"What a wonderful world"
View from my baclony and a nearby park
Just had to walk out and see the greenery after the depressing images from Tokyo. Makes you appreciate things in life.
Edit: Helps if you listen to Louis Armstrong's "It's a Wonderful World"
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

This is now in the category of ye olde news... but...
As some of you may be aware, COH PAX is on atm. There are records of the the Q & A panel located here. They talk about Issue 20 and other goodies.
For some strange reason my connection won't let actually view the recordings and trailers and other assorted goodies so if someone else could hit the highlights... it would be appreciated.
From the traffic on the forums... oh boy.
Shader

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...ld-asia-pacific-12709598

Instead of trying (and failing) to write this part as one big story, I broke it down into snippets, each one focusing on an event from that week.
While probably not the best way to write a story, it was the only way i felt i could get it across with out needless padding or drawing scenes out to long, so here we are, counting down week by week till the day.
Enjoy.
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Atlas Park
Seraph residence
Week 6
Patti slowly made her way to the kitchen, it was late at night and Gir hadn’t come to bed yet. She entered the kitchen and stoped, blinking at the unfamiliar sight of Gir surrounded by a small forest of books, pamphlets and magazines, making notes on a near by scrap of paper.
Walking over she lent over Gir’s shoulder. “What are you doing there?”
Looking up Gir smiled and put her pen down and replied in a slightly tired tone. “Wedding plans, been up most of the night getting some details down.”
Patti looked over and slowly registered several note pads, each sprouting several book marks. “You planed the whole wedding?” she asked some what disbelieving as she picked one up and flipped through it, listings of prices for cakes, dresses and catering, all in some form of organised chaos.
Yawning Gir lent back and rested her head on Patti’s stomach. “Well yeah, it’s been over a year since you popped the question, so I started getting as much organised as I could.”
Looking down at the beaming face Patti could only stand there slack jaw, some how with out her noticing Gir had managed to organise damn near everything… all that was missing was the date…
As if reading her mind, Gir asked that very question. “Soooo, we got a date yet? It would make the invites a bit easier to do and that.”
Mind whirling, Patti spat out the first date to come to mind. “29 April.”
Grinning Gir pulled out her phone.
“Err… what are you doing?”
“Well, when I said I had almost everything ready, I meant it, just got to check for a chapel and that now.”
“But that stuff takes months to plan! The waiting list for churches is going to be huge!”
Grinning, Gir spun in her seat to face Patti. “Normally, but there’s not a single wedding going to be on that day. After all, who’s going to get married the same day that the crown prince of England is?” getting up she started dialing.
“Now I just got to make some calls.” She gave Patti a quick hug before walking out of the room. “Hey Jeena, it’s Gir… hee hee, I know it’s been a while but still want to be a brides maid?”
As Gir wandered off, Patti slowly sat at the table, her mind slowly wrapping around the fact that in a few weeks, she was going to get married.

“I think I need a drink…” muttering to her self, she made her way back to the bed room.

For whatever reason, the big green banner that is usually at the top of every page in the forum, and links back to the top page is missing.  There is still a link to the top page, but it is just a text link.   Here's a link to a screenshot I took:  Link
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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.

The news about the Discovery made me think of this, and it hadn't been put up yet, so...
The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, by Stephen Savitzky (mp3, ogg, lyrics and annotations)

Once my friends and I read science fiction tales
We dreamed of space, and rockets to the moon.
Some day we'd live to walk upon the planets;
The future, oh it couldn't come too soon.

Now it's long past the time we called the future
And still we carry on from day to day
The wonders of tomorrow still elude us;
Reality keeps getting in the way.

And the starlit crystal spires along the Grand Canal,
The cloudlight on the warm Venusian sea,
Have vanished, like the stuff that dreams are made of;
The future isn't like it used to be.

We watched as gallant men rode thunder to the sky
Our probes brought distant planets into view:
The dry and cratered plains of Mars and Venus--
Some dreams were dead before they could come true.

The Saturn Five once carried spacemen moonward
We've lost the plans to build her kind again
Bureaucracy and budgets dragged her under
Her launching pad stands rusting in the rain.


refrain


The century's last year was safely far away
We'd have machines that talked with us, and more.
We never knew the challenge we'd be facing
Was code we keypunched forty years before.

Atomic powered rockets were a pipe-dream;
Most cities still burn coal to chase the dark.
The monorail that once ran to the spaceport
Takes children to an outing in the park.


refrain


But the future that we lost is still someplace out there
Orion still rides hellfire toward the blue,
And rockets proudly land upon their tailfins,
As God and Robert Heinlein meant them to.

Yes, someplace there are old fans who remember
The way the future was when we were young,
And when the chains of space and time slip from me
I'll be part of the song that once was sung.

And I'll share a song with Rhysling,
   beside the Grand Canal,
Ride lightsails on the endless starry sea
When I've become the stuff that dreams
  are made of
In the future of my childrens' memory.

I was thinking this song would be able to temporarily create objects that are commonly described in classic science fiction tales, fully physical and functional, until they start to fade towards the end of the song.  How long they continue to exist after the song has ended depends on how unreal they are in that particular universe (humanoid robots would last longer in BGC than in Buffy, for example), but they never stick around for long, and they always engender a sense of sadness and loss in anyone who sees the created objects vanish, and is capable of experiencing such emotions.
It might be possible to 'stabilize' a created object so it does not disappear with a timely, and likely quite large, application of handwavium or an equivalent material to the created object.
-----
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.

I'm sure everyone's seen movies, or some other media in which hackers are able to take control of everything from toasters to cars via the internet. 
Impossible, right? 
Not anymore.
According to the New York Times, researchers have shown that it is possible to remotely hack cars.  Link
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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.

BtVS + Torchwood:
When Buffy Jumped into the gate she landed right in the arms of Captain Jack Hartness...

Is this something that's been here and I just never noticed it?
Also, since I'm curious:
* Does the board moderation have to place something there?  (I'm assuming 'yes', since I can't conceive of any criteria that the post in question fits that an automated system would pick up on)
* Can we (users) turn it on and off?
* (Circling back to the first point) What constitutes featured topics?
Note that I'm not upset by its sudden appearance.  I'm honestly just curious here.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

First preview chapter of Ghost Story is up.  Too bad we'll have to wait until late June for the rest of the previews, and July 26 for the book itself (preview release schedule here).

edited to correct title