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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45534333#45534333
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Monday, December 5, 2011
Small group int. checks
I should really be doing more important things right now, but Christmas break is coming up and if my memory is to be trusted, it'll be school again before I can get a role play up and running if I wait until then. So. I'm looking for one or two people to RP with, no more than two. I once let a bunch of people into a role play that was supposed to only have three players total and things quickly got way out of hand, so I'm putting my foot down this time. I'll not have any more than two other people in this RP. I've got a few ideas myself, but I'm open to any of yours. Keep in mind that I'm pretty uptight about grammar, so please at least know the difference between "you're" and "your." If you don't, though, check this out-- http://www.roleplaygateway.com/perfect-your-grammar-editing-services-t65363.html . I won't hassle you about slang or chatspeak if you know when and where to use it. I don't care too much about post length, but detail's nice. Shoot for maybe a paragraph per post. If you like longer posts, I'll try to match mine to yours.
The stuff I'll RP with:
Any kind of fantasy, including its sub-genres--dark, modern, medieval, etc.
Sci-fi--I really like playing with dystopian societies, steampunk, and fantasy/sci-fi blends.
Pre-made story worlds--if you're writing a story and want to RP with the world you've made, I'm more than happy to join.
Stuff I'm not comfortable/skilled with, but willing to try out:
Realistic/modern-day things
Romance (I'm okay to try some romance, but I'd like to keep it controlled and realistic and not gushy.)
Zombies
Stuff I won't do:
Fanfiction (You'd be hard-pressed to find any fandom I'd know anything about, anyway)
Anything R-rated
Boarding schools or vampires, unless you can convince me that your idea is really original
Band RPs
Ideas:
1.) Trapped in the Witch's Mansion: Our characters wake up to find themselves locked in a labyrinthine castle in the hands of a bored witch looking for some sadistic entertainment. They must search for the key to freedom, all the while avoiding traps, solving puzzles, and keeping each other alive. Death and injury are very possible in this RP.
2.) Choose your own adventure: Remember those old books where you spent half your time reading and the other half flipping through the book, looking for the right page? This will be kind of like that, except I'll make it up as we go. I'll do all the writing and you can have your character decide which path to take. A detailed character profile is encouraged so I can write them well.
3.) DINOSAURS!: A civilization has risen and fallen. All humanity has now are solar-powered laser guns and the dinosaurs they cloned from fossilized blood. Tribes of people with tamed dinosaurs, among them utahraptors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor), triceratops (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceratops), and parkosaurus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parksosaurus) live nomadic lives in what used to be North America, having epic dinosaur races, epic laser gun battles, and epic laser gun battles while riding racing dinosaurs. The Rule of Cool and the Rule of Funny drive this RP.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/BkxdWjN1UJE/viewtopic.php
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Review: Even with the sex, "Shame" is unsatisfying (Reuters)
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? "Shame" is the movie in which Michael Fassbender gets naked and lets it all hang out.
And yes, he, ahem, measures up impressively. The movie, less so.
Co-written and directed by British artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen ("Hunger"), this is an undernourished drama likely to leave most viewers muttering a puzzled "huh?" as they exit the theater.
Like "American Gigolo," a film it brings to mind because both feature chicly-dressed, handsome male protagonists who are quick to doff their expensive wardrobes, "Shame" is out to show us that having lots of anonymous sex can still leave one feeling empty and unfulfilled.
Brandon Sullivan (Fassbender) lives alone in a tastefully but minimally furnished Manhattan apartment and works at a job -- we're never quite sure what it is he does, though it seems to involve advertising, marketing or technology -- in a cubicle in an office tower.
He's not exactly a model employee, arriving at work late because he was chasing after a woman he cruised on the subway, surfing porn on his office computer, and making frequent visits to the office john to find self-satisfaction. During his off-hours, when not out picking up women, he's home viewing on-line sex sites or having prostitutes make house calls.
Brandon is a sex addict. When his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up wanting temporarily to stay with him, he is less than happy. Her being in his apartment crimps his hedonistic (and onanistic) life style.
"Shame's" plot, such as it is, involves the slow, and frustratingly only partial revelation, of the reason behind the tensions in the siblings' relationship and why Brandon is the way he is. This is a movie that wants us to believe that there's more going on than it will tell us, but it's all so understated and elliptical that it's like a pencil outline of a sketch which no one bothered to color in.
The film is exceedingly handsome looking, showing a New York that's all hard edges, neon and dark, wet streets. McQueen's shots are all as carefully and tastefully composed as Brandon's outfits, making this movie better seen than mulled over.
Fassbender, in his fourth major role of the year (on top of leads in "Jane Eyre," "X-Men: First Class" and "A Dangerous Method"), continues to impress as a leading man of range and intensity. And the guy is seriously easy on the eyes.
Mulligan, as Brandon's fragile sister, convincingly projects a battered vulnerability. Her character is supposed to be a professional singer who, at a swanky nightclub, warbles a prolonged, wobbly, excessively mournful version of "New York, New York." This would be an excellent scene during which to go to the snack bar and refill your popcorn cup.
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/movies/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111201/film_nm/us_shame
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Fearing Climate Change?s Effects on the Adirondacks
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Jerry Jenkins, an ecologist, documents the ecosystem of the Adirondacks and laments its future in the face of global climate change?s local effects.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e599aa365354eff27d95517646c1e22c
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Astronomers find 18 new planets: Discovery is the largest collection of confirmed planets around stars more massive than the sun
ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2011) ? Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team's paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though the majority of those have not yet been confirmed.
Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii -- with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, respectively -- the researchers surveyed about 300 stars. They focused on those dubbed "retired" A-type stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun. These stars are just past the main stage of their life -- hence, "retired" -- and are now puffing up into what's called a subgiant star.
To look for planets, the astronomers searched for stars of this type that wobble, which could be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. By searching the wobbly stars' spectra for Doppler shifts -- the lengthening and contracting of wavelengths due to motion away from and toward the observer -- the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.
This new bounty marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known planets orbiting massive stars and, according to Johnson, provides an invaluable population of planetary systems for understanding how planets -- and our own solar system -- might form. The researchers say that the findings also lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.
According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this is the true sequence of events, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system -- such as the number and size of the planets, or their orbital shapes -- will depend on the mass of the star. For instance, a more massive star would mean a bigger disk, which in turn would mean more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.
In another theory, planets form when large amounts of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into big, dense clumps that then become planets. But in this picture, it turns out that the mass of the star doesn't affect the kinds of planets that are produced.
So far, as the number of discovered planets has grown, astronomers are finding that stellar mass does seem to be important in determining the prevalence of giant planets. The newly discovered planets further support this pattern -- and are therefore consistent with the first theory, the one stating that planets are born from seed particles.
"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," Johnson says.
There's another interesting twist, he adds: "Not only do we find Jupiter-like planets more frequently around massive stars, but we find them in wider orbits." If you took a sample of 18 planets around sunlike stars, he explains, half of them would orbit close to their stars. But in the cases of the new planets, all are farther away, at least 0.7 astronomical units from their stars. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the sun.)
In systems with sunlike stars, gas giants like Jupiter acquire close orbits when they migrate toward their stars. According to theories of planet formation, gas giants could only have formed far from their stars, where it's cold enough for their constituent gases and ices to exist. So for gas giants to orbit nearer to their stars, certain gravitational interactions have to take place to pull these planets in. Then, some other mechanism -- perhaps the star's magnetic field -- has to kick in to stop them from spiraling into a fiery death.
The question, Johnson says, is why this doesn't seem to happen with so-called hot Jupiters orbiting massive stars, and whether that dearth is due to nature or nurture. In the nature explanation, Jupiter-like planets that orbit massive stars just wouldn't ever migrate inward. In the nurture interpretation, the planets would move in, but there would be nothing to prevent them from plunging into their stars. Or perhaps the stars evolve and swell up, consuming their planets. Which is the case? According to Johnson, subgiants like the A stars they were looking at in this paper simply don't expand enough to gobble up hot Jupiters. So unless A stars have some unique characteristic that would prevent them from stopping migrating planets -- such as a lack of a magnetic field early in their lives -- it looks like the nature explanation is the more plausible one.
The new batch of planets have yet another interesting pattern: their orbits are mainly circular, while planets around sunlike stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson says he's now trying to find an explanation.
For Johnson, these discoveries have been a long time coming. This latest find, for instance, comes from an astronomical survey that he started while a graduate student; because these planets have wide orbits, they can take a couple of years to make a single revolution, meaning that it can also take quite a few years before their stars' periodic wobbles become apparent to an observer. Now, the discoveries are finally coming in. "I liken it to a garden -- you plant the seeds and put a lot of work into it," he says. "Then, a decade in, your garden is big and flourishing. That's where I am right now. My garden is full of these big, bright, juicy tomatoes -- these Jupiter-sized planets."
The other authors on the The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series paper, "Retired A stars and their companions VII. Eighteen new Jovian planets," include former Caltech undergraduate Christian Clanton, who graduated in 2010; Caltech postdoctoral scholar Justin Crepp; and nine others from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii; the University of California, Berkeley; the Center of Excellence in Information Systems at Tennessee State University; the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, Austin; and the Pennsylvania State University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Marcus Woo.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- John Asher Johnson, Christian Clanton, Andrew W. Howard, Brendan P. Bowler, Gregory W. Henry, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Justin R. Crepp, Michael Endl, William D. Cochran, Phillip J. MacQueen, Jason T. Wright, Howard Isaacson. Retired A Stars and Their Companions. VII. 18 New Jovian Planets. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2011; 197 (2): 26 DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/197/2/26
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111202155801.htm
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Friday, December 2, 2011
Inquest: Gary Speed found by wife hanged at home
updated 3:40 p.m. ET Nov. 29, 2011
WARRINGTON, England - An inquest into the death of Gary Speed was told Tuesday that the Wales football manager was found by his wife hanged at home.
A police officer confirmed to the inquest that Speed's wife found his body shortly before 7 a.m. on Sunday and that there were no suspicious circumstances.
The inquest did not speculate on the reasons for the death of the 42-year-old former Leeds, Newcastle and Everton midfielder, and it was adjourned by the coroner until Jan. 30.
Fans and players conducted a minute's applause in honor of Speed before each of the three League Cup quarterfinals Tuesday.
One of them was at Cardiff's home match against Blackburn, with managers of both teams laying wreathes on the field at Cardiff City Stadium, where Speed took charge of his final match as Wales manager 17 days earlier.
The English Premier League said there will be a minute's applause in Speed's honor ahead of this weekend's matches.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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More newsGalaxy win in Indonesia
Robbie Keane scored in the 14th minute to give the Los Angeles Galaxy a 1-0 win over an Indonesian all-star team in the first exhibition game of the MLS champions' Asian tour.
Season set
Major League Soccer's 2012 season will open March 10 with six games.
Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/45481613/ns/sports-soccer/
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