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I'm geekier

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Post by Casey Mon Mar 17, 2014 8:46 pm

So, who's geekier? Yes, I consider myself a geek. And I can prove it. Can you out-geek me? Here's my anecdote:


When I bought some Traveller products from the farfuture.net website (the company that owns the Traveller games), I corresponded directly with Marc Miller. Who's Marc Miller, you ask? Why, he's only the freaking person who INVENTED Traveller! Well, I signed as Captain Casey Duquette (my character's name is Eric's game, if you'll remember). And how did THE Marc Miller address me? Why, as Captain Duquette, of course!!!

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Post by Father Dugal Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:31 pm

That's pretty geeky.

And a tough act to follow, but I'll see what I can do. I consider myself such a geek, I have text conversations with my brother where we trade dialogue from movies we watched as kids so many times, they are still crawling around in the dark recesses of our minds. And when I say dialogue, I mean the entire movie. From start to finish as best we can remember.

Some of the movies we have covered so far include the following: The Sword in the Stone, The Last Starfighter, Looney Tunes, Star Wars Episode: IV, Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood, and other cartoons found on VHS tapes. We are currently working through The Empire Strikes Back and have reached the carbon freezing scene. Excelsior!
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Post by Casey Wed Mar 19, 2014 7:45 pm

Allright, Mr. Geek. I can't match your ability on that count. I used to be able to quote the entirety of Episode IV, but that was long ago.

Try this:

The last combat training I had a month ago was how to fight someone who "got the draw" on us, i.e. who was close to us and drew a weapon. The idea is to get close, try to get to the side of the attacker, and either control his weapon arm/hand or position ourselves so we could get out of his angle of attack, and then draw our weapon and shoot him to the ground.

The entire time I was trying to avoid thinking about it in GURPS terms. I failed. What the defense is is a Committed Attack (moving two hexes if necessary), a Grapple, and either a Fast Draw (Pistol) or Ready (Pistol), followed up by the Attack maneuver.

The ball is now is your court.
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Post by Father Dugal Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:01 pm

This moment of geekery is beyond my direct control, but it does give me nerdy shivers of delight when I think about it.

As you may or may not know, in 2016 NASA will be launching probe OSIRIS-REx on a mission to encounter and explore asteroid Bennu. What makes this mission unique is once finished, the probe will take off and return a sample canister back to Earth with the dust from the space rock.

As part of this mission, The Planetary Society (www.planetary.org) will be submitting a list of names that will be traveling with said probe on its mission to the asteroid. The name list will be on the surface of the asteroid for the 500 days. When the mission is completed in 2023, the probe will remain in space, but the sample canister will be returned to the Earth's surface. Both the canister and the probe will have the list of names.

And why is this list so darned special? Well, as it turns out, all present members of the Planetary Society are on the list, and as it so happens, I am a member of the society. So in a few years, my avatar name and I will be speeding off into the stars, which is fine by me since ink (or digital) names don't need much in the way of oxygen or food or something to stand on order to make life comfortable.

And what will happen to OSIRIS as it floats through space? Well, I imagine it will float around for a few hundred years before encountering the Klingons from Star Trek V. And then? Yep, it will be blown to bits by good old fashioned disrupter fire.  Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy Laughing 
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Post by Father Dugal Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:15 pm

I was going to post this video in another category, but the content of this video is geeky. If such a thing as Thor's hammer Mjolnor actually existed and if it were made of the stuff of a dead star (a neutron star) then friends you would have in your position the true instrument of Armageddon. Most of humanity would probably perish depending on what you did with it.

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Post by Casey Sat Mar 22, 2014 10:35 pm

I don't know who's geekier, you for posting that video, or me for having had the same scientific musings on an object that's so small yet so heavy not even the Hulk can lift it.

And as far as your name being carried into space, ok, that's actually kind of cool, and I'm a tiny bit jealous. I'm sure you'll escape V'Ger's fate though. Kirk will just find a half-crazed Godlike robot mind endlessly quoting forgotten British sitcoms and making tasteless puns. Wink

It might take me a bit to come up with something better than that.
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Post by Father Dugal Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:57 pm

Take your time. The act of being an ultra geek takes time like a good soup blending all the right ingredients in a slow boil.
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Post by Casey Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:33 pm

All right. Easy peasy. This one takes the cake. I DEFY you to come up with something geekier!!!

When I was a late teenager (still an adult though), I wore around town a F***KING CLOAK AND SWORD.

I kid you not. It happened. There are those in our group that knew me back then. I wore a cloak made by the mother of a friend of mine out of an old surplus wool blanket. And I carried around a shoddily-made (in India) Civil War era reproduction era saber. No, it made no sense. Yes, I was a loser. Yes, I might still be a loser, JUST because of that. I carried it where ever. The store. Eric's house. It made no difference.

One time I was walking home from my Dad's law office in Midvale to my home in Cottonwood Heights (hence the name of this forum). I was wearing the cloak, and wielded the sword. Walking from Midvale to Cottonwood Heights, you say, wearing a cloak and sword? Yes, it happened.

Anyway, a woman drove by. As she passed, she slowed, then stopped. She stuck her head out of the window. "Are you a Dragon Slayer?" she asked. "No," I said, and that was that. I have no idea, to this day, what she meant. I'm pretty sure it meant something though, at least to her, and that she wasn't making fun of the geek who was hanging out his loserness for all the world to see.

If I had a time machine what would I do? Witness the Creation? Converse with the greats of history? NO. I would go back in time and punch my loser cloak wearing, sword wielding self right in the face.
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Post by Father Dugal Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:17 pm

Wearing a cloak and sword as a teenager reeks of the geek we all love and cherish.

Say, look. There's a kid with a sword and cloak. Is he on his way to throw the ring of his ennui and angst into the fires of corporate indifference? One can only wonder as the boy becomes a man. Or in this case a policeman, which I suppose is similar with the only difference that the gun and cloak are traded in for a gun and legal enforcement powers.

Ah, the sins of geeky youth. I have a story to tell of my youth.

When I was five years of age, my parents bought me a few of those books that you could follow along with a cassette tape . Among the first of these, I received the Star Wars trilogy. I suppose the geek Gods called me early in life because I fell in love with these things. I listened to them time and again. Some times I listened to all three as a way of passing an afternoon. I read and listened to them so often that, after a time, I could recite them perfectly from memory. So to entertain my family on long road trips, I would begin with episode IV and go through the whole of the trilogy.

But wait. Knowing some kiddie books isn't all that impressive.

Well, here comes the geek rub. My memory, while not the best at times, can recall these stories from youth to where I could repeat them back verbatim (Some thirty years in the future) as clearly as I could back then. That, friends, is brand loyalty you can't buy with money.
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Post by Casey Fri Mar 28, 2014 7:50 pm

Alpha Centauri wrote:Say, look. There's a kid with a sword and cloak. Is he on his way to throw the ring of his ennui and angst into the fires of corporate indifference? One can only wonder as the boy becomes a man. Or in this case a policeman, which I suppose is similar with the only difference that the gun and cloak are traded in for a gun and legal enforcement powers.


There might be something to that. Fortunately, when I took the psych test to get my job, they did not do a complete psychological profile, merely a few questions (it was a 6 hour test followed up by a meeting with a psychologist). Had the true geek in me come out, who knows what the results might have been.
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Post by Casey Fri Mar 28, 2014 7:57 pm

Alpha Centauri wrote:That, friends, is brand loyalty you can't buy with money.

Agreed. Similar attempts could be made, but the effect would fall on its face. I would believe (without consulting Wikipedia) that the amount spent for the non-existent episodes I, II, and III equal that spent on the real episodes, but I don't believe for a minute that the new generation of children brought up with those movies has nearly the visceral, emotional attachment that we had to the originals when we were young that has kept with us as we have become adults [sic].


Although it has not kept with me as I have aged, at one time I knew where all the passages were in the Lord of the Rings. Give me a passage, and I could find it for you, and even visualize on the page where that passage was. It was likely some sort of eidetic memory (the real one, not the GURPS version). I have since lost that ability, as is common for adults who had that ability as a child.
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Post by Father Dugal Mon Mar 31, 2014 5:15 pm

Although it has not kept with me as I have aged, at one time I knew where all the passages were in the Lord of the Rings. Give me a passage, and I could find it for you, and even visualize on the page where that passage was. It was likely some sort of eidetic memory (the real one, not the GURPS version). I have since lost that ability, as is common for adults who had that ability as a child.

Yep, that is the price we pay as adults with access to a kaleidoscope of distractions for every day of our lives. I think that Sherlock Holmes said it best when asked about the secret of his genius. He simply replied that the mind is like an empty space that the majority of people fill up with all sorts of nonsense. The key to true genius, in his opinion, is to simply ignore the fluff and fill the mind with the important things like using deductive reasoning, playing a musical instrument, and being addicted to opium.
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Post by Father Dugal Mon Apr 28, 2014 9:46 pm

Time has passed and nothing more geeky has been said. Looks like we have a winner.
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Post by Casey Wed Apr 30, 2014 8:13 pm

You might take my silence as tacit defeat. You might be right....


Wink
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Post by Father Dugal Sun May 04, 2014 10:19 pm

Well, I did just defy everyone at last night's game by wearing a Star Trek shirt. That's fairly geeky. Not to mention a bit risky.  Very Happy Shocked Very Happy 
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Post by Casey Sun May 11, 2014 5:05 pm

To tell you the truth, Eric and I were arguing about who was geekier: you or him. He had obviously heard of the May the Fourth "holiday" before, and I doubted that you had, making him geekier. His stance was that you already had heard about it prior to him mentioning it to you, making for a rather ambiguous geek status.

So, who was right?
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Post by Father Dugal Mon May 12, 2014 11:14 pm

To tell you the truth, Eric and I were arguing about who was geekier: you or him. He had obviously heard of the May the Fourth "holiday" before, and I doubted that you had, making him geekier. His stance was that you already had heard about it prior to him mentioning it to you, making for a rather ambiguous geek status.

Much like International Talk Like a Pirate Day or March 4th, I've known of the infamous May the 4th for quite a few years now. I suppose that cements my geek status rather soundly.
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Post by Casey Tue May 13, 2014 7:43 pm

No it doesn't. Just because Billy the Kid defeated Luke Skywalker, it doesn't mean that he can outdo Attila the Hun.
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Post by Father Dugal Wed May 14, 2014 5:09 pm

No it doesn't. Just because Billy the Kid defeated Luke Skywalker, it doesn't mean that he can outdo Attila the Hun.

Oh. You got me there.
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Post by Father Dugal Thu Jun 05, 2014 11:05 pm

I am currently listening to Alexander Dumas's immortal classic The Three Musketeers. I am intrigued that this adventure serial written two centuries ago contains all the classic elements for an excellent role-playing campaign. Because of this fascination, I've taken to breaking down all of the elements of the story into role-playing terms. When the characters are described, I assign them attributes, skills, and disadvantages. As the battles are detailed, I can only think of the conflicts in terms of role-playing battles. The whole affair is a rather surreal experience to say the least. But it is a pleasant way to pass the afternoon.

Let's see what I've come up with so far.

D'artagnan probably has many of the classic cavalier disadvantages like impulsive, code of honor: gentlemen, always keeps his word, vow (kill the man from myung), moody, and fearless. (the disadvantage since he often goes into combat for the sake of the gentlemen's code.) In spite of these, he does have a high INT score and points in diplomacy along obvious points poured into DEX and sword skill.

Athos definitely has the alcoholic disadvantage (probably the 15 or 20 point version based on how much he puts away) along with Secret (formerly married to Milady de Winter).

Porthos has compulsive carousing, compulsive gambling, and probably gambling addiction. He also has a patron who is a 55-year old French duchess he woos for extra funds.

Aramis is most definitely lecherous, unfazeable, appearance (dandy), and he is watched by the Catholic church for a return to service.

All four of these men have the Cardinal Rochilieu as a 10 or 15 point enemy for the power and forces at his disposal.



Is this room getting warm or has someone turned up the geek thermostat?

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Post by Casey Mon Jun 09, 2014 2:10 pm

Does he have the Youth disadvantage? I haven't read the book in years (really great book BTW), but I seem to recall that he was quite young, and as a result people took him somewhat less seriously.
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Post by Father Dugal Mon Jun 09, 2014 11:14 pm

Does he have the Youth disadvantage? I haven't read the book in years (really great book BTW), but I seem to recall that he was quite young, and as a result people took him somewhat less seriously

Yes, I would say he does. Good call.

Athos also has compulsive gambling but at a lesser level than Porthos. I'd say maybe 5 points or so.
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Post by Casey Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:37 pm

Today Eric and I were discussing (in GURPS terms, obviously), his current medical situation. His conclusion: The original surgeon got a critical failure on his Diagnosis roll to properly assess Eric's pre-operative condition, and Eric then failed his post-op health roll to fight against the infection.
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Post by Father Dugal Wed Jun 11, 2014 9:16 pm

Today Eric and I were discussing (in GURPS terms, obviously), his current medical situation. His conclusion: The original surgeon got a critical failure on his Diagnosis roll to properly assess Eric's pre-operative condition, and Eric then failed his post-op health roll to fight against the infection.

That's sad to hear. If Eric were a denizen of Middle-Earth in your old game, he would be dead. Then he would be blown to smithereens by a black troll and his rather large bow.
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Post by Casey Thu Jun 12, 2014 8:47 pm

Well, if Eric were a character in that game, he would be dead because Alex is playing him....
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