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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Things That Make You Happy

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At work, we have an aviary which for many years had a colony of Lady Gould's Finches, a very colorful species best known for being pictured on a certain brand of computer monitors.  Eventually, we reached a point where the remaining birds were too old to have any more babies, and their numbers have been shrinking, until we got down to two elderly birds, who the boss has now taken home for their retirement.  She had been talking about taking out the aviary and having a fish tank or something boring like that instead.

Well, she's finally decided to get more birds, and after redecorating the aviary with colorful stained-glass style clings on the windows, we now have a very pretty new pair of Lady Gould's, as well as a pair of Society finches.  The male Society started singing within a couple of hours of being introduced to the aviary, and they all four seem to be getting along well.  I hadn't realized how much I missed hearing cheerful music just outside the door next to my desk!

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:

Other things that make me happy.  The speed of the Spam removal services here.

Squints at ToH -- Denmark huh.  Where the "Bloody Vikings" come from?  You ate the spam didn't you?

I should in fairness add that I am not the only active mod on the boards and that killing a spammer and all its posts only takes one click. It actually takes longer to close the active reports afterwards, not that this is really that big a problem. But I must needs share credit with the admins and other mods.

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"The Grand Tour" cast and crew used the same bed and breakfast I did on Loch Ness, the "Old Pier House".  This is sort of like how I felt when I saw Anthony Bourdain hanging out at the same sea side cafe as I did in Chania Crete.   There is something about "I was there first" that makes me happy.

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We had a murder mystery dinner thing for our office Christmas party tonight, and while I didn't get the killer right (no one did), I apparently did the best job at summarizing almost all of the clues, because I was declared the grand prize winner!  This entailed receiving a little gift bag with a mug, an Alfred Hitchcock DVD, and a gift card for a free attendance at a future murder mystery dinner.  :-)

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1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

We had a murder mystery dinner thing for our office Christmas party tonight

I've been to two of those.  Had to sit one out because I owned the kit it was based on.  I had bought it to make a "realistic" murder mystery in a D&D game.  The hosts gave me what amounted to the same as first prize for telling them as soon as I knew what was up.  I got to "play" one of the drunks at the bar.  The refined one who drank German white wine, of course.  Not actually in the script, I just stayed at the bar and killed off two and a half bottles wine.

Total failure in the other one.  Based on my years of experience being a DM and game designer, it was a home brew with nothing like internal consistency, but I could be wrong, I don't know that much about the Canadian gold rush era.

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50 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I've been to two of those.  Had to sit one out because I owned the kit it was based on.  I had bought it to make a "realistic" murder mystery in a D&D game.  The hosts gave me what amounted to the same as first prize for telling them as soon as I knew what was up.  I got to "play" one of the drunks at the bar.  The refined one who drank German white wine, of course.  Not actually in the script, I just stayed at the bar and killed off two and a half bottles wine.

Total failure in the other one.  Based on my years of experience being a DM and game designer, it was a home brew with nothing like internal consistency, but I could be wrong, I don't know that much about the Canadian gold rush era.

My players have learned to be very suspicious of me whenever I announce 'death from natural causes' or 'suicide' in any game I run. This may have to do with it invariably being the case of some NPC they needed something from and where, at closer look, something seemed fishy.

For example, there was the case of a sage they needed information from. They were informed that he had fallen unexpectedly ill and then died. When they looked at the corpse, they found that he had died from decapitation. One player suggested that maybe his fever climbed and climbed until his head fell off, but the others did not buy this.

Then there was the guy who had knowledge pertinent to an inheritance case. He apparently suicided just before the players arrived. The players had some trouble working out just how one might suicide by stabbing oneself repeatedly in the back. It was suggested that he had hammered lots of knives through a board and then ran backwards into it but this theory too was dismissed.

Then there was the nobleman who died in a hunting accident. Said accident turned out to be that someone had put him in a trebuchet and launched him into a nearby chasm. That one they did not even bother to discuss.

Honorable mention goes to the earl that died from a stroke. It was an unusually severe stroke that not only crushed the back of his skull but also most of his neck and his left shoulder.

I really can't understand why but in the games I run my players no longer trust me whenever I tell them that a death is so open and shut that it does not rate investigation.

 

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54 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

My players have learned to be very suspicious of me whenever I announce 'death from natural causes' or 'suicide' in any game I run.

I really can't understand why but in the games I run my players no longer trust me whenever I tell them that a death is so open and shut that it does not rate investigation.

 

At one time I had a "life events" set of tables that I ran against all the major and a lot of the minor NPC in the game (plus cities etc).  The players went nuts when the big bad died from a hunting accident.  Spent 3 months game time (about 3 full sessions) trying to find the "bigger bad".  To this day, some of the players from that campaign will mutter, "the giant boar, in the forest, with the tusks" when a "strange" death happens.

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29 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Yes, how DARE the Big Bad die before any of his enemies have had the chance to kill him!

That statement, more or less, was used by several players when they found out he was dead.

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I did a murder mystery game years ago where everyone was assigned a character to play ( I think this was before the term LARP was in use, or at least common use), and my assigned character was a gypsy jewel thief.  I decided she was a cross between Jenny Calendar on Buffy and Amanda on Highlander (which probably dates the game pretty well, come to think of it.

My character was supposed to steal a set of jewels from a safe.  I had the safe open when another character caught me red-handed....so I screamed, stepping back from the safe as I did so, and as soon as others came to see what had happened, I loudly declared that I had caught him stealing the jewels.  He was startled and thus a bit flustered, and his hesitation in making his own claim only helped convince the others that I was the one telling the truth.  :-)

My sister told me about a LARP she was in where a friend told her that if he didn't like the character he was assigned, early on in the game he would be heard to say, "Oh, boy....." and he'd spend the rest of the game talking to an invisible hologram.  I rather like that tactic, especially if you're in a group likely to have lots of other Quantum Leap fans.

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18 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

I'm pretty sure the Keeper never brought up this anecdote before.
Perhaps you leaped back from a future conversation?

That, or I could have told it in the chat room.  (Note the link up at the top of the page :-)

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7 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

That, or I could have told it in the chat room.  (Note the link up at the top of the page :-)

Go easy on the Pharaoh. He is more used to the kind of chat room you find in the Khufu pyramid. Those that we more commonly call tombs.

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3 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Go easy on the Pharaoh. He is more used to the kind of chat room you find in the Khufu pyramid. Those that we more commonly call tombs.

The term "chat room" actually comes from French archeologists who discovered some of the tombs bearing a large number of cat hieroglyphs. [citation needed]

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1 hour ago, Scotty said:

The term "chat room" actually comes from French archeologists who discovered some of the tombs bearing a large number of cat hieroglyphs. [citation needed]

If I remember correctly, that was actually the origin of the English Phrase "Cat House".

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23 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

If I remember correctly, that was actually the origin of the English Phrase "Cat House".

Your people did have a rather strong attachment to cats. I always did wonder how you managed to avoid feuding between the cats and the crocodiles.

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1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

Your people did have a rather strong attachment to cats. I always did wonder how you managed to avoid feuding between the cats and the crocodiles.

There is a cliché that cats hate water.  That is not entirely accurate.  Most modern felines just respect the treaties their ancestors negotiated with the crocodilians.

Note that those ancient treaties may no longer be enforceable.  Plus more than a few kitties now realize that crocs do not inhabit every available body of water.  And just to complicate matters, the tigers seem to take to water with exuberance.  Almost as if they were directly challenging the crocs to do something about their presence at the water's edge.

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2 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Note that those ancient treaties may no longer be enforceable.  Plus more than a few kitties now realize that crocs do not inhabit every available body of water.  And just to complicate matters, the tigers seem to take to water with exuberance.  Almost as if they were directly challenging the crocs to do something about their presence at the water's edge.

There is this about a tiger. When an eight hundred pounds heavy predator known for its strength, speed and ferocity decides to take a bath, even the most conscientious protesters normally decide to keep themselves, their signs and their sandwich boards at a distance sufficient so as to not actually bother the predator in question. It is perhaps fortunate that tigers do not generally feel an inclination to avail themselves of the services of Planned Parenthood.

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19 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

There is this about a tiger. When an eight hundred pounds heavy predator known for its strength, speed and ferocity decides to take a bath, even the most conscientious protesters normally decide to keep themselves, their signs and their sandwich boards at a distance sufficient so as to not actually bother the predator in question.

Prudence is the better part of valor sanity.

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