drunk, drank some left over handwavium, and somehow put on the suit. Next morning, the surprise remains the same.

Mackie falls out of the picture until he returns in a starship computer. I become a minor nuisance - my newfound ability to fly granting me the sort of freedom from consequences most humans only dream of, adopting my nom-du-guerre to keep Mackie safe. I bother the AD Police into doing something about me and I boost to orbit, and that's where I finally meet AC. We go through the usual 'new cyber, how the fuck'd you do that/welcome to the club routine', step one of which is asking my real name.

Sylia Stingray, I told her. It's clear as a bell in my mind.

But that's not the name I really gave twelve years ago.

And that leaves me right back at the start. Am I still myself?

In a real way I split into two people. Me. And Mackie. Maybe it was a perversion of the usual AI awakening process, or something else altogether - ask someone with a higher AI theory score than me. But, while the detail of my early memories is drastically different, the substance and feelings behind them remain the same. It's a different route, to arrive at the same endpoint. On the one hand, different, on the other - effectively the same.

I still love Ford. I still like doing the things I have loved all my life. I'm still woken by the same Boskone nightmares on those nights I choose to sleep. The basics are the same. the core stuff of me is still the same. I'm still recongiseable.

And then I'm reminded that I took the Oath of Venus, willingly. It changed my core self image from male to female. Sometimes when I'm bored, I doodle lingerie sketches - I've three whole sketchbooks filled with women I know, drawn in lingerie of my own design. Nobody's ever seen them. And I've gained a brother, who's the single most important thing in the world to me. Even if the memories are false, the feelings behind them are real. I can't ignore them.

Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. So, who we are changes from moment to moment... a small delta in the function of self giving a smooth, progressive change. There can be deviations - some life events having more effect than others - but the core remains the same. It's still recogniseable

My own mind has this monstrous discontinuity in the self - a sudden verticle jump in my mental makeup that breaks the whole metaphor apart. But I'm still recongniseably me after its over. I'm not trying to pretend I'm the same person, I'm not working at a charade. Because all those things before 2012, they're just a prelude. The last 12 years has done more to define who I am, than anything before it.

It's impossible to know how different I would've been had Mackie never happened - how I'd have continued thinking of myself as 'male', what projects I would've taken on or what friends I would've made, and the different influences they would've had. I don't really know what person I should've been, so I can't say how different I am now.

Ultimately, the question has to be. Do I still feel like me?

I'm Jet Jaguar. Sister. Partner. Martial Artist. Combat Cyborg, Spacecraft and Engineer.

And that feels fine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/movie ... .html?_r=0]Eli Wallach has passed away.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.