DarthTofu

The BMW logo is a bit off somehow, looks kind of like it's made of rubber. Don't get me wrong, it's brilliant and better than anything I could do, I just thought you might want a bit of constructive criticism. The rings look real (I thought it was a photo at first), and the gun is very nice. Really coming together.

I just stopped spamming as much... That is one awesome DVD Player/Webcam, though. If I ever need to buy either of them- I'm going to get them at a thrift store or something, because they'll be a hell of a lot cheaper, there, but I'll think of this as I walk up to the cash register at Good Will!

I heard from a friend who's intently watching the Dark Knight stuff that they'd recently finished filming before Ledger died. That suggests suicide to me. Reportedly (From my friend; I'd say that I'm not sure I believe him, but the fact of the matter is that I'm almost positive I don't) he was getting so into his role as the Joker that he frightened himself with some of his thoughts. That led to insomnia, which led to the sleeping pills, which may have led to suicide. *Shrugs* just my two bits. What's the betting YTMND takes advantage of his gay cowboy role in Brokeback Mountain and starts making "Ledger closed due to AIDS" YTMNDs?

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/n643395252_2092985_8844.jpg BWAHaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Christ that's funny.

Much as I hated it, I just found out something awesome about the film The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's opening gross was 4.2 million dollars. Appropriate? Hell yes that's appropriate! I would have preferred to see it done with the cast of Monty Python as opposed to the guys they used, though. After all, forty-two was chosen as the answer to life, the universe, and everything because Douglass Adams first appeared on Monty Python's Flying Circus during the forty-second episode... Okay, I'm cutting myself off from Wikipedia.

OOC: Because Karat Sal's namesake told me to get on with the story. IC: I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this planet. Well, moon. Thing. Less than a week. These people had shown up less than a week ago; one of them had literally broken my roof down, and now I was giving them all refuge in the home I'd found and risking my lives for them. I was presenting myself as a target for the one man in the galaxy with the greatest desire to kill me, and I was doing it from over two hundred stories up, directly beneath a Yuuzhan Vong shaping facility. "Ah, hell, what was that?" I'd stepped in something white with black specks in it that oozed after my boot landed in it. It was a pile of crap. Whether it was Vonduun Crab crap, Amphistaff crap, or sentient-being crap I didn't know. All I knew was that I was standing in it, both metaphorically and literally. I stomped down on the floor and dented it. I stomped again and dented it further. On the third try I made a tiny hole into the floor below me, affording me a view of an office just as bad as the one I was standing in. The fourth stomp finally created a decent-sized hole in the duracrete, though an old metal skeleton, so oxidized by now that it was impossible to identify, barred any further progress along that stomping path. I swore one more time for good measure, and scraped my foot clean on the metal. The hole had been only partly to scrape my boot clean, mostly so that I could drop down to the next level. With Micus separated from me by just two holed walls and Vong separated from me by only a ceiling/floor depending upon perspective, I wanted a new position. If I kept good on my promise to Hohass (And I still wasn't sure that I wanted to) I'd be flying out into the air right in front of Micus, and I didn't want to have to do that from a predictable location. The metal skeleton presented a problem, though. I couldn't just kick through it, despite its highly oxidized state, and it would create too much obvious noise if I took out my blaster and shot through it. I needed something that could cut through it, which I didn't have. A hand suddenly came into view, clawing at the floor. A Yuuzhan Vong hand. A head that looked as though it had lost in a battle with a fruit peeler followed, hauling itself up. The Vong was covered in blood, dribbling from his head; a large chunk of throbbing brain matter was visible, sagging out the backside of his head. For all intents and purposes this creature had no business being alive, much less climbing up to me. I readied my blasters and hunkered down, staring him in the eye. He snarled, and continued to climb. He knew that he was dying, and he figured that he may as well try to take me with him. Just as the warrior was pulling his legs up and over the lip of the door frame I grabbed the old, useless bar stool and threw it, hard. It missed for the most part; aimed at his head, only the very tip had caught, but I'd been lucky in that respect. Despite my lack of skill in throwing objects due to a lifetime using blasters, the tip of the stool snagged the Vong's exposed brain tissue and tore it free, along with some more that seemed determined to stick to the stuff. The warrior fell forward in a twitching, spasming head, his legs apparently trying to walk as what was left of his brain told them to walk. I edged over to the wall and bent down to examine the corpse. Something made to bight me I did so, but its fangs couldn't find purchase in the armor around my shin. It struck again, very quickly, but my hand was quick enough to catch it behind the neck with my thumb and index finger. I squeezed, hard, and forced the mouth of the amphistaff open. It hissed loudly at me, but its body became rigid as my fingers forced a response from it by pure luck I'd found a pressure point and a weapon for slicing through the floor. Now I could drop down a story, cut through another three walls with a weapon that wanted to kill me, and fly out in front of a psycho with an oversized blaster. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this moon.

Stalin kicked Hitler's butt in Russia. Stalin's mustache trumped Hitler's by about twenty points. Did Napoleon have a beard? No. Did he get beaten? Yeah. Do the Iraqis have bear- wait a minute, bad example. It has indeed started to appear. For some reason my chin has far darker growth than anywhere else, but it's all coming in at almost the same rate. Come the beginning of February I'll post a "before" and "after" pic. I have a video of the shaving from New Year's eve with myself and my friend. I'll upload it to YouTube when I get my video camera back from a friend and have time to upload it.

I agree with the first bit, though it's a bit extreme to say that you can't repurchase if your gun is stolen and used in a crime. Yes, it needs to be kept under lock and key and all that, but if you're not in the house at the time, a lock and key can only go so far to keeping out a burglar. For gross negligence I think it would be acceptable, but if a professional were to steal your weapon and sell it on the black market, it's going too far to remove that person's ability to purchase another weapon.

It depends. If you both get the same TC (Total Conversion) mod for the game, then you can both play with that TC. Generally speaking it seems like on-line games are planned out in advance (I don't play online; I'm not computer-savvy enough to download stuff and wire it into the game), so if you want to you ought to be able to play with a certain mod in place. So far I think the most popular one is the Rebellion Reloaded beta that's been released. It features better graphics, more by way of EU characters, and newer ship designs, plus some much improved scaling. It's also handy for single player games, I hear.

Actually a pretty good chunk of gun crimes are committed with legally purchased weapons. Something north of twenty percent, if I remember correctly. A dog is also a good secondary security system. With a simple alarm security, the noise it makes will actually scare the burglar off most of the time; they just assume that it's hooked up to a full-out anti-theft system. Even the sign saying that you're protected by thing X will sway some of the smarter crooks. As you've said, though, a power outage will render the system inoperable, and not many folks would want to bother with a backup generator. Demographically speaking, though, the power is generally pretty stable throughout the US. The last time I can remember it being out for more than an hour or two was immediately following a category three hurricane.

Haha! Love the last one! That spider is massive! Hell, the banana spiders in Guantanimo Bay weren't even that big! They got to be the size of a dinner plate, but not that big! Then again, maybe I just didn't see the ones that big; I was all of three when I left...

Ominous, is it too much to ask that you write out complete thoughts instead of sentence fragments? If you speak English as a second language I'm certainly willing to accept errors, but the shorthand and randomly placed punctuation is really starting to make reading your posts tedious. What SOCL is saying about owning a gun and its relation to defense is this: Most times that gun will be out of reach. Would you sleep with your under your pillow? In the night stand? In the closet? Unless it's very close to you, your chances of using it if someone wants to kill you are quite low. Krytos has stated numerous times that he is writing from the Australian perspective, and that he doesn't feel that he can accurately represent the United States position due to the vast differences between the two countries; rather, he is providing commentary on how the current gun laws work in his home country of Australia. SOCL lives in Washington DC, and as he's said, he gets most of his news from BBC and NPR, both of which are generally agreed upon to be neutral news networks. He doesn't look for a "side" to listen to so much as the facts and statistics, and takes the extra step of thinking for himself rather than just taking the immediate view of whomever is speaking. A cautionary note to all: Tempers are beginning to flare a tad, so let's all take a deep breath and realize that this debate won't change the world, no matter how angry we get. Calm down, turn Caps Lock off, stop pressing the italics button, and go about this in a dignified manner; I started this for debate, and I'm happy with the debate that's gone around, but it's showing the potential to degenerate into finger pointing and cries of "You're stupid!"

Alright, time to take on the new method: Satire. Sort of. The second amendment gives the right to bear arms. Nuclear warheads can be classified as arms quite easily. Would you feel safe if your next door neighbor could purchase a nuclear warhead? If a fellow in Washington DC could purchase a nuclear warhead? It's just because they're a collector, they wouldn't actually use it. Or so they say. Do you feel safe at all? I'm going to jump ahead and answer for you: No, you don't. Having an H-bomb near the White House or in the middle of NYC or Chicago is a threat to thousands of people. On September eleventh over three thousand Americans died. When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima over ten thousand died. Granted, most second amendment lovers aren't lobbying for purchasing a nuke; they're lobbying for purchasing, as Rob said, an assault rifle. This ties in, though, in how the two are linked. The second amendment certainly allows the people to own both, but owning a nuclear warhead is extreme and dangerous to too many people for anyone to really want it to be available for purchase. Thus, it must be reasoned that at some point the law needs drawing with decisions regarding what is too dangerous for the public to own. The question, now, is where you draw that line. Is a man entitled to own a tank because of the second amendment? A long-range artillery piece? A fully automatic assault rifle?

Alright. Right now I'm chatting with SOCL with regards to how the Yuuzhan Vong plan to dig in while in the Y'Toub (sp?) system. What we've decided upon is a sort of knock-off of the way some of the Japanese were during World War II; even after the war officially ended with the retaking of Coruscant, some of the fanatic Yuuzhan Vong are still holding out with all they have, and are willing to fight to the death. The Y'Toub system is going to be one of those systems of hold outs, partly because it's somewhat holy, having been used as a testing site for some of the planet-shaping techniques that went into Coruscant. We're still ironing out details, plus we're trying to figure out which planet will be liberated first, and in what ways... And who the big commanders will be when all is said and done. Right now we've determined that the main battles will be ground-side (Whoopdiedoo, I know), and that's about it.

While we aren't able to give the AI a decent brain, you can still make the game more challenging for yourself, as Eagle said. RebED has been used to create a number of mods, such as the "Death Star" mod, where the AI will actually produce the ship. (Hopefully). It also includes a mod by JedIgor (or was it Kane?) from some time back designed to make the AI behave more aggressively due to decreased transit times between systems. I think there's a full-out tutorial on making the AI more aggressive in here somewhere buried under old posts...

Please do. It looks bloody awesome- the whole thing is filled with camcorders, though unlike Road Trip from Hell it uses multiple camcorders. High-budget bastards at Hollywood...

I didn't think I was being too predictable in my opinion- or did you mean in writing up this topic? As SOCL said, unless you sleep with a gun, you'd have a hard time getting to it if someone entered with the intent to kill you or to subdue you with a weapon when they entered. It might help if someone is just breaking and entering to steal, I suppose, but the majority of those breaking and entering crimes aren't going to be horribly violent criminals. According to Time, I think it was, something like 75% of breaking and entering criminals will just take off running if they find out that someone's in the house and knows that they're in there as well. Heck, a simple security alarm (The type that goes "BEEOOBEEOOBEEOOBEEOO!") will work great for keeping out anyone who's breaking and entering. In a residential area that'll scare the piss out of 'em and have that criminal running 99 times out of 100. In a rural area things are different and it may well be necessary to have that shot gun, seeing as you don't have any neighbors within a good distance, but for somewhere where the population density is high and the neighborhood is decent (This is not counting the high-crime-rate slums of DC and New York) an alarm will scare anyone away. And on top of it all, I'm not even saying that you have to give up your gun- just to register it. Now, then, Rob: The full-auto thing is a matter I'm going to agree with the bandwagon on for once. You can get a great power trip out of having a full auto gun at a shooting range, sure, but what's the huge difference between owning one and renting one to you? You can still shoot it the same number of times as you'd have liked to before, and you don't even have to take care of the maintenance work. The difference between a gun collector and a coin collector is that, unlike coins, guns have another use. A very, very dangerous one. If you want to collect pistols that are more along the self-defense line variety I've no issue, but when you collect assault rifles I feel severely threatened by it. The only thing these weapons can be used for besides venting are their original purposes- killing people in an offensive situation.

I kinda liked what I had to read of Catcher in the Rye. We read part of the first chapter in class during the first day of school, just to show us how woefully innept we were at spotting hidden details. They're like booby traps, except it takes a teacher asking questions to trigger them. I'm reading Brave New World right now. It's good, but you can't take it in very large chunks at a time. I have to read a chapter or two and then pause to try to digest it, and occassionally I have to step back from the really annoying swap back and forth between three different perspectives in terms of 1.5 sentences, for about two pages, to figure out A) Why he's doing that and B) Who the hell's point of view he's on. It's a kind of confusing book when you take an AP view, a disturbing book when you take a human view, and a decent book when you don't take a view.

I'ma nominate Jahled again, despite the fact that it was a repeat avatar, just because I liked recycling his old Maul Santa from last year, and because he did a good job on the site and on Tex's avatar (At least, I think he did. Jahled did the snow storm, right, Tex?)

Oh, yeah, pretty fool-proof plan. Capture Palpy. Stick Palpy in a fleet with Luke that's chock full of Sullustans and other detection units. Go to a planet that's got full Imp loyalty in a sector where you have no influence and the planets are all or mostly uninhabited. Take the planet. Drop Palpatine down on it. Take up your regiments. Send in Luke to catch Palpatine. Repeat. If he's injured you'll obviously do better. It might not work so well in multiplayer, though, I don't know.

That's a matter of the individual state. Just wondering, why do you feel that you need a full auto weapon to defend yourself? Or need one at all, I suppose, if it isn't for defense? Those weapons seem like they would be best utilized for offensive means, such as robbing a bank or something. The second amendment says that a citizen could own, say, a bazooka, yet I wouldn't feel comfortable if my next door neighbor had one for self defense. Too much collateral damage if he uses it to defend, plus it can, again, be better used for an offensive purpose than a defensive one. A weapon like, say, a pistol, however, is more suited for defense in my opinion. It's small, nearby, and won't be very useful against a cop or two. A guy breaking into your home, though, will have something to think about if you pull your gun on him.

... I put in new speakers on my car using idiot-proof instructions that I got from Crutchfield, a really awesome website based in Virginia, that gave me a full new stereo system of last year's parts for just $150, including a new, awesome radio... I think that qualifies me as a crazy engineer, though the world is free to disagree with me on that point. http://www.crutchfield.com Check 'em out. They have great deals on auto parts.

You mean like Defender "Triple Post" 16? Just kidding- you're the reason this thread is still about. I like the helicopter one a lot.

Uh, Rob? Pulling a gun during a crime is 15 years automatically. Firing is 20 years automatically. If you actually shoot someone you've got 25 to life.

My strategy against the AI is generally to send down Luke on missions of sabotage on Coruscant while I have the planet blockaded with a fleet they can't possibly beat. Generally speaking Luke will fail or be captured, but then I just take the planet and I have him, with a Palpy/Vader fight helping to boot! That's all I have for you. Try RebED if you want to make him more powerful, eh?