Allamorph

....yes, why do you WHOA HOLY SHIT WHAT Uh. Yes. Yes it is. Editing now. Criminy.

LeVar Burton is heading a KickStarter project to bring 90s children's television program Reading Rainbow forward into the 21st century. This show was one of my favorites when I was a kidâ??a close second to Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?â??and I would love to see other kids enjoying it as much as I did. The project has already (and easily) reached its stated fund goal, but I'm still thinking strongly about supporting it myself, if only because I remember those old Brought To You By prefaces on each show that always ended with "...and by viewers like you". What about you? Do you also have fond memories of the show? Did the thread title immediately get that theme song playing in your head? What authors did you discover that you might not have if you hadn't seen them there?

Dirty man-sewing gogogo.

I've noticed that a game's success ends up depending solely on the strength of creative desire of its players, rather than simply its subject material or theme, or even the skill level of the players. Incidentally, what sort of stuff does draw your interest?

Oh, no, don't mistake me. The werewolf is obviously the main point. I just wanted some Hispanic/Latin American flavor to add, not a person who can assume an animal form via magic. But yeah, I'll cobble my thoughts together and see what you think.

So here's a secondary question based on the first: what all mythologies are open for the table for this? I'm not really a fan of Japanese/Asian stuff either, but at the same time I think the European side (while still rather interesting) has sort of been done to death. You said you're basing this all in the US. What other American-based myths would you allow to be used? For instance, both the Native Americans and Latin Americans have their own shapeshifter legends, which are very rich in their own right. When you said 'witch', I immediately keyed off of the brujas in Mexico, which sent my mind down the path of the nahual for blood intermingling. I think that kind of background might lend itself well to, say, a fourth- or sixth-generation character, who might not necessarily know or care about their heritage (or they might, who knows; it all washes out in development, I find).

Jeez, it's been ages since I was involved in one of these....   Your opening Sign Up post mentioned "Ladies of the Land".  Could you elaborate a touch on them?  I'm curious what avenues you have for flavor.

I may not be as old or as tenured as you peopleâ??you ... weird leadersâ??but I also sometimes wish I was still involved in a game.  OB RPs gave me a constant push to imagine back in college, and having only recently revived my active writing, I notice it's a little harder to hunker down and churn things out when you know you have no audience waiting.   I have mostly good memories about the old Theater thread.  Some of fun discussions had over story directions, some of sitting back and laughing at all the soap operas that invariably developed in the backstages.  But if I were to go back to any of them?    Hm.   Well, I've always been fascinated by the concept behind the Death Card series that Sandy brought to us, to the point where I wanted to try running my own, but I still think there's a fair bit of bitterness surrounding the name here, and it's much tougher to start running something somewhere else when you don't really have any time (or, let's face it, inclination) to invest yourself in becoming known and trusted again.  Other than that, though, I think the three I miss the most are This Is Earth and Gifts & Curses II, both from the brilliant (AND ABSENT, DAMMIT YOU ENGLISH WENCH) mind of Vicky, who will always be one of my favorite people, and the ill-fated but intriguing semi-magic Victorian drama (at least intended to be, I think) Masked Agenda, created by 4815162342, which was basically stillborn but which holds the distinction of having my favorite created character ever.   SD still exists in my mind.  I may reverse and begin writing it myself one day, just to go back and play up some of the other characters and set down some necessary foreshadowing.  I will never understand how a throwaway game I joined on a whim got so intense. Good times, though.

I have just discovered KATFYR holy shiiiiiiiiit

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DUDE THE EDIT REASON OPTION BLOCK IS BACK THIS IS AWESOME   BOO YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS BOO COME QUICK BOO SRSLY Edit: ....wait, what? It was only because I had editing privileges for the Noosphere forum? Lame. PETIE BRING THE EDIT REASONS BACK FOR GLOBAL USERS

This movie is stupid and horrible and campy and I love it. Terrible plot. Fantastic lines. And the guy I thought was pretending to be Gary Busey was in fact Gary Busey. The guy does a good impersonation of himself. Who knew? "Stop getting shot!"

Confirmed.

Okay, so as of right now, filtering forums by tag and attempting to use the advanced search feature both return database errors on the site.

There is no "Delete" button on the fan art page itself. It does exist, though. You have to select "Edit [Work]" on your submission page. Scroll down a ways, and it'll be there. Also saying "please help" is silly. You are posting in the Help section, after all. It's sort of implied. ^_^

Just got Netflix, so I'm going back and catching up on a lot of television I've either caught only piecemeal, missed, or ignored over the past decade and a half.  Currently working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and The X-Files, both of which I used to love, and testing out The Dead Zone, with which I am being pleasantly surprised. Also need to start working on The Walking Dead again, and have added a number of other series to a watch list for future reference. I've always been a sucker for science- and paranatural-fiction.

Sacramento is really warm and I Do Not Want That.   Gonna check out San Fran today, see some stuff.

"Oh my god, you have a voice-actor voice." â??Chibs

I know that feel. Most of my peers right now are seven or eight years younger than I am, and about half of my instructors and superiors as well.

Yep. Close friends only. Sorry, love. =P

Heh. Oh, right. I've also taken the opportunity to meet and hang out with various TheO/OB members. I've met Raiha twice, once in Chicago and once in Norfolk, VA. Right before I left my duty station in Charleston I made time to catch up with somegirl, one of TheO's more prolific graphic designers in years past, and she was so nervous about meeting me that she brought along one of her best friends for backup and supportâ??and was then amazed when I had her supposedly taciturn friend chattering away by the end of the night. Sweet girls, both of them. And then a couple of months ago I convinced Kimmeh (also from TheO; I think here she called herself KimmehWolfwood and only posted in Graphic Worm stuff) to fly up to NYC and hang out with me there for three days, and in the process we got treated to fantastic Chinese food by Adam and pizza by MewMew and her boyfriend. Mew was very put out that I have a thing against pictures.

To actually answer the question, I've been ... different. I didn't start lurking/posting here until I was about halfway through my first year of college. I'm a smart guy, and a good worker, but I suffered from a mild case of general inexperience-based-ignorance and accepting apathy (i.e., 'this kinda sucks but I'll work with it') and thought I could work through something I didn't fully understand and didn't really want. I was diligent at first, but I kinda saw a lot of my peers giving way less effort for the exact same result, and for a while I tried that and then wondered why it didn't work. And then combined with some serious disillusionment and some poor choices regarding work and finances and roommates, I ended up basically retreating from a lot of the world for about a year. But then I got sick of it. I was going absolutely nowhere, doing nothing to better myself and wasting my money (which I didn't really have), my talents (which I started to let stagnate as well), and all the time in the world. And my parents, who are good people, didn't really know what else to do besides tell their twenty-three year old son to buck up and get with the program, because although they're supportive and understanding, they're not the type of people to sit there and hold your hand through everything. They worked their own way up and had to deal with just as much stuff as I did, so they weren't going to come flying to my rescue just because I felt bad and didn't want to try. And mostly I was tired of sitting on my ass all day doing nothing but sleep and eat and ... process food. So in April '11 I enlisted with the Navy. I wasn't actually able to ship out until the end of October, but I moved back home in the interim and almost immediately found work: making biscuits at Hardee's for eight hours a day. Not the most glamorous of jobs, but it was tiring, and it paid, and it kept me from further pushing myself into thoughts of what a miserable sot I was. Funny how work does that for you. Especially work where you exert yourself. Beating down dough and slinging around biscuit trays and trash bags and scrubbing the food muck off the floor makes you break a sweat. So I did it, and did it well, and when I left everyone was let down because once I got into it I made some damn fine biscuits. (And kept a damn shiny floor.) I shipped out to Basic Training Camp (or BT Camp, hence "boot") 25OCT11. I know that date by heart; it's kinda like my second birthday, now. And that was two months of essentially group isolation while a set of sailors made us stronger and faster and less collectively stupid. It wasn't fun, but I kinda miss it now. I graduated from there in early December, and since then I've been in bar-none the longest training pipeline in the military. (Even longer now because of delays due to equipment failures and staff integrity issues.) I'm still not even a real sailor; I have yet to lay eyes on an actual steaming ship, much less be allowed inside one. But it's necessary for us. My rate (or job, for you civilian types) is a nuclear-qualified mechanic. I, along with two other rates, maintain, work on, troubleshoot, operate, and fix nuclear propulsion plants, which are installed on every one of our submarines and aircraft carriers. Nuclear propulsion is basically a keystone to our fleet strength; without it, our carriers can't travel around the world without needing to be so-close to a friendly port for refueling, and our ballistic/guided missile and fast-attack submarines wouldn't be able to stay underwater for extended periods of time without running out of food or killing their crews by diesel/gas fumes. But nuclear power is also a touchy subject to the general public. We can't afford to have nuclear disasters. Otherwise we'd lose access to basically all our allied ports (and what few neutral ones allow us in), and our strongest vessels would remain tied to port on one of our coastlines. So they train us for a minimum of a year and three months, although I'll hit my two-year mark in the Navy in just over two more months. I mean, think about it. If I were to come to San Diego and say, "Hey, I want to build a nuclear power plant to power your city, but I want to put it right about the middle, right where all the people live," I'd get shot down immediately. If I said, "Also, yeah, I wanna put wheels on it and drive it around the city," I'd be laughed out of the state. But at any given point in the year right now, there could be over half a dozen (maybe over a dozen) of those exact platforms sitting right there. And the city lets us. Heck, we even have a nuclear carrier parked in Japan's backyard. Think about that. Think about the history of that country and this country and that word. So they train the ever-loving crap out of us so when we go and operate a no-shit live plant for realsies, we don't botch it. But I'm almost done. And I just got orders this week, so provided everything goes well, I'll be moving to Seattle in October. In the meantime (with, like, the two free hours a day we're given while in this pipeline), I still read and write sometimes, goof around on game systems, have been going to the gym much more often, and have recently gotten really into Airsoft and snowboarding. I hope all the rest of you are well.