The Old Hack

Indeed, the entire point of the original employment of the term. I am sure the irony completely escapes the right wingers.

On the other hand it is fairly easy to set them off. In England during WW2 some genius had the idea to issue carrot rations to their night fighter pilots, claiming it improved their night vision. This was to distract possible spies from looking into the top secret radar mounted in night fighter planes. This worked so well that to this day there are parents giving their children carrots in the belief that it will improve their vision.

If they had met at a Starbucks it would have been a tall latte.

The CompSci Department in the University of Copenhagen still uses a PDP-9 for protection of their main server. Admittedly they use it to block a window previously employed as an access route for hardware thieves, but it still counts.

Ron de Santis has just outlawed all discussion of the weather on account of this being a potentially woke activity. All posters are requested to not show this thread to citizens of Florida as this might implicate them and possibly get them subjected to the death sentence.

I have to admit that if I were a dictator about to fight a civil war, I'd probably just hire my own mercenary group to fight itself. Winning side gets to be the new Praetorian Guard on the condition that whenever they depose a dictator, they themselves get to clean up the mess left behind. That sort of civil war would be a lot less bloody and destructive, and I bet it wouldn't even exact all that many casualties. If I remember my Italian history correct, if you set mercenaries to fight other mercenaries they typically settle it by either boasting, a war of maneuvers, a drinking contest or a best of three in rocks-paper-scissors.

I still fucking love that when Putin declared that Ukraine was not a country, the Ukrainians responded by withdrawing Volodymyr the Great's charter for the founding of Moscow, revoking its right to exist as a city.

https://www.egscomics.com/egsnp/wie-151 Looks like the storyline is finally getting axed.

That is so last administration. Today the focus is rightly placed on the US Military Mummy Uprising Plan.

Oh, that explains the fart jokes on the Rosetta Stone. Thank you.

And once it got answered, people wished it hadn't been.

In this particular case I feel it somewhat compensates for the slowdown that the explanation is actually funny.

Thirded. I will say this, mind you. I feel George is the master of dicking around without actually being a dick.

Big talk from the literal Pharaoh of bad Egyptian jokes.

Errr, to clarify, I was not disagreeing about the math being during design phases but about it being heavy. I feel very early Traveler tended to rely on the more accessible forms of math and rarely went above grade school level. At least I never had much trouble with it and I am hardly a math genius.

I don't think anyone could ever be ready for it without actually having experienced it. I remember playing in groups that would literally spend a whole week covering a dungeon inch by inch to make sure they had not missed something valuable, often smashing every single altar, chest or piece of furniture in the process and sorting through the splinters afterwards. (This practice did taper off somewhat after a DM I knew had had enough of it and the players found they had just smashed an invaluable set of crystal carafes as well as spilled several quarts of extremely powerful potions on the floor. He was nice enough to let the players find a single Potion of Longevity and one surviving crystal decanter worth 1000 gold, leaving them to wonder at the value of the remaining set now lying in a pile of fragmented remains strewn all over the flagstones.) Of course, at least this time Ellen might be spared the trauma of watching an entire party erupt into murderous infighting over a ring they had just found. Some people do not manage their greed very well. Especially not if they allow their resentment to gradually build over time. (The ring was not even magical, but I don't think it mattered to the involved players. At that point it was the principle of the thing.)

I am not sure I agree. I played original Traveller as a teen, and while it did employ a good deal of math I would not call it math _heavy_. At the time my math was mostly grade school level and I had no trouble. This... sounds like it is way past that level. Of course 'heavy' is relative and others might disagree. YMMV. But at least back then I did not consider the required math burdensome.

Nah, this was while he was POTUS. So he just told the Marines and Secret Service to show them the door, or exit, or whatever.

Plenty of it. This is a well documented condition. Around a hundred thousand children with deformed spines were born in Vietnam post introduction of Agent Orange to the war. Not to mention countless stillborn ones. Unfortunately court action is expensive and a class action suit is difficult to form when more than 99% of those born with Agent Orange-caused prenatal damage are no longer among us. My wife knows a few surviving Vietnam veterans. Every single one of them utterly despises the draft dodging traitor that spent four years squatting in the Oval Office. Possibly it was not his most tactful idea ever to order disabled veterans to leave ceremonies he attended because he didn't like to look at them.

It's his party, and he'll axe it if he wants to.

I do not object to math heavy games, at least not their existence. But I feel no urge to play them.

I would like to thank you on behalf of my wife, whose father went to Vietnam only to suffer from Agent Orange poisoning. He too only served as a convenient scapegoat upon his return home. My wife was born paraplegic due to her father's Agent Orange poisoning, a casualty of war before she was born. The Republican Party, of course, just pushed through cuts to her medical support using the reasoning that as a family member she is not a 'real' veteran. I am certain that veterans will feel heartened by the support of having their families hung out to dry should they suffer injuries during their service and be unable to support them themselves.

Some of them got five draft deferments and called the people who went to fight 'stupid.' I cannot understand how Republicans could support this cretin and still claim to be 'supporting the troops.'

I think drones would be better. Gentler on the recipient and more likely to arrive with the pizza still in a state to eat.

https://www.egscomics.com/egsnp/wie-146 This is not going to end well for the bad guy. For some reason I am reminded of one D&D game I played in which featured the dreaded Dire Chicken as a typical opponent. They looked like normal chickens but acted like velociraptors in a bad mood. And fought about that hard, too.