Bay 12 Games Forum

Who is interested in a book club?
I need to do more reading and am interested in the community dissecting, analysing and criticising books as a group. I'm somewhat spurred on by this title I'm interested in being given away for a limited time.

"Someone has posted a bomb threat on the door of Chardin Memorial Library, at the heart of one of the finest Jesuit universities in the world.
Everyone inside, no matter how trivial, prestigious, or eccentric, is a suspect.
No one has the foggiest idea why in the hell someone would threaten to bomb a library.
Whatever the explanation, our heroes have to work fast. They have until the end of the semester to find the truth and stop the mad bomber…if either even exists at all.
SYNCHRONICITY (125,000 words) is an offbeat, cerebral mystery about science, religion, the occult, and the quest to apprehend the transcendent in a mundane and frankly boring world. "

Anyone interested in the book club who misses the deadline will sadly have to wait for the next title, I'm open to suggestions for the next titles, generally anything freely available online.
This title interests me as it's from a first time author who's an academic and has shown to be rather creative in producing political science-fiction on the Aurora forum. He writes in some detail about the process of publishing through amazon on his blog .
Theres only 2 reviews so far but both have been quite positive.

By Brian 
This book is not easy to classify. On the one hand, its discussions of science and rationality remind me somewhat of Neal Stephenson; on the other hand, I don't think Stephenson has ever written something with sorcery. In that sense, it could possibly be classified as 'urban fantasy', although it is very far from a typical urban fantasy.

So what is it actually about? It is about characters fighting against the forces of darkness (or something which chooses to present itself that way) in two locations; students and professors at a small Catholic university in the US, and expats teaching English in Taiwan. These storylines are related, although only loosely. An incredibly disparate group of individuals come together at the college, including sorcerers, catholic priests, people who ineffectively try to measure ghosts with e-meters, and die-hard rationalists obsessed with their own intelligence.

And this is one of reasons the book is good: a lot of the interactions between these extreme individuals are tinged with a faint sense of absurdity. Due to this, found a lot of the book quite funny. Other positive attributes: once the book gets going, its quite engaging and readable, many of the characters, although caricatures, ring true to people I have known (as in, they are extreme versions of real people), and the book brings up many interesting aspects of faith and religion without being heavy-handed in either direction.

In summary, although this book has a few problems, I would recommend it to anyone interested in a cerebral, slightly offbeat, sort-of-urban fantasy. I cannot think of another book like it.

If this sounds like something that interests you give it a shot, I have it on my Iphone and will read and review it within the week. Happy reading

It's time for yet another image heavy KSP Lets play, community involvement is welcome and we'll be playing iron man mode (no reverts, all crashes are final, and fatal for our non orange jumpsuiters), we'll be playing in career mode, as far as i can see all mods do support the tech tree (kethane requires a small patch). Mods are selected among those that add functionality Lotsa Mods!;


Mission Controller (liquid fuel and oxygen costs have been reduced by 25%, tanks have been increased in cost 6 times;
Ferram aerospace;
TAC Life support; (Default values, Except; Electricity consumption has been slightly reduced Halved, Time without water is increased to 7 days)
Deadly reentry;
Remote Tech;
Modular Fuels;
Cargo Transfer Bags for TAC life support;
Kethane;
ExtraPlanetary launchpads;
Interstellar;
Kerbal attachment system;
Infernal robotics;
Bavarian Tubes;
Procedural Fairings;
Kerbal Engineer;
Mechjeb (Cost of Mechanical Jeb pod increased by 40,000);
Ubio part welder;
Kerbpaint.

23/4 Adding new mods:
Enhanced navball;
Docking port alignment indicator;
Scansat;
Hullcam VDS;
Distant object enhancement;
Added Tac lifesupport greenhouse; (Food production has been balanced to match the vanilla C02/water purifiers)

I should note I have never used any of these mods, and have pretty much no idea where in the tech tree most of these parts will show up.
My own idea is to run through basic Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, etc, Missions (or at least highly simplified) as well as launching copies of various real life science probes etc, with the added limitations that Deadly reentry, Remote tech and Mission controller add.
I've come to realise that it's possible to 'grind' easy/cheap missions using mission controller for money, I shall avoid that by only doing unique missions.
First update soon, Jebediah learns how much fun the external command seat is (Bonus update using sandbox)

Note; images are freaking massive, Apologies. I'll be JPGing all images from now on.

Update 1: Rockets are fun!
Update 2: WTF is a space program?
Update 3: Data is important?
Update 4: Goo, What can you do?
Update 5: RTFM
Update 6: The right stuff, Quicksilver 6
Mission 7: Quicksilver and the Pretty Giant Missile 11 meters high which is Launched from the Space Center which has a lot of banded iron formations around the place.
Mission 8: Freedom 6.
Mission 9: Liberty bell 6.
Mission 10: Friendship 6.
Mission 11: Aurora 6.
Interlude 1: KSSR Launches Kaputnik.
Mission 12: Sigma 6.

Is this related to the fact My noble screen is blank?
I'll try modding in noble positions from the mountain entity and regen.

With all the new animal additions there is significant lag when going past the 'Meat' Tab of the stockpile menu, and searching for one item such as 'chicken meat' takes forever
Considering most animals have 12 meat products in the menu it would cut down the size of the list Significantly if they were bunched together as whatever animal they came from but expandable when selected to allow selecting individual organs/types from that animal.
Edit: Or even sorting them Alphabetically and into tabs would be much easier to use.
Edit2: Not that i don't appreciate the significant effort toady obviously went through to laboriously add in all these critters, Thank you for the new release.

This will be my first attempt at a megaproject, also it will be as far as possible a community fort in that i'll shove named dwarves into the place and try not to kill them intentionally
I'll also do short recaps of whatever happens as long as it's fairly interesting.
The general goal will be to find a nice map with a large very deep ocean and build an asthetically pleasing aboveground port designed to facilitate trade with lightdwelling freaks traders with emphesis placed on a small quantity of floating deathtraps ships and a wholly over-engineered
100 gun ballasta battleship.
Essentially it'll be designated a naval outpost and most industry not related to shipbuilding will be banned, food and sweet sweet booze must be bought from traders and the top priority will be the construction of said vessel.
From my initial plans it should take somewhere around 5000 logs. And probably at least 2000 pigtail cloth which i'll mod into cloth blocks for walls. Yeah wall thickness sails might look weird, but on this scale it should look pretty good
Scans of the plans and screen shots are to come..  (when i get around to it)

Uh yeah if you want to be dorfed sign up here, first 7 will be the initial embarkers, the skills of which i haven't decided yet, but most will almost certainly be carpenters