darkmonki

"I'd like to take this opportunity to plug the idea of separating Ref into Reflexes and Agility. Being a world-class sniper does not make you a world-class gymnast. "

No, but it's possible to be both if you have both of those skills. Simply having a high REF would not make you a world-class gymnast or a world-class sniper. Only the potential to be so. It's the skills that make you that. If people are going to start changing the system at the stat based level, then you're basically creating a new game system, not making the old one better.

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The mighty PWEI kicks arse. I loved 'em. Me and my ex-housemate used to psyche ourselves up for a Friday night by pogo-ing to Everything's Cool...

In chaos and riots, the screech of machines

No right and no wrong and no in between

Fall one by one, the queen to her fool

Dos dedos mis amigos - everything's cool

Everything's...

Tres cyberpunk, if you ask me...

. Old indie head meself, I can't believe anyone remembers Kingmaker. I have to say I do have a Blagger's ITA album kicking around somewhere, which was very similar to PWEI.

Cybergoth is pretty much the term I keep hearing, too. Or Rivethead. I used to use the term Dusthead, myself, as it was all born from industrial music, but has been moving more and more from EBM to trance/darkwave over the last 5 years or so.

BTW I stopped going to the Slimelight because I moved to the US. Not quite the 50 quid night it once was if you have to factor a weekend flight in... And 50 quid is how much I used to have to spend from Coventry, not when I lived in London. It covered  travel, some cheap booze (before they opened the bar there), some dancing powders, and about a thousand cigarettes. Any money I had left over was spent on trying to palm my then girlfriend off on someone else. Once that finally worked, I migrated from the gothy areas to the techno-industrial floors and spent 5 hours each night punching out the beat to that song that goes "thump-thump-thump-thump"... Man, I lurved that place...

Not everyone's cup of tea, though, I fully understand...

If they started that late then maybe I didn't see them. Was pretty heavy on the goth scene back from 93 to 98. Ex-Slimelight regular, and all that. Was in the same hall as a lot of bands but was generally too busy getting drunk or otherwise finding ways not to be sober to know exactly which band I was dancing to most of the time...  

Broke a 100 posts! Woo-hoo!

Seems to me that this can be sung to the tune of "Heartbreaker" by Pat Benatar...

Why do have a weird feeling I've seen SBM live? How long have they been around?

How about this from the Popular Science site?

(6) The 96-Hour Suitcase

Puma's 96 Hours collection includes almost everything you need for a typical 96-hour business trip: 26 made-to-order basic-colored crease-free pieces (including underwear), two pairs of shoes, and two jackets. All comes neatly packed in a lightweight aluminum carry-on. Socks and toiletries not included.

Price: $3,800

puma.com

Looks pretty funky to me. Best of all, all the clothes appear to be black.

I tend to average at 4 pints a night. But I drink extremely quickly. Mostly because the people I hang out with are social drinkers and I drink to get hammered, so I need to get as many in as possible before everyone else decides they've had enough and want to go home. If I'm out with a big group, I'll sneak a few shots in there, too. I like drinking, but can happily go without. However, I do feel the need to get wasted once a week. A left over of my old work hard play hard days, I guess...

Hey, I KNOW it was product placement. Just seemed bizarre to me that they would spend more money on shows and "news" items telling us that they had put together this "think tank" in order to prove that these companies will still exist in 50 years...

Spielberg: So what did you come up with?

Futurist: Cars go up buildings. Cops fly. There's a section of town with very tall towers. But it's not in DC so you don't have to put it on the skyline. Everything else, no change whatsoever.

Spielberg: Failing mobile phone companies?

Futurist: Still there.

Spielberg: Gap? Lexus? McDonald's?

Futurist: Still there. Yep. No change whatsoever. Oh, except they all spam you as soon as you walk through the door.

Spielberg: Cool. Well this pointless piece of crap film was never going to get any funding anyway. I'll call the finance guys and we can basically turn it into a 2.5 hour commercial. Moby would be proud...

I think I get the gist of what Nymus was saying but his sentence structure was so backwards I lost the plot.  J-Pop - wave of the future. Personally, I voted for rap, but as they say in Strange Days:

"You know how we know it's the end of the world? Everything's been done."

So someone gonna have to invent a new type of instrument before we get anything of any real interest again. Or at least find something discarded and discover a new purpose for it, a la Roland 303 & 808...

Phipps: "So by removing the ability for the citizens to defend themselves from firearms attacks, and making sure that the criminal element knows this, how exactly did your government see it as a means for reduction in firearms-related crime again?  I'm a bit confused here... "

Me: Just for the record, this didn't happen. Citizens never did have the ability to defend themselves. The only people who had guns were crims, armed response units, sport shooters/gun club members and farmers. All except crims need a licence for one. And it was really bloody hard to get a licence, too. Only sport shooters/gun club members have been affected by the "ban" on semi-automatic weapons. Criminals haven't, cops haven't, farmers only ever needed shotguns for pest control anyway, and, as has been mentioned can't really use them for self-defence, even on their own land. As I mentioned in the big gun debate a couple of moons ago, governments can't take away rights we don't have. All they did was take away the guns, not the rights. We never had a right to carry firearms, nor to protect ourselves with it. Instead what we had, and what Brits still have, are taxes and a police force. Besides, you can by a gun pretty damn cheap on the black market in the UK, but bullets are really expensive. And once you've fired a gun, it's pretty much tainted. You can't give it to anyone else for a job. Easier to use replicas for intimidation value.

MR is an extremely good film. Plenty of cool tech, some of it even believable. Liked: The constant personalised spam you get everywhere you go. The ripperdoc scene (exactly how to play out getting an implant). The design of the futuristic parts of DC. Disliked: The cars that run up/down buildings (Cruise parks his right outside his apartment, and now anyone living above him running up that track would never be able to go any higher). The Spiders (too fluid and Matrix-y). The way futuristic DC seemed to disappear off the skyline whenever we were in the "now" DC. The way no one thought that present day companies might actually merge with other companies or at least change their logos sometime in the next 50 years...

I really like this film. However... In some ways I kept feeling that, like AI, Spielberg kept the future stuff for the gadgets and didn't bother with anyone else. Which is why in AI, people are still wearing plaid shirts and chinos. (Sure we have the technology to create Artificial Intelligence, but no one can take us away from the powers of American Eagle Outfitters...) Costuming is basically stuff you can get from a slightly modernistic store right now. Haircuts obviously will never change in 50 years, and Cruise's kitchen looked kinda retro. Otherwise, superb film... But I guess I'm used to Ridley Scott's uber-design sense...

-Rid.

Agamemnon Posted on July 08 2002,15:36

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Jeez, man... Read some Pratchett.

Personally, I'd rather spoon out my own eyes. Smarmy, anodyne little get.

Pratchett, that is, not Aga...

ObOnTopic: Twelve Monkeys cool. Not cyberpunk. But then again, many things have been labelled as cyberpunk by people who see something who like cyberpunk that think it's cool enough to belong there. Myself, I would say it has an atmosphere which belongs in CP, but the plot, storyline, etc., not.

And my wife watched and loved 12 Monkeys, but can't seem to get through Blade Runner without falling asleep. Maybe I married the wrong woman...  

- Rid.

Aw, heck. I'm in.

31, white Scottish heritage. Born in London, UK, living with wife in Queens, NY in the American Empire. Religiously ambivalent. Politically British liberal, probably count as a minor-league socialist here in the States. Guess that covers it. Oh, been playing for around 20 years, on and off, designing my own games for around 12.

Hey, checked it out and joined. It looks okay (now I've changed the view options), but I really can't figure out what it *is*. Is there some kind of manifesto for this? Because it looks like a kind of news portal, but I can't quite see what kind of news would belong there. Enlighten us!

Wasn't British Aerospace working on some kind of sub-orbital flight plane called HOTOL? IIRC, it shot off into LEO, refuelled on a satellite and then dropped back down to it's destination. They said it would cut the UK to OZ flight-time in half. If they ever built it. Looked kewl, tho.

Sure, as long as the company that publishes it has a real good editor...

I give all my players the same deal. About 2 grand in cash, a $15k vehicle of their choice, a medium furnished rental apartment and 1/2 EMP (rounded down) in contacts. They can then trade this stuff around to suit themselves based on cash. I can't remember exactly how it went, but you could sell the vehicle for it's value, or buy a cheaper one, or a buy a better one, you could up- or downgrade the apartment (for cash), and you upgrade (spending cash) your contacts for best friends or downgrade them (gaining cash) to acquaintances and such like. This way, everybody starts out on an even keel, but can change their money based on the lifestyle of their choosing. Most characters dumped their cars for those $100 microbikes, which are even faster than most cars. Some went for the cool apartment, some used it all on cyberwear, some bought up some serious contacts to help out gearing up on missions. Some even had cash left over to invest with. Worked out pretty well. If I can find the rules, I'll dig them out and post them.

Linus=kid with blanket. I knew that... I just get him and Schroeder mixed up so often I plumped for the wrong guy. Yet another Darkmonki-ism, as DM tries not to look stupid and ends up looking more stupid. However, at least I'm articulate.

Linus? The piano playing kid from Peanuts? Surely if God was a Peanuts character, it would have be Peppermint Patty?

And what do you get if you strap toast butter-side in to the feet of a cat? Velcro?

Hmm... From the experience I have with a similar system except these are elevators, not trains...

Make it two platforms, not three. Each car then only stops twice and only at it's designated positions, either on an even or odd floor. Also, make these express trains - no locals. If you build your towers so every thirty or so floors, there is a two-storey shopping mall, or some other public area, have the trains running only to those public areas. People can then take elevators from these levels to their local floors. It's part of a current tower design I saw earlier this year on TLC's Building The Impossible.

Just an FYI: My building's 60 stories tall and has two elevator banks, one which runs from ground to 30 and another which goes direct from ground to 14 (corporate restaurant and conference facilities), then to 31 and up. Most towers have some kind of express elevator system that does this. Ours is almost unique, however, as, like I said, it also tries to reduce congestion by placing two elevators on top of one another servicing odd and even floors simultaneously.

Wow. I go away for a couple of weeks and suddenly this Monoxide guy's making Bullet look like Shakespeare...

It's kind of funny, because we're assuming that the new alternative of the future would be something that exists now. The idea of alternative music is that it's cutting edge, and industrial/techno/punk/nu rock, whatever hasn't been cutting edge for at least 10 years (25 in the case of punk, and nu rock was totally preceded by the Judgement Night soundtrack of 94/95). I remember back in 1987, when Stock, Aitken & Waterman owned the UK charts, that a new kind of punk was going to break out. Something so raw that it would tear the youth of the world to pieces. I thought it would be rap music, and, in the US, it probably was, but in the UK rap music had already gone into the mainstream, and in fact it was Acid House/Techno which did it. I had it wrong simply because I couldn't see it coming. The music of the future will be something no one has thought of yet, but I'm pretty damn sure that when it finally breaks, Brian Eno will have the formula for it down pat within two weeks.

Erm... That would "grammar", right?

Stop drinking the water, CJ...