Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Xantalos]

Ah well, it'll be cool anyway.

[piecewise]

And now for something completely different!

http://stan9fromouterspace.bandcamp.com/

That something you did or just a coincidental name?

[Corsair]

I dunno if I'll be able to keep the xan art.

I basically just used a bunch of random character images I found to make your head shots.

Oh well.

You making an ER-RPG?

[Xantalos]

Musings about Jim's character - he seemed to me to be a fairly average guy with (by first world standards) fairly standard morals. The only reason he's exalted as this big Captain America-like figure is that by comparison to almost everyone else in the HMRC he was a saint. He was totally willing to murder a random dude if he was annoying him, do the Mesk spine breaker thing, didn't really care all that much about Grate (leaving aside the DBZ-like conclusion to that particular fight), etc, but he was also pretty willing to make friends like he did with Lyra and everyone else he was friends with.

Basically an average dude who purely by virtue of not being an absolute monster gets portrayed as some guardian angel-type deal.

[Comrade P.]

Spoiler: So there's this gif (click to show/hide)

That is how I imagine players opening that booby-trapped door in M19 looked like.

[Pancaek]

-pressed post by accident, under construction-

Ok, so here's something everyone can do for me. The following characters are in the game:

Pancaek

Those players that are still around controlling those characters, give me a few sentences about their general character, how they act, how they respond to pressure, what their desires are, etc. Basic character info.

Those whose controllers aren't around, the rest of you can give me an impression of their character.

I'm assuming this is post-squishy human Pan? Robobody or synthflesh doesn't really matter. If he's still squishy human, the only thing that changes is that he gets increasingly fed up with bleeding out and becomes more transhumanist by the day. The flesh is weak.

 Well, for starters, deep down he's weary of everything exo/space magic, but he cannot help himself getting attracted to it and thinking it's the most awesome thing since sliced bread. And he was really hyped for sliced bread. He has little regard for the lives and emotions of people he doesn't know well. That being said, he tries not to say that to their face. He's got quite a few people he dislikes, but he keeps it to himself because he doesn't really want a confrontation. Because, above all else, he's a lazy bastard who doesn't like doing hard work. He also dislikes lasers, because all they don't have the dramatic effects of conventional weaponry. His bestest pal is Miyamoto, followed by Stacy, Lars, Flint and Maurice. He regards the Armoury master as an example to strive for when it comes to amps.

That about what you wanted?

[piecewise]

I dunno if I'll be able to keep the xan art.

I basically just used a bunch of random character images I found to make your head shots.

Oh well.

You making an ER-RPG?

Yep.


Remind me never to use this many characters again. Doing interacharacter dialog when you have 8 characters and only 4 will show up is a headache.

[Toaster]

And now for something completely different!

http://stan9fromouterspace.bandcamp.com/

That something you did or just a coincidental name?

Nope; just found it on the internets.  I claim no responsibility.

[Radio Controlled]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think I saw PW hanging around in the students' bar earlier.

By that I mean there is a Halloween skeleton on one of the walls in the students' bar.

No, I wasn't drinking in the students' bar at 10AM. I passed by on the way to the students' coffee shop to get some tea.



Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think veins have muscular walls...

They do have some smooth muscle far as I know.

In general, veins function to return deoxygenated blood to the heart, and are essentially tubes that collapse when their lumens are not filled with blood. The thick outermost layer of a vein is made of connective tissue, called tunica adventitia or tunica externa. There is a middle layer bands of smooth muscle called tunica media, which are, in general, thin, as veins do not function primarily in a contractile manner.
...
Neurogenic and hypovolaemic shock can also cause fainting. In these cases, the smooth muscles surrounding the veins become slack and the veins fill with the majority of the blood in the body, keeping blood away from the brain and causing unconsciousness. Jet pilots wear pressurized suits to help maintain their venous return and blood pressure.

so they do, and it has a function (and can go wrong in certain circumstances).

Listen, I know it serves a purpose with the whole slower, longer contractions but I'm sure you could just do some sort of "Even slower oxidative fibers"  and careful use of graded force.

So what, the body should sacrifice benefits such as greater elasticity of this kind of muscle (useful for eg the bladder to be able to expand more while still being able to contract and empty itself) to make studying it a little easier for the lazy students of this world?

... yeah, that sounds about right.

Nah, I mean, whats to stop other muscle types from doing that...what is it called...flexation relaxation thing? The one where the smooth muscle tenses up when it stretches in order to retain contractile strength and not get over extended.


I'd just prefer if the body could be a little bit more standardized.


Also, I'd like they to stop naming body parts seemingly at fucking random with no real conventions as to how they choose the name. Or I should say, with way too many different and often conflicting conventions.

For the first, I'd advise you to take it up with whoever designed this mess in the first place. Might be difficult to get a hold of him, only ever comes down every millennia to write a book or drown some fools and throw rainbows around.

For the second, I stand by my conviction that scientific naming conventions are done by a particularly hateful chimpanzee on a typewriter that derives sick fetishistic pleasure from screwing with us as much as his monkey dactylography allows.

[Harry Baldman]

The best part of anatomy/histology is always the bit where you've got a name and a thing. Bowman's gland, islets of Langerhans, Purkinje cells, Purkinje fibers, crypts of Lieberkühn, loops of Henle, Nissl bodies, and those aren't even the obscure ones.

Bonus points if you live in a country that has some form of contention with the established naming conventions and likes to put a different name for the same structure.

I'd also harp on protein nomenclature, but that's more hilarious than annoying most of the time. Especially once it clicks that many of the more famous proteins (well, the developmentally relevant ones, anyway) are named like that because of what their absence does to a fruit fly.

[Radio Controlled]

It can get pretty amazing. You'll get genes named 'hairless' that are vitally important to hair growth.

But it gets better, like when a scientist thought it'd be funny to name a gene 'sonic hedgehog', and then years later a doctor has to explain to a distressed patient his deformity is seemingly due to a blue video game character that went out of style in the 90's.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/weekinreview/12schwartz.html

[piecewise]

It can get pretty amazing. You'll get genes named 'hairless' that are vitally important to hair growth.

But it gets better, like when a scientist thought it'd be funny to name a gene 'sonic hedgehog', and then years later a doctor has to explain to a distressed patient his deformity is seemingly due to a blue video game character that went out of style in the 90's.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/weekinreview/12schwartz.html

Isn't the sonic gene related to autism?

Because cosmic irony.

The best part of anatomy/histology is always the bit where you've got a name and a thing. Bowman's gland, islets of Langerhans, Purkinje cells, Purkinje fibers, crypts of Lieberkühn, loops of Henle, Nissl bodies, and those aren't even the obscure ones.

Bonus points if you live in a country that has some form of contention with the established naming conventions and likes to put a different name for the same structure.

I'd also harp on protein nomenclature, but that's more hilarious than annoying most of the time. Especially once it clicks that many of the more famous proteins (well, the developmentally relevant ones, anyway) are named like that because of what their absence does to a fruit fly.

"crypts of Lieberkühn"

See, this is why the game I'm thinking of making after the ER one is based on anatomy.  I mean hell, "mesenchyme" sounds like a boss name to me.

[Harry Baldman]

Yeah, crypts of Lieberkühn are pretty boss. Can regenerate your entire intestinal lining in days from the damn things. Can even prepare them, put them in a proper mixture of nutrients and generate intestine-like objects (though without the villi forming even if the cells are technically correct).

And sonic hedgehog's a really important morphogen, especially in neural patterning. It's responsible for the ventral pattern (the bone morphogenic protein, named with the best intentions, but ultimately misleadingly so, doing the ventral bit) in the neural tube and a whole bunch of other stuff, hence why mutations in it mean your forebrain progenitor doesn't divide into hemispheres, at which point you're dead unless your sonic hedgehog is only very mildly disabled, in which case you're merely stuck with holoprosencephaly for the entirety of your life.

Autism's more subtle, characterized by excess of dendritic spines (not enough pruning in your nervous system, possibly, but of course that's likely not the full story).

[Dorsidwarf]

Yeah, crypts of Lieberkühn are pretty boss. Can regenerate your entire intestinal lining in days from the damn things. Can even prepare them, put them in a proper mixture of nutrients and generate intestine-like objects (though without the villi forming even if the cells are technically correct).

And sonic hedgehog's a really important morphogen, especially in neural patterning. It's responsible for the ventral pattern (the bone morphogenic protein, named with the best intentions, but ultimately misleadingly so, doing the ventral bit) in the neural tube and a whole bunch of other stuff, hence why mutations in it mean your forebrain progenitor doesn't divide into hemispheres, at which point you're dead unless your sonic hedgehog is only very mildly disabled, in which case you're merely stuck with holoprosencephaly for the entirety of your life.

Autism's more subtle, characterized by excess of dendritic spines (not enough pruning in your nervous system, possibly, but of course that's likely not the full story).

Isn't sonic hedgehog named after it's effects on feather growth in parrots?


genes are weeeeeeird

[Harry Baldman]

Isn't sonic hedgehog named after it's effects on feather growth in parrots?


genes are weeeeeeird

Don't think so, no. When they found sonic hedgehog, they were specifically looking for hedgehog genes (named because mutations in them produce bristled-looking fruit fly embryos) in vertebrates, and it's named that because one of the postdocs involved in the lab that discovered it had a daughter with a Sonic comic in her possession.

Or so says Wikipedia, anyway. There's probably alternate hypotheses over the etymology already. Unlikely that it'd be feather growth in parrots lending the name, though. Parrots don't see much use as model objects as far as I know. Probably take too long to develop, unlike a fruit fly, mouse or zebrafish. And sonic hedgehog does more important stuff in the brain department, as mentioned.