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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete) Demons and Angels Seven Days to Skitter
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Neruz said:
'Best Excessive use of Pyrotechnics' should totally be an Academy Awards category
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If there was, I suspect 'Laserblast' would be a winner.

Some friends and I rented it from Blockbuster way back in like... the late 90's maybe? Because it was rated absolutely awfully on some list on Rotten Tomatoes I think.

The 'laser guns' make everything explode. Even the snow explodes and catches on fire at one point.

We actually really did make the same joke here at the time, saying that even though the movie was absolute trash, it had to have made some guy's pyrotechnics career.

There's an MST3K version, too, for anyone who wants to see for themselves.

Edit: At Least, I think it was Laserblast. Some movie about a pair of aliens chasing some other aliens about a gun anyway. Took place in wintertime... at least at the end where all the shooting and exploding happened. I'd have to dig out my MST3K set to find out.
 
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Neruz said:
'Best Excessive use of Pyrotechnics' should totally be an Academy Awards category, judged on a combined score of Quantity of Things That Exploded for no Reason and Quality of Explosions; rated on a scale of size of explosion, color of explosion, impressiveness of explosion, cinematic framing of explosion, number of people walking away from explosion in slow motion, number of things hurled through the air by explosion, number and quality of secondary explosions triggered by primary explosion, importance of explosion to plot, dramatic timing of explosion, foreshadowing of explosion and of course quality of dramatic one-liners employed prior to and\or immediately after explosion.

I would watch the Academy Awards religiously just for that category alone if it existed.
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The category exploded in 1997.
 
hey dnw if thread is dead but got an ide for an folowe up you could use the material you got now an do an incursion into the Warhammer 40K/Fantasy universe whit Jackson telling Taylor a bout that bad feeling that had him order an emergency jump before the MTF nergal battelship popt in think varga would find that interesting but rather then yust dumping straight in to the 40K vers you could some how haw em first pop in to the old world of Fantasy which planet could be some where in the 40k vers that way varga and the rest of the gang may be abel to get an soft coarse of chaos and after they fix the planet some what (probly bay sealing the warp gates at N/S polls) you could haw an chaos marine warband be pulld in to the world by the ewerchosen as hes is geting desperet for somthing to stop thos dam lizards you coulde probly use the curent canon on both 40K/fantasy endtimes cose i think both of thos seting woulde be the best seting for the famely to step in
 
Update: The DC Comics epilogue is a work in progress, but has been delayed by real life work commitments and the annoyance of scans telling me my SSD is about to fail, causing me to spend my free time doing the archiving of stuff that I should have been doing all along but put off.

I was also toying with the idea of a Ba'albreaker canon omake, though my first attempt came out more as a rather dry timeline of events leading to his rise to power in a world without heroes. I also thought about making it a crossover with Mass Effect...but frankly, tinker-enhanced Goa'uld tech would tear Reapers into little bits relatively quickly, which would kind of make Ba'al/Heartbreaker a legitimate hero despite any atrocities he might commit. Bluntly stated, the Reapers fall into the category of, "overwhelming threat with a glaring Achilles' Heel."
 
MTB said:
Before you do that you could go and debug code. That sounds like it would be more fun.
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*It Is!

* = for given values of 'fun'

...especially PeopleSoft code that uses Ī̶̼̬͇̟͙̅̈́n̷̢̤͆̾̏͘ť̴̛̪͇̳̞̈̔̔ĕ̸͚̳̍̀ǵ̷̛̦̦̑́͂r̶̮̱͍͎̬̃̑͆͠ą̶͎̺̙̅̾̕t̶͓̂ỉ̵̝͇̻͈̃o̶̥͇̳̹͌̓͊̿̕ṇ̶̢̡͒̉̀͝ ̶̮͎̭̽̋͋B̶̡̙̝͇̠̅̍r̸̪̬̬̈́̏ọ̶͙́ǩ̸̨̙͉̭̳̑̈́̚͝é̴͇̦̈ŕ̷̳̖̊̄̓̌, PeopleSoft's version of web services.
 
MTB said:
Before you do that you could go and debug code. That sounds like it would be more fun.
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I've debugged code in JScript, Ada, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, SQL, C++, C#, TurboPascal, R...and probably a couple of things I've forgotten. The degree of fun varies rather dramatically with a) the consequences of failure, b) whether or not you're debugging your own code, and c) how utterly batshit insane the programming language is (here's looking at you, Ada).

Writing prose is more fun as long as you're not struggling with writer's block.
 
Derek M said:
I've debugged code in JScript, Ada, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, SQL, C++, C#, TurboPascal, R...and probably a couple of things I've forgotten. The degree of fun varies rather dramatically with a) the consequences of failure, b) whether or not you're debugging your own code, and c) how utterly batshit insane the programming language is (here's looking at you, Ada).

Writing prose is more fun as long as you're not struggling with writer's block.
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Goddammit, Derek, I'd almost forgotten about Ada. Now I have to start all over again.
 
Derek M said:
The degree of fun varies rather dramatically with a) the consequences of failure, b) whether or not you're debugging your own code, and c) how utterly batshit insane the programming language is (here's looking at you, Ada).
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And d) how silly arrays are. Looking at you Lua. ("Arrays start at 1! Only they aren't actually arrays, they're hashmaps! But we call them "tables", for reasons. And you can add non-numeric keys to them! And there are two separate "lengths", one that gets the length of numeric keys, and one that gets the total number of elements in the table... Only that's not quite true. Trying to get the length (numeric) of a table is defined as "ome element such that N is a key in the table and N + 1 is not a key in the table" in earlier versions of Lua, and outright UB if you don't have contiguous numbered keys from 1..N-1 in the table in later versions of Lua.)
 
Pseudocognisant said:
And d) how silly arrays are. Looking at you Lua. ("Arrays start at 1! Only they aren't actually arrays, they're hashmaps! But we call them "tables", for reasons. And you can add non-numeric keys to them! And there are two separate "lengths", one that gets the length of numeric keys, and one that gets the total number of elements in the table... Only that's not quite true. Trying to get the length (numeric) of a table is defined as "ome element such that N is a key in the table and N + 1 is not a key in the table" in earlier versions of Lua, and outright UB if you don't have contiguous numbered keys from 1..N-1 in the table in later versions of Lua.)
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He, it's a human-designed system just like economics, so it must be good, right?
 
I remember trying to go from Turbo Pascal and ANSI C to wrap my brain around Scheme and using recursive function calls to simulate loops. Huh, I guess that's why after two shots at the goose I still don't have a Bachelor's of Computer Science.
 
sdwood said:
Goddammit, Derek, I'd almost forgotten about Ada. Now I have to start all over again.
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Back in the 90's, engineering comp sci courses at GWU were taught in Ada...for some reason. The B-school comp sci courses were in Turbo Pascal (which I liked, and I was sad that Delphi never really took off instead of VB and Java). I have never, ever, encountered Ada in the wild, as even back then you had to basically be on a government contract to ever see it.
 
Derek M said:
Back in the 90's, engineering comp sci courses at GWU were taught in Ada...for some reason. The B-school comp sci courses were in Turbo Pascal (which I liked, and I was sad that Delphi never really took off instead of VB and Java). I have never, ever, encountered Ada in the wild, as even back then you had to basically be on a government contract to ever see it.
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Where do you think I ran into Ada? University of New Orleans, at a time the military had already dropped the requirement for Ada.

*shudder* I'm having flashbacks. 600kb 'hello world'. (Or was it 800kb? Thankfully, the memories aren't _that_ distinct, I just remember it being completely absurd.)
 
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Not Ada
  • Sidestory
    • Saurial walked into the BBFO offices, to find Metis deeply immersed in reviewing technical documentation.

    "What's up?"

    Metis looked up. "Did you realize that in at least three other realities, the Department of Defense created their own programming language and mandated use of it for contracts?"

    There was a pause. "I did not know that. Why?"

    The black lizard shook her head. "From what I've been able to find, the introduction of computing was much more chaotic than in our world, or in most worlds with super powers. It has to do with the lack of tinkers, other types of enhanced intellects or alien technology. There were no standards for languages, so they pretty much forced a solution on contractors."

    Saurial shrugged. "Makes sense. So is that the standard language in those realities?"

    Metis winced. "Not so much. While it has a lot of advanced features, it's also exceedingly complex, and hasn't adapted to changes in computing technology -- especially changes in platforms to smaller portable devices."

    The smaller lizard girl went over to the drink machine and began pouring herself a mug of coffee. "All right. So why are you spending your time on it?"

    "I'm not, really. It inspired me to come up with our own programming language, however," replied Metis.

    Saurial frowned. "Do we really need FamCode, in addition to FamTalk?"

    "Dragon's programming languages are all extremely well written, but they don't inherently support Family capabilities. I want compiler support for quantum entanglement data transfer as well as massively parallel FTL processing. There are things you can do with dimensionally-shifted processing cores that should make things like long-key brute force decryption something that can happen in real time. I mean, in a sense, that's similar to how thinker powers work," explained Metis.

    "Interesting. Let me know what you come up with. Does your new language have a name?" asked Saurial.

    Metis smirked. "I was thinking Lovelace."

    "Nice."
     
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