The Old Hack

The Moderator: I'm sorry. Unless the admins can somehow change that, you guys are stuck with me.

I'd like to know where you got it, too. I'm sure my wife's cat Saki would love it. (Saki is a determined little thing! At one point I bought her some cat treats called Greenies. She loved them so much that when my wife's attention was elsewhere, she managed to claw her way through a fairly solid carrier bag, a protective wrapper and the Greenies bag itself to get more of them. My wife returned to find Saki happily munching Greenies to her heart's content.)

I've noticed that some people have the filter but are subject to having it drop temporarily out of action. A good example would be a Foglio Spark in the height of a Spark fugue state or possibly Doc and Roger from The Whiteboard in the rapture of invention. (Come to think of it, these two examples seem all but identical.) Of course, a great many people are subject to bypassing the filter altogether in times of crisis. If you only have about a second or less in which to respond to a situation, you often act on the first impulse that pops into your head. In that case the only way to block impulse that I know of is to have previously trained for that kind of situation. Example: getting shot at. An ordinary person might freeze, drop or run but would probably not stand still while debating options. A trained soldier might reflexively roll for cover and return fire. (This happened to me in the Home Guard. I was in a patrol unit in which we among other things had to learn how to do basic fighting in the woods. At one point the sergeant walked us through a course in which he explained various sorts of scenarios. As we went past a clump of trees, he told us, "Imagine that there's a lone enemy hiding in there opening fire on you. If that happens, all of you charge him, then one of you might get him. If you just drop where you are now, you'll be pinned down and he'll be able to pick you off at his leisure." That very same night we got sent out on an exercise patrol where that exact scenario happened. The instructors even had it happen in the precise spot we'd received the lesson. I didn't even think, I just charged right at the shooter and when I reached him I told him he had been bayoneted to death. Then I turned around and saw that ALL THE OTHERS had just dropped where they stood. I was very glad this was not real war, if it had been, the shooter would have shot me first and then done just as the sergeant said, picked the rest off at his leisure. The entire tactic was obviously based on him being swarmed and one of us getting him but somehow a one-man swarm strikes me as less likely to succeed in swamping an enemy...)

I hope you are right. I doubt it will be easy, however. And I suspect that Mr. Verres will require someone who isn't Tedd to talk sense into him.

Or they could introduce the new George Foreman combination tablet and grill!

In a way I find this sad. Tedd's reason for keeping personal matters from his father is to avoid the pain of his father's inevitable transphobic backlash. Mr. Verres might not understand why Tedd is starting to distance himself but I am certain it is nonetheless both concerning and painful for him as well.

Eh. I don't think it matters whether she has an extra strong version of the disadvantage or if she just by default forgoes the roll. Either way the result is the same: with her, thought equals action.

You normally get a roll to avoid acting on impulse. Catalina's version doesn't allow for the roll.

Ah. That does help. You could call this a simplified chain of command, really.

Possibly in Catalina's case, the correct definition is that thought equals action. She thinks fast, then without further ado puts her thoughts into action.

Ouch. Still, better that they have been found now rather than they get left alone to worsen still further.

For what it is worth, I live in Europe and I have an iPhone. And an iPad. I love the silly things. Admittedly I saved up a while to have the money to throw at them. Good job. You have managed to send my mind into that eerie place where I am now wondering about supervisors whose job is to supervise other supervisors as they supervise lower ranking supervisors on duty observing still lower ranking supervisors, and whether those first supervisors then go report to their supervisors who then in turn have supervisors they have to keep satisfied, on and on, ad infinitum ad nauseam, worlds without end...

About time. There is only so much you can do with midjinks.

That seems reasonable enough. If you don't insist on hugely awesome effects, you can do some surprisingly neat stuff these days. People like the Nostalgia Critic and many of the reviewers on his site are hardly ILM but they still do some quite funny and satisfying effects at times.

This reminds me of the time a friend of mine was working at Carlsberg, one of Denmark's biggest breweries. He was supposed to install a system-wide update to Excel. However, the genius that had set up the original installation program on the server had set its defaults to 'Uninstall' and 'All Computers.' My friend hit the return key just one time too many and suddenly the server started to remove Excel from all of Carlsberg's then 1000 office computers. He managed to stop it when it had 'only' removed it from about a hundred computers. Still, this was not good. It required a lot of toil and swearing (possibly the swearing wasn't required, but my friend did it anyway) to undo the damage done.

He is always concerned about Tedd and naturally suspicious. He might not be really suspicious, though, just worried.

At least it had staying swearing power.

Digital effects are cheap. Good digital effects are still expensive. There is a great deal of difference between the kind of CGI that looks like animated plastic and the kind where they've worked in colour variations, correct light and shadow effects and so forth. T-1000 in Terminator 2 was an example of the latter; Gollum in LotR was a masterpiece. The dinosaurs in the later Jurassic Park movies... maybe not so much. In fact, some of them looked like moving plastic figures. All that meaning that it still costs time, effort and money to produce a really good product. But if you can make do with cheap trashy effects, you're good to go... at nearly the same horrible low quality level of old. (Mind you, plus points to Ed Wood for having poor Bela Lugosi smack himself with rubber tentacles wrapped around him because the machine that was supposed to move them had broken down!)

A 'necessary stupidity' is as good a definition I have ever heard of a category of precondition common in history. History is positively littered with bad decisions that nonetheless led to advantageous outcomes. For example, Columbus was not the only one to make the (correct) assumption that the Earth was round. However, the others considered his idea to sail around the Earth to reach India unworkable; they'd done the math and realised that the distance from Europe to Asia by sailing west actually exceeded the distance imposed by the trip around Cape Horn. That Columbus just happened to bump into a new and entirely unknown land mass full of resources to exploit, loot and plunder was just one of these trivial facts that the simple math couldn't predict.

IBM made lots of genius decisions like that. At one point two oddballs came to them with a device they had cobbled together in their garage. It could photographically replicate pages of documents at a rather impressive speed. They got told that IBM could not see any possible application for such a device in any modern office. The two guys shrugged, ambled off and formed a company named Xerox.

There was a funny error in FASA's old Star Trek roleplaying game. The Klingon Agonizer was described as 'a torture device, attached to the shoulder directly above the ear.' I don't think even Klingons had quite that odd an anatomy.

Amongst other things this resulted in the truly horrendous episode 'Shades of Gray.' I cringe just remembering it.

Congratulations. I love it when a new computer is up and running to my satisfaction. Hope the growing pains will soon end!

He did fix the problem in the end. I can't remember if he used Norton or not. I do remember his priceless expression when he realised he had lost everything on the disk except the program that had caused the problem. He felt that was adding insult to injury.

So, in spite of its acronym being FAT, it actually was a very slim program? (This reminds me of something that a compsci major friend of mine once experienced. He was experimenting with code that could modify the FAT of a floppy disk, which he knew was risky but intended to be careful with. Unfortunately for my friend, he confused one floppy for another and tested the program on the wrong disk. This disk held about a dozen programs he had coded himself for use in his classes, about a week's worth of effort. When he discovered his mistake, he checked the disk in horror and found that he could only see one program on it -- the program he had written to mess with the FAT. The rest of the programs were still there but could no longer be accessed due to the FAT having been modified...)