This happened six months ago:  http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 36,00.html]NASA Receives Two New Hubble Telescopes For Free.  (Quick summary:  they were built for a spy agency, which moved on to better tech before they could even unwrap the 'scopes.  Said agency then gave them to NASA.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Portal: now available for TI graphing calculators.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

As we approach the end of the year, it's time to dust off all the seasonal tales that bring joy to our hearts...

Let's start the list with an old favourite:

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/97/Jan/cthulhu.html]Yes, Virginia, there is a Cthulhu
--
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

Jazz legend Dave Brubeck has died at 91.
My dad was a jazz fan.  I was listening to Dave Brubeck before I even entered kindergarten; the rhythms of his classic "Take Five" are imprinted in my soul.
Edit:    When I reread that last sentence now, it sounds ridiculously melodramatic and a lot less intelligent than what I was trying to express.
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

I stumbled over this while reading CNN's website this afternoon -- a http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/12/05/e ... irst-look/]short article with some photos about the upcoming film version of Ender's Game.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Several Articles out in the wake of City of Heroes closure and it's finally appearing to hit bigtime in the media now that the election is over.

City of Heroes Goes Out With a Roar and a Bang - Kotaku
When Rejected the #SaveCOH Campaign Looks for Another - Article on Lorehound about how the Save City of Heroes movement is looking to Disney to buy the property and the organizers, including Mercedes Lackey, have put together a 31 page proposal detailing the strengths and advantages of doing so.
EuroGamer - The Final Hours of City Of Heroes
Watching the World End - New York Post
'Unethical' Game Closure - this one is very important - as it is the Korea Times! Right in NCsoft's own backyard!

All of these articles are very well written, but it is that last one that's the most significant - that's the Korea Times! That's right in NCsoft's backyard!

And now...
Breaking News: NCsoft Seattle offices undergoing “realignment”
Something major appears underway at the Seattle-based offices of Guild Wars 2 publisher NCsoft.

Quote:Something major appears underway at the Seattle-based offices of Guild
Wars 2 publisher NCsoft. After a tip from an anonymous source, PC Gamer
contacted Public Relations Director Lincoln Davis who denied that the
Seattle studio had closed, but confirmed today that a “realignment” was
taking place.
“NCsoft is realigning internal publishing resources to better suit
the needs of our game development studios,” Davis told PC Gamer. “As a
result of the realignment, several employees and contract positions were
affected. This was a very tough decision to make and wish the best for
all NCsoft employees in their next ventures.” Davis didn’t elaborate on
the extent of the restructure nor of any possible effects to Guild Wars
2.

In October 2011, employees at NCsoft’s Seattle, Austin, and Brighton
studios were also hit with layoffs, and today’s news follows last
summer’s report of a nearly 12 percent reduction in revenue suffered by the South Korean publisher compared to the previous year.

We’ll update this post as more information becomes available from NCsoft.

Just thought I'd give a shout out to Arachnos X - you got quoted in this article. 

But it's a also just a great article anyway. Go read. 

The Final Hours of City of Heroes At Eurogamer.Net.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/st ... kyard.html

Spoiler

Amazing how a perfectly accurate title can be so misleading, no?

Just today, I've noticed that most recent posts "post time" have been listed as a relative time (i.e. "X minutes/hours/days ago" ) rather than absolute. Is this a new thing or did I mess some setting somewhere?
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

I've been having a conversation with Ross, and some of what he's been saying - none of the particular words, but the gist of his arguments - has made me realize why I'm dragging my feet on the last two chapters of my big Fenspace story, Legend of Galactic Girls.

in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.

Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.

It's too late to change that, but it isn't too late to keep Fenspace from becoming yet another clone of spacebattles.com However, one of the things we're going to have to do - assuming we want to be not-a-dystopia - is to vastly scale back the armed conflict. And that includes me, so I have to vastly reduce the armed conflict in my stories.

I have other plotlines on the spike - the "man versus the unknown" plot of the first Zeta Tucane expedition is one example, and there are enough possible subplots in the relationships between my major characetrs to fill a novel series.

So, anyway, I'll be putting LoGG on the back burner for quite a while, and writing some stories that don't have a body count. It's past time to remember the "fen" part of "fenspace" ...

(If there's any conversation about this, I'll read it, but I think my mind is made up right now. For my own stories, at least.)
--
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