Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - OOC Chat (Archive)

now now...I believe our handy-dandy new hacker buddy disabled that sat platform

(at least that's how I choose to recall what happened, anyway)

so no dropping more Thors on Spawn's insectile head

Hey, you get what you ask for... Right?

Kesslan's response is perfectly appropriate: He just wants to test your anti-missile defense capacity with your shiney-new 16mm hand-cannon. If you're not up to the task... Well... You should take that up with the surgeon, and the manufacturer. But we won't really know until after the Thor hits, right?

You know, instead of a new hand, you could try to learn the magic hand spell. And everything oves as if by magic. Well, not as if... but by magic. Ah well, imagine how awesome that would look. Grabbing stuff with an invisible hand.

Hey, I think you're on to something there, Darkon. It would look like one of those Jedi Force powers.

Oh Ga-La! Did you ever get any info from Ou on Force-like spells, powers, etc?

No, not yet. But I have designed a concept character who works on this sort of thing: I did a Magician Paraplegic who moves around with a permanent Levitate spell, and uses 2 permanent Magic Hand spells to manipulate things (of course: Permanent=Sustaining Focus). It was a really cool character, but I haven't play-tested it yet.


[EDIT] With that in mind: there are some really cool things being done with Cloning and Gene Therapy which can effectively make it so that you've regenerated your hand entirely (in 2072, of course). You can clone your hand, grow an new one and reattach it. Then, once that's done, you can get some Gene Therapy to make it so that your aura accepts the hand as it did the original. I'll try to find the books/pages, but it's possible to entirely replace it, literally "as good as new". That said: it would be unsurprising if a 'Runner wasn't up on the Med-Tech enough to know that. So Spawn can continue to seeth with hatred for the slight to his aura for some time now. The Doc, however, would be aware of this as an option.

Definitely sounds interesting. I toyed with a Psionic tradition character who's spells and the way they would have manifested would have closely resembled a Jedi, but he unfortunately never saw any action. And I lost him in Crash 2.0


I like the concept, so I will probably rebuild him at some point.

Meanwhile, me old bucko Spawn will be fitted with a fairly typical cyberhand for now...or whenever he manages to get to a doc. But I have plans for something a bit more exotic later on.

There's defeinitely something to be said for a snap-blade with injection capability... You can do some fairly impressive things with a payload of some of the poisons on the market; not to mention Narcojet - ye-olde-standby...

Oh yes! In fact I had another char drafted up who was a stealthy infiltrator. He had air pistols loaded with injection darts carrying narcoject and one or two other toxins. The basic concept was an infiltrator who was opposed to killing. Hmmm...

I think once a cybernetic replacement is in position, essence loss is permanent. Though a cloned hand should save the essens, or not? If it is done directly to the stump I mean. The stump itself could even stay for a while, so the hand can be grown.

Yeah, thanks Darkon! Kesslan and I covered that already. I have opted for an obvious cyberhand for now, in order to expediate game continuation.

But later...who knows?

At present cloned organs/limbs cause no essence loss and cybernetics and bioaugs etc do. By the same token however you can return essence to normal using special surgery as well but it does NOT return lost magic points due to lost essence. It also doesn't restore essence lost due to various essence drain powers.

I still like the obvious cyberhand. Spawn sees himself as an outcast from metahumanity and the 'metal fist' will reinforce that self-induced belief. His reunion with his old teammates, who were the closest thing he'd ever had to friends or a family, coupled with his relationship with the newly (or soon to be) orphaned god-daughter Rebecca, will force Spawn to face a world he had left behind years ago.

Really? Only 157 Spade contacts? I wouldn't have been surprised to see another 0 on the end of that; or two.

Well that's just in the Seattle area :p

Kesslan wrote:

Well that's just in the Seattle area :p

Google yields: "About 3,830,000 results (0.25 seconds)"

For "Spade Seattle"

Anyway, sorry for not posting yesterday guys- Work got busy and I ended up grabbing a nap last night that...turned into sleeping until the morning.

I'll probably throw up a post later this afternoon after I make some progress on this Firewall course.

Actually, you did an open search, without the Quotation Marks. If you search on "Spade Seattle" with a closed search, you get 9,450 results - but it's non useful data, because it also requires that the words appear in that exact order. If, however, you go in to Advanced Search, and enter "Spade" and "Seattle" in the "Search all these words" line, you will return 3,450,000. Which is the search option you would want to use, if 3.45MM results was a useful data point...
And: it reduces the possible output by 400K! That's important (although, barely over 1%...)!

Open search will search both words seperately. Closed search, however, requires that they both exist, together, in the search results. And finally: using the "Search all these words" option will return all sites with a mention of BOTH words, but in any order on that site.



Kesslan, however, is assuming that the 'Trix has the capacity somehow to reduce the search results to "Unique People Contacts Only" somehow... which is perfectly reasonable. But I would still assume that there would be quite a bit more than 157!

No I'm assuming The Exchange is searching it's own database and eliminating all but the most likely results. Also google tends to pop up multiple hits for the same or very similar pages and does not actually break it down most of the time. It also tends to net a lot of hits on totally unrelated sites that just happen to list the keyword(s) in question somewhere or other.

EDIT: Just thought I'd throw up a disclaimer in case anyone that comes across this post thinks it's a real 'hacking' tip. So-called "Google Hacking" is well known in IT Security and there are a plethora of books and tutorials out there about. We did many such 'Google hacking' searches as IT Security exercises in college.

Gala wrote:

Actually, you did an open search, without the Quotation Marks. If you search on "Spade Seattle" with a closed search, you get 9,450 results - but it's non useful data, because it also requires that the words appear in that exact order. If, however, you go in to Advanced Search, and enter "Spade" and "Seattle" in the "Search all these words" line, you will return 3,450,000. Which is the search option you would want to use, if 3.45MM results was a useful data point...

A closed search would return hits that only contained the literal phrase "Spade Seattle" (space included), I believe.

The post was just a tongue in cheek jab at Kesslan to pull his leg

If I was actually trying to look for Spades in Seattle I could have gone with a phrase like "Seattle + Spade" (minus the quotation marks) to get results that contained both words, however, Google automatically places the + symbol in when you're doing a search for multiple words.

Alternatively I could have used the 'lastname:' and "location:" modifiers. I.e, "lastname: Spade location: Seattle" (which turns up people like Dean Spade and Jeannie Spade who actually live in Seattle. Their Phonebook modifier has been discontinued due to complaints- it used to be you could access white pages for the U.S. My American Stepmother was the only one in her city listed on Google. What's worse? It'd provide directions straight to her front door with Google Maps

Gala wrote:

And: it reduces the possible output by 400K! That's important (although, barely over 1%...)!

Google only actually returns the first 1,000 hits, if I recall correctly, regardless of how many hits it obtains (be it 1,001 or 100,000,000)

Still, when you can find people's passwords by searching for Excel Files that contain passwords... or websites that are vulnerable to specific exploits, 1,000 results can be too precise.

(E.g, search for something like filetype: .xls "login: *" will look for Excel files that contain any usernames (and possibly passwords) - which is what the wild card * is)

And...that's your daily 'hacking' tip I suppose?

Wow Jagger: Nice response! Out of curiosity: when you say "Open Team Channel" does that mean that Sha'hGrim heard you? Because as far as I know, she hasn't dialed in to an Open channel, nor accepted one. And no one has responded to her questions to Darkon yet either. Remember: the following are Sha'hGrim's contributions to the closed-team-channel (which everyone is dialied in to except Sidney). These are things that Spawn would have heard (if he was paying attention).

Gala wrote:

"Just keep me in the loop, ok? I don't want my Spirit to be holding someone who's innocent for any longer than is absolutely necessary." Sha'hGrim added.

And then later:

Gala wrote:

"The only reason I stopped the Truck was because I don't know this guy, and that's our loot... But if you know him, and he's going to the right place, then what's the big deal?" Sha'hGrim followed-up, trying to keep her fogged mind on the point. She didn't bother to reach out to the Spirit yet, as she didn't have any useful updates yet.
"Also: how are you speaking with him?" She asked finally, bringing her original questions full-circle.

So, while the RP is entirely appropriate, this whole situation came about because Sha'hGrim was out of the loop (because she was too dazed to notice the Exchange App). And she still is... Pattern, anyone? She actually asked "how you guys are communicating with him?". If I was any more explicit here, Kesslan would be within his rights to penalize me for metagaming!

Thanks Gala! I figured there was no need for Spawn to 'step in' between Sha'hgrim, Darkon, and Sidney. In fact, I truly am interested in how Sid 'smart-mouths' his way out of the 'cookpot' he's jumped into.


I was attempting to include the whole team to hear Spawn's response to Sidney. If Sidney hacked Alexi's comm then he would be able to listen in. When I said 'open channel' I meant the team channel. Poor wording, perhaps, but the gist, I thought, would be self-evident.
I will edit that line to avoid further confusion.


Ok, I omitted 'Open' and added a line stating that Spawn knew Sidney was monitoring the team channel. That should clear up any misunderstandings.

Ok but how does Spawn know that Sid is monitoring Alexia's comlink exactly?

Kesslan wrote:

Ok but how does Spawn know that Sid is monitoring Alexia's comlink exactly?

That's assuming Sid is monitoring the Commlink, of course. I've had Sid 'forget' to follow the Commlink in the meantime, as Alexia might very well have disconnected it once he started to talk to her.

If she didn't though, would Sid be able to follow all their conversations?

This is starting to look like a bad soap opera.

Janice is in love with Mark.
Mark is married to Suzie.
Suzie is having an affair with Jack.
Jack is dating Erin, but wants to be dating Janice.
But Erin is really in love with James.
But James is Janice's doctor.
And Erin is Janice's sorority sister, and roommate.
And to top it all off, Mark and James are both in-the-closet lovers.

So, ah, the only logical solution is to set off a Thor Round in the middle of the small town of SoapOperaVille. During Business Hours, just to make sure that everyone is right there in the Target Area.

So what your saying is I should just do a TPK and start over again?

Well, that is one way to respond, I suppose. If you're an evil GM with blood-'n-guts on your mind. The alternate, and perhaps more obvious response might be something like this:

"You know, Gala, I think you missed the more obvious conclusion: That Jack and Janice should just get together. Then everything else will unravel, as it should."

And had that been your response, I might, sarcastically, stated: "My, that is a supremely reasonable solution... I wonder how that might be applied to this current in-game situation...?"