Inspirational and Meta Sites Redux

[Threepony]

Have the 8000x8000 amazingly high resolution image of Pluto:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... elease.png

It's kind of awesome, and there's a lot of interesting geography here. Might be a good story to have geologists borrowed from Earth (with permission! Everything is better with permission!) brought out to make sense of Pluto, and the various dangerous adventures possible when water-ice is your 'bedrock'.

[Dartz]

Meanwhile, Ireland has a nerdy Navy

LE Samuel Beckett has some new artwork


________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

Meanwhile, Ireland has a nerdy Navy

LE Samuel Beckett has some new artwork

Sam Beckett? Oh, boy...

(Yes, I know - but ... Fenspace.)
--
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

[robkelk]

Fenkinder games:

[img]http://assets.amuniversal.com/fe2cca70f868013014ce001dd8b71c47]

http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1952/05/12]Source
--
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

[Bob Schroeck]

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch ... xy/410023/]The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy.

What makes it mysterious? Exoplanet searchers discovered that it appears to have a metric buttload of things orbiting and occluding it -- so many that "alien artifacts" is a possibility that has been seriously laid on the table by reputable astronomers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[InsaneTD]

Maybe it's where we colonize after using up earth.

[Bob Schroeck]

And CNN.com had a http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/world/ext ... index.html]larger story on it today.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

New NASA Research Shows Giant Asteroids Battered Early Earth

Who gets to use the NASA artwork? Do we have any very-young-but-(barely)-inhabitable worlds out there yet?
--
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

[Threepony]

Sorry for being off for a while. Been getting battered by programming and database design classes badly.

BUT! Not quite a link to an interesting site, but a potential source of a story as I just got done finally watching Jurassic World.

And it's totally a potential fen story with tweaking (even in universe for it). The dinosaurs? Wu was an early mad who went undiagnosed because nobody even knew handwavium existed at the time and he was exposed to the honey variant. He went through a visibly mad phase before seemingly returning to normal before anyone started thinking about it, and went Boskonian over the years.

You could tighten up Vic's character by having him serve as a contractor during The War, and dealing with 'murdersaurs' which were boskonian twisted raptors that went relatively unrecognized before he returned back to serve with Ingen's forces. His spiel about the vulnerability of electronic assets works better in a verse with actual AI, as does his crazy idea for turning raptors into a new weapons system. It works when you actually think about taking the time to carefully iterate raptor generations and tweaking them with dog genes to find the right sequence to recondition them to accept humans and turn down the prey-drive. And you could turn down his outright villainy into more 'doesn't realize he's fallen in with boskonians' and well-intentioned extremism. He actually gets pissed with Wu when he starts realizing what Wu really made (A better Murdersaurus for his employers), but dies/gets horribly maimed for a lot of the same reasons as in the movie (disrespecting the superior predators).

Owen works still, and could be tweaked to be a SEAL who went fen during the war and became a Warsie after a discharge for some reason, then got picked up by Vic for also managing to contain and control some of the boskonian bio-terrors. Other than having some better gear, and a slightly different relationship with his raptors he'd likely work much as he did in the actual movie. Maybe a little bit of trauma from those bio-terrors but otherwise generally the same guy.

Claire could work pretty much unchanged, as could the nephews.

A big thing would be that instead of just losing attendance from boredom, in the fen-version of the movie it's because it's got competition from fen parks which can do similar things without some of the costs. But at the same time, they're ignoring that the fen would rather actually work with them because they're totally fine with the park and want it to survive because frickin dinosaurs. So, they let Wu off the hook and tell him to have fun with the Indominus, and... yeah. Basically the same thing as the current movie version, but faster and better resistant to that whole 'getting shot' thing (more than it already is), and all-around nastier.

And another thing is that I could totally see them accidentally building an actual Jurassic World with Fen help, and building all the dinos (either through actual mad's creating actual clones, or through super-animatronics) and then ending up shrugging and opening the real park afterwards. More interestingly, the idea of actually accidentally making self-aware raptor androids by mistake sounds like it might be a fun little complication.

Seriously, totally works as a fen movie and as a dane movie with minor changes to the existing version we have, and it's a nice way to create a fun thing in Fenspace.

[Dakota]

Have some Miracle of Sound - My Shooting Star
_______________________________________________________________
Characters
Sabre Fang
Dakota

[robkelk]

On the occasion of the ISS being continuously occupied for fifteen years:

(Big image, wrapped in a spoiler tag)

Spoiler

--
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

[M Fnord]

The scene: The Soviet Ministry of Communications, Korolevgrad, Luna (voted "best sleepy hive of communist insurgency" three years running). System-famous TV host and Professional Angry Person Momo von Satan strides into the Minister's office and slams her laptop down on the desk.

"WE. ARE. FUNDING. THIS." she says without preamble.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Matrix Dragon]

Please. Fenspace would build and launch the Satelite of Love.

[Ross Van Loan]

Please. Fenspace would have a multiplex community of Satellites of Love each with its own slightly differntiated variants of of Crow T.R., and T. Servo. There'd be conventions solely to aggregate all of the cinematic cheese quipbots and their human sidekicks into massive malodorous movie marathons. We'd be up to our interocitors in waggish robot antics! Our interocitors! 

[robkelk]

The scene: The Soviet Ministry of Communications, Korolevgrad, Luna (voted "best sleepy hive of communist insurgency" three years running). System-famous TV host and Professional Angry Person Momo von Satan strides into the Minister's office and slams her laptop down on the desk.

%[link=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/bringbackmst3k]"WE. ARE. FUNDING. THIS."] she says without preamble.

With a voice that could freeze helium, she asked, "What do you mean, 'http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/top ... rs?page=11]StellviaCorp beat us to it'?"
--
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

[Matrix Dragon]

And I just realised this means we have a Crow and a Claptrap in the same universe.

[robkelk]

There's a hot rockball with an atmosphere, only 39ly away.

That's plenty close enough to be a Senshi terraforming testbed, right?
--
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

[M Fnord]

Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[DeputyJones]

Edit: deleted, wrong thread
  

[robkelk]

Something for the retro spacers: a look at what could possibly happen in the near future year of 1965, as proposed by Wernher von Braun. The "fun" stuff starts about six minutes in.


--
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

[robkelk]

3D-modeling resources for NASA Artemis Mars scenes (and similar scenes set elsewhere). Links to the OBJ download pages, images from those pages.

http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/nmss-hdu



http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/nmss-z2



EDIT: Oh, and an older OBJ that completes the scene - http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/pahrump-hills, an outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp on Mars' Gale Crater


--
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

[robkelk]

Sometimes Noah reads this to Helen just before bedtime...
--
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

[robkelk]

The Fenspace Convention need no longer fear the 'Danelaw putting an embargo on shipments of epsom salts!

(C'mon, there has to be a story seed in this somewhere...)
--
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

[M Fnord]

Fresh from the IAU, exoplanet names!

Whaddya think, should we use these or not?
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

Fresh from the IAU, exoplanet names!

Whaddya think, should we use these or not?

I don't see anything that conflicts with what we've established, so ... why not?
--
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