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... And everyone else should:



The Tenth Wars have got underway! At least, the filming has; given the turnaround for the Ninth Wars, I think we can expect it sometime this autumn. Can the green-striped monster of the West Midlands defend its crown? Will the disc of doom from Reading shred more of its opposition? Might the rocket-powered house robot launcher from Birmingham Abergele have a new target this series? Will Foxic do anything?

All will be revealed, along with the new-look arena and a full cast of fighting machines from all over the country and beyond, because this. Is. ROBOT WARS!

I'm a little excited. Can you tell? =]

I get it, I really do. One time, when I was a stupid kid, one of my stupid kid friends convinced me to throw rocks at seagulls so that we could catch one, take it home, nurse it back to health, and have it as a pet. This was a terrible idea, and I'm pretty sure I knew it at the time, but I did it anyway because she was my best friend, I worshiped her, and I guess I was feeling extra-gullible that day. Thank goodness, we sucked at throwing rocks and didn't actually hit anything.

But, as it turns out, doing a bad thing in order to do a good thing is never smart, and I expect will almost always fail miserably.

~Neshomeh

So, when it comes to the stuff you usually do, like the PPC Hunger Games or the Friday Forums, you not only wouldn't object to people taking them over from you, but would be happy if they did?

If someone were taking something that's "yours" (in the "people think of this as hS's thing" sense), would you prefer they get in touch with you first or just go for it?

On a general note, as I said in a different context downthread, folks, this current state of affairs is very unfair to hS. We're starting to treat him as a near-infinite source of "keep the PPC running" juice (or at least it's starting to feel that way), and, as he pointed out, that's not what he is. I don't want to see a "why I'm leaving the PPC" from hS because he's sick and tired of dealing with our crap, and I'm worried that's the path we're headed down. Let's do something about that before it's too late, yeah?

(Then again, I could be completely wrong about this. Feel free to ignore me.)

- Tomash

:P

Gotta make everything fandom related these days. :P

I also bring an offering of local news from my corner of the world. My boss and I actually went and shot some video for a church in this tiny little town of approximately 3000 people, and not long after, well... this happened.

The TL;DR is that the (openly gay) organist admitted to spray-painting a swaistika, "Heil Trump" and "fag church" on the walls of the church back in November.

"I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag . . . I of course realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism."

Yeah, maybe not.

There's camera footage of the whole thing, apparently, which is how they know the car was driving away from the officer, not reversing "aggressively" toward him, when he fired. There doesn't seem to be any question that he done it. IMO, there's no excuse for shooting at a bunch of teens fleeing a busted party, however drunk and rowdy it might have been.

Turns out I was right. System Sounds replied to a comment about the (lack of) tuning with the following:

The notes are slightly out of tune because we used the actual measured orbital frequencies (the resonances have been slightly detuned over the last few billion years, mainly due to tidal forces). You can download the midi file at system-sounds.com in which the notes are quantized to be in tune. We wanted to remain true to the actual system and have as little human input as possible. Thanks for watching!

So that's cool. They also have an example of a system that doesn't have any planets in resonance, the Kepler 90 system, on this page. It's quite a difference! (Herr Wozzeck, this should be right up your alley.)

~Neshomeh

I thought American police had that constitutional 'right to bear and indiscriminately use arms' thing going on? [/sarcasm/sarcasm/sarcasm]

Seriously, I've been horrified by the state of America's police (at least the parts that make the news) for a while now; I hope this is the start of a trend towards fixing that. (And, obviously, if the officer charged is innocent, I hope the trial recognises that and they find who did do it.)

TRAPPIST-1 - I did see a comment somewhere that "they could at least have used an in-tune piano". I had to listen to it at work with the sound down low, so I'm not sure how they picked the notes they used.

hS

Shockingly, a white police officer shot and killed another young black guy last Saturday, in this case a fifteen-year-old kid in the passenger seat of a car leaving a party. Only, in this case, the officer has actually been fired from his job and has been charged with murder. We'll have to see if it sticks, but in the meantime, kudos to the police chief in Balch Springs and to the Dallas County judge who signed the warrant. We can't keep letting people get away with this crap.


The TRAPPIST-1 video is awesome. ^_^ It seems like the notes aren't quite tuned to each other, at least not to my ear, but I guess they picked up the frequencies they used from the planets themselves?

~Neshomeh

No, I'm not performing that song again. I said "once" :-)

HG

It's geeky and sort of adorable, which basically sums up the human race as a whole. :D

Welcome back to the Friday Forum. It seemed to work last week, so let's try it again.

Please remember that, when it comes to the state of the world, not everyone will agree with you. You're free to state, discuss, and defend your viewpoint (provided it does not violate the Constitution), but please don't use that fact to attack others.

Fandom News


(Link)

Ah, do you remember the golden age? When you could have a film about Nazis that featured a stand in for the kookiest Republican presidential candidate, and it was taken for granted that she'd be fighting against them? Aye, them were the days.

I'm talking, of course, about the frankly hilarious 2012 movie Iron Sky. The first official teaser trailer for the sequel (Iron Sky: The Coming Race) dropped this week; it has Adolf Hitler riding a T. rex, and if we can trust the 2015 pre-teaser, features both the Hollow Earth and a race of reptile people living there. Fake!Sarah Palin is one of them, so I guess she was on Hitler's side all along after all? Alas, my golden era is already tainted...!

(I expect a full critique of Blondie the T. rex's anatomy. Come on, paleogeeks, I know you're out there.)

Silly News


(Link)

You all, I'm sure, remember the astonishing discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 star system, a small red star with seven earth-sized worlds around it. It has its own website, featuring this gorgeous NASA travel poster that accurately shows the fact that, y'know, this place has seven planets inside the orbit of Mercury, they're going to show up in each other's skies the size of our moon.

The issue with this system is that, with so much mass so close together, most models show the planets colliding and destroying each other within half a million years - which, obviously, hasn't happened. Luckily, astronomers are clever types, and a paper pre-printed this week suggests a way for them to be, y'know, still there: a "resonant chain", where the orbits of all seven worlds are gravitationally linked so they counter-balance each other. It's quite funky - but not entirely silly, and this section is called 'Silly News'.

The silliness comes with how this has been announced to the world. The image above links to the video in which the orbits of the planets have been transformed into music - a piano note for each complete orbit, a drumbeat for each time a planet passes its neighbours. It's a gloriously ridiculous way to showcase an astrophysical hypothesis; I love it.

Serious News


(America & France)

This week, FBI Director James Comey was fired by Twitter Personality & President Trump. Comey is simultaneously the man who decided to publically announce that he was once again investigating Hillary Clinton mere days before the election (prompting widespread belief, given how close the votes turned out, that he pretty much chose the next president all by himself), and the man who was still investigating Russian involvement in swinging that same election at the time he was fired. He wasn't - quite - investigating Trump himself, but "firing the man who's checking whether your administration is influenced by a foreign power" ain't looking good.

It's made worse by Trump's letter, which includes this delightful paragraph:

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.

... which comes off an awful lot like 'you thought saying what I wanted to hear made you safe; you were wrong'.

Personally, I've never believed the way Comey handled the email reopening was innocent; he knew full well what he was doing. But firing the man who is investigating whether you were elected on false pretences was never going to look good.

Meanwhile, in Europe, France has utterly disrespected the spirit of the times by not electing its far-right candidate as President. Weirdos. They did still join in the whole 'overturn the establishment' thing, though, voting in a President from a party/movement that only formed last year.

Do we still have any French Boarders around? It'd be interesting to hear an inside view on why the traditional parties didn't do well in the first round - and why the far-right didn't end up winning after all.

Not News

My town has a WWII memorial (we don't have a WWI one, because the town didn't exist at the time), and some of the names on it are... well:



I can't make up my mind whether this is "Savage" Ivy Muriel, the brutal cricketer whose last match against Australia is the subject of both legend and three separate police reports, or "Savage Ivy", the famous masked wrestler and/or vigilante who spends her days as Muriel the children's librarian.



What kind of cruel parents name their kid "Ernest Stammers"? I mean, there's no way he's coming out of that with his psyche intact.



Finally, the untold story that takes place after the Narnia you know and love. This gritty sequel explores Peter Pevensie's conscription in 1944, his first blooding on D-Day, his meteoric rise through the ranks of the British Army - and his tragic, noble death on the Somme (because, like, there's two World Wars? Who can be bothered to remember that? Hey, one of those writers was at the Somme, wasn't he, Rowling or Tolkein or something like that. Who was the one who wrote Narnia? Let's make it him, and Peter can tell him all the stories while he's dying. Man, we're brilliant.)

... I will give prizes to anyone who writes an encounter between High King Peter, Ernest St-st-st-stammers, and either of the Muriels in the battlefields of Europe.

hS

I am not awake at 11pm. ^_^ (Well, sometimes I am, but I shouldn't be.)

Though Saturday might actually be difficult... um, I'll post something on the day.

hS

I mean, I absolutely agree with the idea that the "middlebies" should realise that their voices are not only able to be heard, but needed.

But...

I've read several posts here where people are saying that they're generally happy with how things have been handled so far and they they don't have anything to add. If that's genuinely the case for most of the people here, then it looks like those of us who've been participating can congratulate ourselves on a job (mostly) well done.

At the time I posted my rant, one week after the second part of this thread started, only three of us had commented. Of the six people/groups named, the only ones that had comments from all three were Ekyl (which you could maybe consider settled, if you consider three people a consensus, which... you shouldn't) and Nord-Herr (which absolutely wasn't, and I'd retracted my comments by that time).

Of the others, Neshomeh and I had received no comments, so unless the people saying that were happy with 'let's leave them hanging, tee hee', that wasn't in any way addressed. The Multiple Discord Users had two. Granz had one - mine - which was in direct opposition to the consensus from the first half of the thread. And Scapegrace had two.

I don't mind people posting to literally just say "I agree with hS" if that's all they feel they need to say - oddly enough, I tend to think my opinions are correct anyway, so I'm not going to say everyone has to disagree with them. But not even saying that - treating both me(/you/Nesh) and the people under discussion as if 'hS Has Spoken, No More Need Be Said' was how things work... is unfair to everyone involved. I don't want that kind of authority, and the people who are being discussed want closure. They want to know that, if someone gets upset in six months' time, they won't have the issue they thought was settled here thrown back in their face.

This community only works if people get involved. If they don't, it's not fair to anyone.

hS

1/ I am not in charge of the PPC.

2/ I do not want to be in charge of the PPC.

Please, please try to understand those, because half the time it feels like if I'm not being lauded for the one, I'm being lambasted for the other.

I do so, so much around here for the simple reason that there's no-one else left who will. Most of you don't remember that I didn't create the Shipfest (that was bjam and BiD) or the Badfic Games; I didn't invent Fill the Plothole or the PPC Hunger Games (well, you might remember that one). I just took them on when their creators left or lost interest.

And I will keep on doing so. If Neshomeh or Iximaz leave (gods forbid!), I'll probably end up taking over the Christmas Filking and Pokemon Tournaments, because I don't want to see them go away, and most of the time no-one else steps in to do it.

But it doesn't mean I'm in charge. It doesn't mean I want to be. It doesn't mean you should look to me to fix everything and/or be the cause of all problems, because I can't and I'm not.

And I am so very tired.

hS

But this really is one of the recruitment stories I've seen that are not immediately followed by a mission, which is a thing I enjoy. I much prefer them being interludes than a pre-mission thing.

Hence why, I'm suggesting Iximaz's "Tooth and Claw"

Have a cake.

Heck yeah I'll be rad!

Ix birfday?!

Ix birfday!

Ix.
Birfday.

Happy birfdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
My gift upon you is: four skateboards! One for each limb! You'll be the most radical kid on the street!

HAPPY BIRFDAY ENJOY YOUR CAKE