zipwitch

Moldy? Psh, that's nothing. The real excitement begins when you play with the sweat coming off the dynamite, like we did back when I was a kid in the 80s!

Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.

As opposed to Legends of Tomorrow, which is an RPG party doing "adventure of the week" on a timeship. (I enjoy Legends of Tomorrow a lot. It totally feels like the writers are running weekly gaming sessions and turning them into scripts.)

Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".

Seveneves is a great book (although a little grim for my taste), but it is not about Kessler Syndrome. It's about a scenario where (spoiler alert for the first sentence), the Moon blows up, and humanity has to deal with the consequences.

The US government's High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)(1), a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists, uses a high frequency, high-power transmitter to temporarily excite a small part of the ionosphere. One theoretical use for HAARP is to produce an ion outflow that drags oxygen up to 800km and could be used to enhance the drag on orbiting satellites (and presumably debris as well), de-orbiting them faster.(2)

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_...

2) https://www.nap.edu/read/18620/chapter/6

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/937/

Then there's what's often called "privilege" (circumstances of birth). What are the consequences to you of taking a risk on being lucky and missing?

For some people, dropping out of college and spending a few years working on a project that might pay out spectacularly is negligible. Sure, it's a few years of lifespan, but you learned some stuff and your future trajectory isn't going to be dragged down by a failure in your early 20s.

For others, one shot is all they'll ever get. If they don't get the degree and the right job out of college, the trajectory of their life will be permanently inflected downward.

Circumstances of birth have a huge impact on what chances are rational to take.

Verbal thinker hear as well. Weak mind's eye, but imagined scenes or objects are actually easier to visualize and describe than memories of real objects or places, most of the time.

Strongly verbal thinker here: weak "mind's eye" (or nose, or ear). I can remember and later identify images, music, etc with a high degree of accuracy, but when I call something up for "internal recall" my memory will almost always lack the fine detail of reality. It's very rare that I can "play back" or "conjure up" something in my head vividly. I don't absolutely require an internal monologue to think. With some things, like sports or gaming, there's a lot of non-verbal processing going on.

I can do reasonably complex verbal, mathematical, or IT work just in my head, and often have an internal monologue running while doing so. It not that my working memory[1] is especially good, it's just that if I'm spending more than a couple hours on it, I've mostly memorized it, so I can think about the solution, or at least the next step or steps, and then type or write them out. (Closing my eyes can help eliminate distractions, but isn't required. Good headphones playing something non-intrusive and blocking out audible distractions are at least as important, probably more important.)

What I can't do in my head is solve complex problems in real 3D space. If I'm trying to fit components into a box for a hobby project, or doing some moderately complicated carpentry for a home-improvement project, I prefer being hands-on. Need to be hands-on, really. I can't fit the pieces together in my head, even if I'm looking at a page full of all relevant measurements. 3D modeling software is okay, pencil and paper and drawing tools a very poor and painful substitute.

Interestingly, when I'm working with a hands-on project is one of the few times when I can make a very sharp mental picture. I can be looking at a piece of lumber, or a bare enclosure, and know it exactly what it will look like when I'm done.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

No good alternatives. For years, I had smartphones with slider keyboards. Now, I carry a foldable bluetooth keyboard in my bag. Onscreen keyboards are for emergencies only. But a lot of people view lugging the keyboard as unacceptable.

Not even a mention of Password Safe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_Safe

It's what I've been using for Windows-running non-savvy relatives for decades.

Aerial Board of Control? :-)

(Kipling also wrote SF short stories, set in a universe with the aforementioned organization as a world government, for example "As Easy As A.B.C." (1912).)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Board_of_Control

Challenger did not explode.

The key events of the disaster took place over about three seconds.

A leak of high-temperature gas in the right solid rocket booster damaged the external stack of solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank.

The damage to the external tank caused it to come apart, and resulted in a fireball from the released liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The solid rocket boosters broke free of their mountings as the disaster unfolded.

The Challenger orbiter momentarily survived both the fireball and external tank failure. But those events made it impossible to keep the orbiter correctly oriented.

The loss of proper orientation while travelling ~1000mph meant Challenger was hit with very high stress forces, far beyond anything it was designed to survive, and swiftly broke apart.

Shortly afterward, the Range Safety Officer remotely detonated both solid rocket boosters, which had survived the disaster mostly intact and were careening out of control.

More detail at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

Solar wind as the culprit was still being tossed around in 2017.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-maven-reveals-most-... "The new result reveals that solar wind and radiation were responsible for most of the atmospheric loss on Mars, and the depletion was enough to transform the Martian climate."

If I recall correctly, the pound is just a unit of account (I think I'm using that right) during the Medieval era. No one is actually carrying around pounds of silver.

As it happens, I've been putting together notes for a new D&D campaign I'll be running in the near future. I downloaded this exact price list as a reference three days ago.

> (Balrogs don't fly.)

Them's thar's fightin' words. :)

I don't have a copy of the old Usenet FAQ handy, but here's a tiny sample of the debate for any curious readers:

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs/Wings http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Do__Balrogs__have...

Cue the great SF writer E.E. 'Doc' Smith of Lensman fame, who went into detail on the challenges of just getting two spaceships to match velocities closely enough to allow docking at transfer of passengers and cargo. (He did handwave the speed of light away, though.)

In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read: "Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth." "Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."

Obligatory pedantry: "Angmar" was the name of the northern realm which the Lord of the Nazgul once ruled as the "Witch-King of Angmar". We don't know what his original name was, although I believe there's a reference to him being a Lord of Numenor somewhere. Tor.com recently had a nice overview of him: https://www.tor.com/2019/10/31/exploring-the-people-of-middl...

The only canonically named Ringwraith was Khamul, the Witch-king's number two. (Roleplaying game company Iron Crown Enterprises once put out some nice but totally unofficial names for all the Nazgul.)

I think it's great slave farms in Southern Mordor, around the inland sea of Nurnen. http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/n/nurn.php

(There may also have been farms in the East that I'm not remembering. The East was definitely under Sauron's thumb, although perhaps not so firmly as he would have liked.)

That's a popular and oft-repeated conception, but not precisely canon. Tolkien was never able to definitively pin down the origin and nature of his orcs to his own satisfaction, and never reached any final decision, afaik.

In popular culture "Curzon" is probably most familiar to StarTrek:DS9 fans as Curzon Dax, the predecessor of the Jadzia Dax. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Curzon_Dax

(The character - a diplomat - was very clearly inspired by Lord Curzon.)

Ann Leckie's fantasy novel The Raven Tower is set in a world where such pagan gods are real, and dives right into a description of how human tribes will spend generations training them to respond favorably.

Yes! I had Archon II as a kid and loved it. I remember that playing against the AI was a very different game than playing against another person, as the AI could do things during the fights with perfect aim and split-second reflexes that made it very overpowered with certain units that another human had a hard time using well. But it's strategy wasn't as good, so I could outplay it on the board enough to get a win, especially after I figured out which units I could use effectively against the AI.

When reading online reviews anywhere, it's always fun to see what fraction of 1-star reviews are "this sucks and/or readily fails at what its supposed to do" versus "I'm using this wrong".

Everyone is commenting on privacy, but isn't the main use for VPNs (at least in the US) to avoid the consequences of digital piracy?

I'm in my 40s. My childhood was closer to WWII than to the present day.

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead, 1996

It may be obvious to those of us with an interest in etymology, but when the phrase came up in my tabletop gaming group (ages 18-50), they were unanimous (save for myself) that the meaning was "the fast and the dead". I had to resort to a web search to convince them otherwise.