For #reasons, I just wrote this up for the wiki. What if anything did I miss?

• DEFCON 5: All clear, normal life is taking place (the default setting)
  
• DEFCON 4: Heightened awareness, something's about to take place (or just took place) that might require a higher alert level Real Soon Now
  
• DEFCON 3: Something's wrong but we think we can handle it
  
• DEFCON 2: Something's wrong and we need help
  
• DEFCON 1: SOS! Reinforcements ready to fight as soon as they arrive needed ASAP!
  

• Washuu's lab (the master sysop node, with all the bells and whistles and all the custom extensions listed below)
  
• Yggdrasil (sysop node)
  
• The Midoriya
  
• OSA-P jewelry store (covers the entire store with no "training areas" designated; no physical control panel)
  
• Kaleido Stage (has three control panels, located at Kalos' office, Ken's backstage desk, and Sarah's dorm apartment)
  
• Aquarena Springs theme park (covers the entire park with no "training areas" designated; the control panel is located in the Bannings-Lowell's executive office)
  

• CCTV surveillance of the property
  
• voice messages
  
• text message alerts to the residents' cellphones
  
• teleportation-portal detection
  
• alerts of new Good Neighbor System nodes being connected to the network
  
• a cellphone app that can act as a control panel for a single node, specified upon installation
  
• text messages between nodes - useful if somebody's manually setting their node to "heightened awareness"
  

Because I needed this bit of trivia elsewhere...

Eimi's personal name is 影美, written with the kanji 影 (ei) meaning "shadow, silhouette, phantom" and 美 (mi) meaning "beautiful". Seems to me (and thus to Noah Scott) to be an appropriate name for an AI.

Kicking off the parade for 2021, Liam Reilly, Lead singer of Bagatelle

Very much an Irish one. The band that were expected to do what U2 did

I'm not sure if this is an unreasonable request, but oh well, here we go.

So I'm working on a semi-serious fanfic project. Yeah, yeah, I know I should finish Vigilante's Run, but I've put that unofficially on the back burner for the time being. Yeah, yeah, I should work on my Fan RPG, but what the hell, I just did a bunch of work on it and I'm kind of burnt out on that.
Anyway, it's a reboot / origin story for the Knight Sabers in the style of a Hollywood screenplay, the imaginary anime / live-action / whatever movie this long-dead franchise deserves. We get the Sabers together, they fight Brian J. Mason's Sinister Plot, then Mason gets stabbed in the throat at the end. Simple. Only, not. That's why I'm turning to you all, who are, like, the Great Ancient BGC Nerd Council.

I'm working on it in a proper piece of screenwriting software, but since that uses my real name you'll just have to settle for the Plot layout Google Doc. Anyway, here's some stuff I'm thinking about for it:

ACT 1: Sylia recruits all the Sabers.

- I've already written most of Priss's recruitment and am generally happy with it, and I have a nifty idea for Linna that I stole from that one BGC audio drama - namely, that Linna knows Sylia from after her parents took Sylia and Mackie under their wing after Sylia's dad got ganked. But Linna hasn't seen Sylia since like college, where Linna dropped out to save money and Sylia went to Oxford to begin her Bruce Wayne-ing. So on one hand Linna has a better idea of what sort of questions to ask Sylia ('This is about your dad, isn't it?') but Sylia also knows that Linna's a middle-class ball of insecurity and anxiety, has a better hold on her than she does Priss.

- Then I'm trying to figure out how to get Nene in there - screenplays only have so many pages, usually act 1 is about 30 pages. It's tempting to not even give Nene an individual recruitment scene, or to play it for laughs ('Would you like to be a superhero?' 'Shit yeah.'), but I think it's worth at least thinking about what Sylia gets from Little Miss Cyberpunk and what Nene gets in exchange. I've got in this opening scene that Sylia's not recruiting skilled mercs because she needs people who have a personal stake in fighting GENOM, so the idea of her getting recruited via hacker-puzzle doesn't really work...

- And somewhere in all this I need to establish Mason as a threat. Basically, Priss's bosozoku buddies tried to do something involving stolen tech for him, the deal went bad, and she was the only survivor - that's what establishes her grudge against GENOM, and how Sylia finds her. Plus, Sylia and Mason were childhood friends - at least until his dad killed her dad, and then she got shit uploaded into her brain, and Mason's been sexually frustrated and obsessed with her ever since. (Yeah, I stole that from Bubblegum Disaster. It was a good plot detail. No judging.) So that's good connective tissue, good to make an antagonist like him personal, but he has to be introduced by the end of Act 1, somehow - and introduced specifically as the Bad Guy.

ACT 2: The Sabers get their shit together and start their first job - figuring out what it was Mason got from Priss's bosozoku.

- Yep. Bulk of the plot and I have no idea what I want to do with it. Mason's got a Sinister Plan going on, the Sabers figure it out, hurt him bad. What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks. I like some of the ideas there - transhumanist ambition used for grubby commercial purposes, an ongoing struggle between people's perception of the uncanny and GENOM's desire to mitigate it - but I dunno. And I don't want to bring in the orbital kill satellites quite yet. So - I need another idea that I can still tie to Mason's deal gone bad. Any ideas?

- Act 2 ends with Mason deducing Sylia's identity and sending Battle Boomers after the LADYS633, just like in episode 3. I really like how Dartz told that story in YT2032...

ACT 3: The Final Battle
- To the point that I want to crib the idea of him coming in person to her after wrecking her building and proposing she come work for GENOM. Of course, Sylia politely declines, he leaves, she loses her shit. Good stuff all around.

- By the same token, Mason brings his 12B Boomers and his bodyguard boomers (Razordolls) to the final battle, reveals he knows the Sabers' identities. He doesn't get backup, of course, because Quincy has lost patience with him. So the Sabers kick his ass, preferably somewhere that isn't GENOM Tower but has some symbolic relevance to the plot.

- Mason almost chokes Sylia out, Sylia stabs him in the throat, the Sabers ride off into the sunrise. Priss gets to play Konya Wa Hurricane over the credits.

So - yeah. I just need some help hashing out the plot. Many people on this forum are better at writing than I am. Any ideas? Help would be much appreciated.

Greetings to the year 2021 from Aussie Land.

From the image thread...



May this year be better then the one previous.

from:jet.jaguar@friggarock.fen
to: [General Lists]
Subj: A few Dates with a Firefighter.

Frigga is almost unique in Fenspace that we have an actual working Fire Brigade. 6th Platoon Frigga SAM train regularly as Friefighters, Rescue Workers and as Paramedics. Of course, it's heavy work, requiring a high degree of physical fitness. The Brigade requires a standard of fitness well above that of the regular SAM.

This leads us on to topic at hand - the First annual Friggan Firefighter's Calender.

Yes it is a little objectifying isn't it? But, it's all in a good cause and I'm sure there's something for everyone to enjoy in there.

Proceeds will be donated to the Nikaido Foundation.

You may order yours here

Now if you'll excuse me, the first test printing has arrived and I'll need some time alone to inspect to results in detail.


-Jet

Review of a browser that isn't based on Chromium or Mozilla

Still in alpha-test, but if you have a Raspberry Pi-400, you can be a tester.

This morning a sizable explosion was reported in downtown Nashville with several buildings damaged. I am putting it in politics due to the lack of information about whether it was a gas pipe or a car bomb as has been speculated.

https://www.wkrn.com/news/large-explosio...nashville/

God willing, there are no victims.

I just listened to The Shepherd, as I do every Christmas Eve, which means that for me it is now Christmas.

Happy Christmas, everyone. Here's hoping that next year will be better than this year.

Old thread is here.

And to start the new thread on a lighter note, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is still pressing Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick for the $1 million bounty promised for proof of election fraud. Pennsylvania found several cases of fraud on the Republican side, for those who don't remember -- like Dan Patrick, who clearly doesn't want to pay out.