DarthTofu

I rather enjoy being the Devil from Sinfest- why should I feel the need to contaminate myself with a BEAK pun? All that would result from that would be every one jumping down my throat every time I made a spelling or grammar error... Granted, I have had a few BEAKing moments in school lately. These include- telling my Latin II Teacher (Who also teaches English III) that she misspelled "grammar" (Only one "m") and my Writing I teacher that, in her analysis of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye she should have used the verb "affects" as opposed to the noun "effects."

A) I've already posted that picture. B) Why, Micro$ith paint, of course! Def is our resident Paint-master, Taco, you should know this by now! I like to consider myself a (relatively) close second. Oddly enough, Def doesn't, possibly because my stuff is far too cartoony...

I use AIM (On my profile) G-mail talk, and Skype if a meeting is pre-arranged (I don't usually just log on to see who's about). My name on Skype is the same as my forum name, my AIM and E-mail can be found through my profile I'm fairly certain.

"Look I so old to you?" The idea behind this would be that what we see is only a fraction of the battle; the vast majority of it is in the realm of the Force, and invisible to us.

One would imagine the battle between Yoda and Palpatine to be one of Force mastery. After all, is it not Yoda who first tells us that "Size matters not," and Palpatine who shows us just how much more useful some powerful Force-lightning is than a flashy lightsaber? Heck, we have Vader's fight with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back in Cloud City where Vader nearly took Luke out merely by throwing objects at him through the Force, without a single lightsaber swing! A battle like that would have been great in Revenge of the Sith!

Hell, one can focus for well over thirty pages on one mission alone! The men involved in it go through years and years of training, sometimes for just one launch, and one (the most famous one) had a rather horrible incident involving a spark in one of the oxygen tank forcing the crew to turn their lunar lander into a life raft (Apollo 13). Granted, this only ties into our relationship with Russia in the sense that those astronauts were now under an official treaty effectively stating that they could land in any ocean, lake, pond, or puddle around the world and be safely returned home, even in Russia, without worry. The Mercury missions, though, now those we can go on for a while with (Designs of the two separate rockets based on the messages they would send out, the training gone through by the astronauts and cosmonauts, and that story Mad posted in randomness about how the Americans designed a pen that could write in space, under water, etc. and the Soviets just used pencils)...

@SOCL: Remind me to kill you some time soon... @Rob: I'm going to have to agree with Jahled on this one: A) This is a thirty page paper you're writing. You need a broad topic! B) The purchase of Alaska is not a broad topic. C) The Space Race is about eighty-jillion (Yes, one jillion is now a number) times more interesting than the purchase of Alaska. D) If you do a really top-notch job on this you might increase Florida's revenue through folks coming to check out Kennedy Space Center, and that'd be awesome.

Neither are mine, both are awesome. http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/ketchupvsmustard.jpg http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/simpsons.jpg

Okay, come on, now. I'm as much for spam as the next guy (Er, actually, since the next guy will likely be SOCL, I suppose that's wrong...) but this is ridiculous. Let's just lower the posts down to once per three hours or so, okay? Okay. Good. Jeeze, you guys have me calling spam on you! What is this, Corrupt-a-wish?

Halloween is gory, but likely not as gory as Braindead. Didn't they use something like 5,000 gallons of fake blood for that flick? Or am I thinking of Nightmare on Elm Street? Halloween's bloodiest scenes are probably (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert): Michael slicing his father's throat, stabbing his older sister, drowning the caretaker dude, stabbing the girl's black-haired friend whilst she's shirtless (how bad would it suck to be dying and have your father see you "exposed" like that?) and the very end, where he tries to kill his little sister.

That really sucks, Rob. Tons of heavy work, plus it's supposed to be your "slacking" year. Russia's likely your best bet for a thirty page paper (Double spaced, hopefully?).

Oh, man, I'd forgotten all about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles until now! Well, that's not true- my sister innitially wanted to name me Michaelangelo after her favorite turtle when I was an unnamed child... I eventually opted for Leonardo at around six, but by then it was too late, and my legal name stuck. Curses. H2G2 is kinda dark for a ten-year-old, though, Verdex, isn't it? Or am I just thinking of the later stuff, like Mostly Harmless, that got to be more... er, innapropriate?

Four differant building materials and individual walls to be made? *Cough* AGE OF EMPIRES PART I! *Cough* ... Allergies. Seasonal. I swear. Still, it sounds pretty awesome- For the moment, though, I'm trying to learn how to work Sony Vegas, so that is my "video game" of the week (Or eight. This thing is complex, and I don't have a bloody owner's manual that I can find...)

It was released in 1995, Paul. You either won't have to wait for it to come out on DVD, or you'll have to settle for snagging it on VHS; those are likely your only two options.

While some (Tex) will decree that we are forever children at heart, or that anyone younger than them is a child, or that I am a child, or whatever, the fact of the matter is that I don't think anyone still refers to his or her self as a "child" in their mind, and considers their life to have moved beyond their "childhood." Thus, I now ask this question: What is one of the things that you remember most from your childhood? A series of books for "young adults," perhaps, or maybe a television program, or a theme park you attended religiously with your family? For me, I'll have to go with the Animorphs books. While some of you may not know what they are, if you were born in the early nineties or so, then odds are that you know what they are/were, and you were sucked into them as well. Basically it follows five human children- Tobias, Cassie, Jake, Marco, and Rachel- plus one alien that's a sort of mouthless centaur called an Andalite- Ax- in their fight against the invading Yeerks, which are basically slugs that slide into your brain and take over your body (Kinda like the Goa'old, for any Stargate fans). Anyway, they all have the ability to "morph" into any creature they can touch and acquire the DNA of, thus they can use these morphs for guerrilla warfare throughout the 54-book series, having "battle morphs" (Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), infiltration morphs (Ants, bats, fleas, etc.) and morphs to suit the occasion (Beavers to create a dam, moles to burrow underground, etc.) The whole plot isn't too complicated, with most of the books consisting of "The Yeerks have a new superweapon of the week! Go blow it up in an epic battle!" though according to Wikipedia (I was more of an "action book" fellow, so I didn't pay attention to this back then) it was also about the toll that the war and killing took on the individual children. There was a slew of psychological pain from killing, acceptable losses, ordering the murder of 17,000 sentient beings at one point toward the end, etc. The beginning and the ending were pretty cool, with perhaps twenty out of the fifty-four books being "corish" books in which important characters and events were introduced, with another thirty-four "oneshot" books that were essentially filler. They would probably have made a decent TV series had they A) Had a higher budget, B)Not tried to air it on Nickelodeon, and C)Not censored out a lot of the killing and such... And, on another level, D) had a lot of the special effects technology we have today... But this thread isn't about the Animorphs books so much as it is about everyone else's childhood memories. In retrospect those books really were a waste (I managed to force my parents to buy me some twenty of them, check out another fifteen or more from the local library, read two or three whilst at the bookstore, and buy one or two with money I found on the ground), but they were still fun, and they kept me reading.

Cute and fluffy critters- a must for photoshop! Nice, Jahled, I'd missed those two! On a side note: Rob's new avatar is looking at me suggestively, grinning, raising its eyebrows, and winking. I'm not that kinda guy, Rob. Tell your avatar to stop hitting on me, please. It could never work out between us.

I still say that the stuff with him as a kid is the only really scary stuff. It wound up being pretty much a gorefest in my opinion, anyway. It followed the basic horror movie outline: Psycho killer kills everyone that he can and then the virgin lives and kills him/her. Unless it's Stephen King. Then everybody is screwed in some way, shape, or form, and the people wind up killing each other.

Sounds rather interesting, Sinister. A bit like the Battle for Middle Earth games, but interesting all the same.

Er, not that I'm an editor of the game in any way, shape, or form, but I believe that there are ways to make the game more difficult- for instance, with RebED the build times and and maintenance costs and likelihood of building for different troops and ships and such, to the point where in a given amount of time they can build a fleet twice as powerful as your own.

With the original you could just hit "escape" and it would skip the briefing. It doesn't work that way with Reloaded?

Damn. I thought it looked hilarious, and I was really pushing my friends to go see it instead of Halloween.... Well that bites.

OOC: I’m updating again. I think this is probably a sign of the end of the world or something like that. Then again, I have pounds of homework that I should be working on over this weekend that’s undone, thus it really isn’t too out of character for me. The universe as a whole, at least, is probably going to be alright. IC: Karat Sal did not like the infidels who surrounded him at all. The feeling was mutual, that much was for sure, though the intensity and reasons for it were not. Sal sneered, stretching his scars and scabs as he did so; a thin trickle of blood from a recent sacrificial cut by his flat nose began to drip down along the natural curve of his face, rising over the individual scar bumps. The room he stood within was almost entirely made of yorik coral; one of the first locations to be worked upon by the shapers, it had been to test and ensure the survival of the coral on this area of the moon; after Ithor’s effects on the armor, it was seen as a necessary precaution. Karat Sal did not care for precautions or attempts to cheat death; had he been at Ithor, he would have fought not in dead armor as some chose to, but in only a warrior’s loincloth. Had he not known of the allergen, he would have died; that was the way of things, and he would have liked to die on this moon had the gods willed it. Blood- scarlet, argent, ebon, jade- coated the walls, dripped from the small bumps in them. The lambants situated in individual nooks and crannies were all at least partly obscured by the fluid, and so cast varied glows upon the room and the beings held within. Rather than using the Embrace of Pain, which drained the resource for other warriors, the Shapers were trying something new: using the living bodies as nutrients to be assimilated into the coral. So far it wasn’t taking very well with any of the species, though Karat Sal found it pleasing on an aesthetic level. It was almost symbolic of this war, the whimpering, crying creatures before him denying the Divine Right of the Yuuzhan Vong to this galaxy and bleeding as the Yuuzhan Vong assimilated only that which was necessary from them- in the case of the galaxy, the planets, and in the case of the yorik coral, the core elements and compounds of the bodies. Karat Sal advanced to one of the prisoners, a human female with short black hair, and touched her gently beneath her chin with his fingers, letting the long talon-like nails at the ends push the skin with almost enough force to break the skin there, to the point where only a fraction of an exertion on his part would start her bleeding. “Te-el ma, infadal, ees thees youar preshous bais sick?â€

China has, apparently, banned the Dalai Lama (sp?) from reincarnating in their native lands without permission. Pure stupidity at first glance, but now the Chinese officials can plant their own "official" religious leader and create a religious rift with those who are loyal to the next Dalai Lama. Link worked for me the first time and the second time... Edit: Duh. Probably should have realized that "This" did not mean "that" in Eagle's post.

Nice new picture, Jahled. I've posted so much of your work on Facebook, now, and this will likely not be an exception due to its greatness...

Relative of yours, E?