Sorry guys. I guess I won't be coming back in tonight on the beta server. I can't get back in the game. The server is too clogged. I wish I could've teamed with you. 

First of all, a story fragment.

Quote:The Metaverse was, from a technical standpoint, a marvel of software engineering. It was a wonder of the digital world. It was an open-source. distributed, peer-to-peer real-time fully-immersive social network. Anyone could pull down the source code that the ‘verse ran on, compile it, and run it up on his, her or its own personal hardware and join in the fun. It ran on waved PDA's. It ran on dedicated server farms. It pulsed through veins and arteries of data that held the city together and gave it life. It was the world ad if it was dictated by the internet. It was where you could be anyone and anything you wanted. It was free, it was wild, it was vibrant and throbbing and pulsing with a visceral unreality that made it all the more fascinating. It was the world's own bazaar where everything and anything was possible, provided you had the sense to figure out how to code a plugin to your client that could do it. You could fight in a tournament using whatever set of combat rules suited. You could find a quiet corner and try our a whole new sexual experience in a body entirely different to your own. There were sports fields and racing leagues. There were markets trading virtual currency for real items, and vice versa. There were hacking contests. There were folks who went around in a Avatars wearing a shirt and tie with a question mark for a face who thought it was epic lulz to redecorate people's apartment-server if they didn't have a good lock on the door. You could log in with a public terminal with a basic avatar, you could log in through a full-immersive sensory-replication body-suit or neural induction gear. It was even possible to play with a mouse, keyboard and mic, FPS-style. The only limit was your budget, your hardware and your imagination. It was a barely controlled anarchy, with the only real rules hardcoded into the clients themselves. Don't lie about your real gender and age, no oversized avatars, some technical requirements to keep things from just falling over, and that was basically it.

It was, in Jet's humble opinion, the coolest damned thing in all of Fenspace as of its public launch at BubbleCon.

It helped that, through a quirk of acquaintance, she'd been involved in the project since the very first alpha's, years before the closed beta's had begun. and was the proud owner of the Fifth ‘verse server and first standalone server in existence. She'd been little more than a tester, someone needed a cyber to test certain features, and Jet was the cyber someone knew best. Even when Jet'd left Genaros, she was still testing the ability of each new feature in the 'verse to handle interwave lag over planetary distances. Her only contribution to the actual code was the personal flight module…. Solely because it'd gotten annoying walking everywhere. It was dirt-basic, crude, and not exactly elegant but it worked. It went into the mainline, and in six months had become something almost unrecognisable as Real Hackers™ found their way to fixing it.

So, Jet had a tester credit, a minor contributor's credit and that was it. Jet had also known most of the original creation team personally long before they'd actually went public with the thing and hit BNF status. Jet even remembered the barroom discussion that'd brought the whole ‘verse about, when the spark of an idea had first flared and caught hold years earlier. Jet pondered on the fact that that might, technically have made her the Hiro Protagonist of this particular metaverse. The thought always made her smile.

Sn0wcat finally made it big. After years bemoaning the lack of funds to take his idea beyond a small cluster of friends who'd worked together on the GWS, most of them had finally hit it big.

Such things let her get away with things not normally allowed. Jet's own private server still sat in that same building Jet'd lived in when she first launched up to Genaros station way back in 2012, right before the emergency con and a message from a certain Doc on a Rock that changed her life's direction for good. It was almost unique among current ‘verse servers in that it was capable of bridging out onto the wider interwave, bringing the ‘verse all the way out to Mars and into Jet's own private office. It was a feature that'd been removed for 'bandwidth and security' reasons right before the public beta. Jet's was grandfathered in to keep it, and keep her in contact with the station. Talk about your home away from home.

She made a point to remember to log in once a week or so, to check for messages or occasionally to meet people in a private and secure place. Anyone on the interwave with a client could browse into Jet's server and take a look around. In the public area, there really wasn't much more than the basic white room. All four walls and floor where made from the same mono-textured backlit milky glass. There were no shadows to render, enough friction to walk. It was the bare minimum a public area could consist of. It was little more than a directory. A few simple filling cabinets sat in a corner, containing a mirror of the Stingray Hardsuit packages. There were also some Highway Star files, including a frankly epic cutaway drawing, some wallpapers and a 'Race to 400' badge. Beside them, was a donation box, where people could donate to the Star project, and get themselves some subscriber-only benefits, and a Highway-Star only mailbox. They could also link out to the actual Highway Star site.

Someone was running a search through the filing using a basic Senshi avatar. It was the default Aiko model with borderline uncanny-valley eyes and a basic tactile mesh. She was fiddling around in the filing cabinet. Jet could call up her details; IP Address, age, sex, client and whatever else she wanted to tell about herself.

“Sorry,” she said, wearing an embarrassed smile. “But how do you download stuff in here?”

“Take the folder you want from the cabinet,” Jet repeated the same explanation “It'll unlock when it's been downloaded to your home computer.”

“Oh,” said the Senshi. The Avatar's expression didn't change, but Jet swore it should've been blushing. “It's my first time in one of these servers,”

“Welcome to the 'verse, “ Jet said, tiredly. She was more concerned with getting into her own private area. Being a cyber, Jet's client was a hell of a lot more advanced. Given the right data, she was capable of interacting with this whole virtual world as thoroughly as the real, and beyond. It all got very matrixy, and Jet wasn't sure how to describe it otherwise. In the real world, a buffer computer provided a safety net, but her own hardware was more than capable of interpreting the signals being sent from it, and constructing the entire world inside her own mind. With a thought, she could switch back to the real world, check up on something, then slip right back in with only the briefist flicker of disorientation. From a technical standpoint, it used a subset of the standardised puppet-body interfaces, only this puppet was a rough surface simulation.

Jet sent her personal login to the server, being rewarded milliseconds later by a simple door fading into view. The Senshi still wouldn't be able to see it, she didn't have the correct permissions. As far as she was concerned, Jet just disappeared.

Jet just had to touch the door handle to materialise on the other side. There was just a momentary flash of disorientation as her senses adjusted to the abrupt change in input.

This was the real server. This was the real metaverse. It was a replica of Jet's bedroom, of his bedroom from before. Jet'd begun creating it way back in 2012, during what she liked to refer to as her homesick period. The basic layout with collision detection and texture meshes for the walls, the bed, shelving and the like had taken three days. Everything else had been added in the four years or so since. Cupboards acted as filing cabinets, while the television was really a representation of a media player. There were ebooks on the shelves which Jet'd never gotten around to actually reading and there were a few little widgets to play with hung around, mostly toys and models. The laptop on the desk acted as a visual representation of the server load, and as a terminal emulator for when things needed to really get done.

The real metaverse covered all the senses. Sight, sound, hearing, smell and touch. Jet could brush her fingers against the fabric of the bedsheets and feel its delicious softness. Even though her avatar still had the same metal fingers and armour, she had the same sensory mesh as everyone else. This room was filled with hundreds of different textures. Evening sunlight provided warmth through an open window, chased by the scent of perpetually fresh cut grass. The curtains even fluttered just-so, but in a way that made it obvious they were a simulation.

Getting this level of detail was near-maxing the outbound connection of the server, pushing the processors in the buffer system to their maximum. It was so heavy, she could only log in at certain times when the bandwidth at Grunthal freed up. She could still feel the lag between touch and sensation, a slight microsecond delay that would be all but imperceptible to a regular human.

The metaverse never felt real. It was always possible to tell it was a simulation. The textures where all hollow meshes. Nothing would buckle or yield when touched. Sounds were all recorded files rather than hardware generated on the fly. Objects made the same noise no matter where you hit them. The unarticulated joints on the figurines on the shelf would never move, while in reality, Jet had to consciously try not to break them when picking them up.

In a wardrobe, Jet held a pair of other avatars. One was himself, based of a number of photographs, with hardcoated jeans and blue t-shirt. It was also the oldest, dating right back to the initial testing. The other was an athletic extrapolation of what might've been under the armour, complete with a choice of outfits. Jet picked one or the other depending on her mood, and who she was going to see, or what she was going to be doing when she got there. She could select them merely by touch.

Jet didn't bother. She'd only logged in to check a few of her messages.

The Highway Star mailbox was full. There were the usual requests for technical information, and the details of an upcoming show in the UK Jet would have to attend to keep one of the sponsors happy. It wasn't too onerous, Jet'd always wanted to go to Goodwood. Another was from a son of an Arab oil sheik who was very frivolous with his money, and was trying to cajole Jet into setting up a production line for the things, or at least building him his own one.

When she considered it, The Star was the best thing Jet'd ever done. A giant pain in the wing to keep running and maintain, but worth it. It brought contacts, it brought friends, it brought money and it brought in the true Fen currency.... bragging rights. Most of all, it brought fun and variety to Jet's life.

Finally, she moved over to her personal items.

A chill ran through her body... her real body... as she read the first one. It was the brush of deathly cold steel on bare skin,

Sn0wcat was dead.

Sn0wcat had thrown himself from his office window.

Given how his nickname "Darshu" is constructed from "Dark Schneider" it seems a valid hypothesis, and would explain away the inconveinient fact that by releasing him from his sealed form, it's wiping out the cute little kid with the big-sister-little-brother relationship if he was always the same person with suppressed memories, rather than some unlucky nwborn chosen to contain an otherwise unstoppable evil.

That's probably the way it was intended to be all along, but it didn't seem obvious until the name thing hit me just now.

- CD
--
"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

Microsoft paper suggests installing cloud servers in private homes and businesses and using them as furnaces.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

I met my old lover
On the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy after all these years
I'm not the kind of man
Who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on
Old familiar ways
And I ain't no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy after all these years
Four in the morning
Crapped out, yawning
Longing my life away
I'll never worry
Why should I?
It's all gonna fade
Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I'll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years
-- Paul Simon, "Still Crazy After All These Years"
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/topic/6569]Old thread is old.

New thread is new.

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/04 ... ian_water/]Water Slides on Mars
--
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

So they downgraded the US... now what?

http://finance.yahoo.com/...t-apf-821085521.html?x=0

Anyone else playing this? I am currently loving the hell out of it.
Had an epic encounter today where an out of ammo su-5 ( dinky low level russian mortar spg) managed to cause a t95s death ( end-game super heavy tank destroyer) when he rammed the side of it persistently preventing it from turning around.
Then the remainder of our whole team managed to use that to shoot the helpless t95 in the ass until he rage quit.
Some pics to give you a sense of scale:
T95
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/...520www_wikipedia_org.jpg
Su-5
http://en.valka.cz/attachments/12217/SU-5-1ek.JPG

University of Ottawa -- assumptions

I'm planning on having my protagonist be a graduate of the University of Ottawa, where she studied Handwavium at a doctoral level. I'm making some assumptions about the University, in case anyone else sets any scenes there as well. If the assumptions are contradictory to Fenspace overall, please say something and I'll adjust.

1. The University is actively researching the Handwavium phenomenon -- someone has to, and the University is a major research institution.
   
2. Rather than attempt to ban any waved vehicles, they prohibit any motorized flying craft around the campus. Thus, there are a few bicycles flying around -- probably quite a few. (Saoirse will be the one that introduced the ‘waved windsurfer -- with mixed results.)
   
3. These waved vehicles are only allowed to fly on campus.
   
4. Waved motor vehicles are allowed, with the appropriate government lisences, but can only fly on campus in designated areas.
   

I was thinking of writing a crossover with the Pokegirls universe. You can find information about it here: Pokegirls, www.pokegirl.org/, http://www.angelfire.com/mn3/pokegirls/main.html. Basically it is a post-apocalyptic setting where a mad scientist has replaced most animal life with geneneticly engineerd sex obsessed monster girls.The treatment of them varies in every league(country) from nearly human to less then tools.I was wondering how the factions of Fenspace would react to such a place?