Dantius

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Good system, Slarty. That's precisely what we'll do. And deciding when suggestions have come to an end is arbitrary, too. We haven't had a new one since noon. Eight hours is probably too short a period to wait, but what about twelve? Twenty four? How about Monday evening? Suggestions should have petered off by then. I know most people don't check the forum as obsessively as I do, so we might want to ensure that everyone's had adequate time to check the thread...

The game is afoot is SWfrontiers! Well, except for Rowen. But it's started nonetheless!

Originally Posted By: Actaeon I'll second 1Q84, and probably close voting after four more (for a total of twelve). Several book groups would not be bad, but it's probably a good idea to start out with just one in order to work out the kinks. Then, like Diplomacy, we can run a few at a time. If sci-fi wins this time, perhaps a thriller group will start up in a week or so. I don't really feel like a thriller, but again, I'm willing to compromise for the opener. In any case, I'm loathe to exercise too much control over the selections (like the trimming Slarty mentioned). I'd recommend to err on the side of too many books. Right now we only have something like a half-dozen participants, and the thread's only been open for a day or two. We could let things simmer until Monday or so before we finally close submissions and create the poll.

I'll second Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Although this is a book club, I feel compelled to point out that the movie for that was freaking fantastic.

I submit Mission to Paris (above) and Nightfall by Asimov, because it seems SF might be the way this is headed. I second SIASL.

How about instead of just tossing out nominations, everyone participating in the club nominates one book, and then we create a poll (one of the multiple selection ones), and the book with the most votes gets read? I mean, I would imagine that's how most RL book clubs work...

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Dantius: How long is it, and is it discussible, from your understanding? I myself was about to read either "Cloud Atlas" or "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", but I don't know if those will appeal. I'm willing to compromise somewhat just to undermine Slarty's rather reasonable pessimism. A quick Google has it being at 255 pages, and from what I've heard from the person who recommended it to me it's a thriller like something le Carré would write, so it should be fairly discussible.

Hm, I've been meaning to get around to reading Mission to Paris. It's a spy thriller set in France in the interwar years- it's supposed to be quite good.

Bradbury? God no, I really dislike his style. How about something more modern instead?

I'm pretty sure I could manage it, as long as the books are fairly short.

Northernmost and easternmost: Moscow, Russia (55.7517° N, 37.6178° E) Southernmost and westernmost: Honolulu, Hawai'i (21.3069° N, 157.8583° W) So I _would_ have done it properly, with haversines and spherical triangles, but then that would have underestimated my distance relative to everyone else. It's all your faults. d1 = 195.4761 degrees d2 = 34.4448 d1*d2 = 6733.14 whatever weird unit we're using I'd have won handily if I've been to NZ, I guess.

It's not terribly difficult to calculate the spherical area. Just divide the box into two triangles and use L'Huilier's Theorem to find spherical excess E. Then the area of your personal bounding box is just 2*E*R^2.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking SOT - just because some cultures or civilizations didn't develop certain technological benchmarks doesn't mean their knowledge should be discredited. That line of thinking is part of what allowed the Europeans to justify their invasion and conquest of the Americas, as they were only dealing with savages who hadn't even developed the wheel, after all. Obviously, you're not a racist conquistador, but please cool the rhetoric. I see noting racist about SOT's post. I think his logic goes something like this. 1. An apocalypse must have a cause. Nuclear war, enviromental collapse, meteor strike, plague, whatever. 2. The Mayans did not have anywhere near the sort of scientific or technological acumen to understand any of these. They didn't have Newtonian physics to plot the courses of asteroid, advanced biological knowledge and evolutionary theory to chart epidemics, the grounding in nuclear physics to foresee nuclear warfare (or even conventional ballistic warfare, for that matter), the environmental understanding or data to predict global warming, etc. 3. As of today, we have all of these tools. To the best of our knowledge, none of these disasters are imminent. Medium to long term? Perhaps. But there certainly isn't a date X whereupon Russia will nuke China that we can predict to 100% accuracy. 4. Therefore, any predictions made by the Maya are not grounded in science and based on faith and mysticism alone. We might as well try to predict the future by doing numerology in the Torah or interpreting passages in the Bible or suras in the Qu'ran or analysis of the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching or whatever- they'd all give results of equal validity to the Mayan predictions. 5. Primitive superstition, whether in the form of Mayan predictions or interpretations of millenia-old scriptures and poems, is emphatically not legitimate evidence for an actual apocalypse. Therefore, any warnings they give can be disregarded. QED.

My hair is not "graying", it is progressing along the corporate capillary distinguishment continuum!

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Rupert: by "older members," you mean members who joined a long time ago, not members who are old in years, right? Ironically, it would work either way. Interesting statistical tidbit: While the graph returned by the poll looks quite Gaussian in shape, when you normalize for equal bin widths, it becomes very, very leptokurtic and doesn't resemble any distribution much at all.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Jeff can't just keep on putting out games set on abandoned magical research islands. Well, he's done a pretty good job putting out games set in a magical underground cave systems. He's on what, number 11 now?

Originally Posted By: The Ratt I'm a little late, but I think you did you're math wrong. 6 * 9 = 54. Clearly false. Six times nine equals forty-two. It's the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Homage if another FS person comes into my room asking if it is communications, I'm going on a spree. Do I [censored] look like I'm with communications? So you're saying what you have there is a failure to communicate? +1. Cool Hand Luke FTW. No natural disasters around here. A few invasive species and pests, but I'd take Asian Carp or the Emerald Ash Borer over "getting my house burned down" any day of the week.

We have two people in their 50's? I thought only Harehuter was my competition for "oldest member here". I even narrowly beat out Jeff by a month or two...

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Heh. What are their other (relevant) pejorative terms? I would imagine that a great deal could (or should) not be posted here...

My age is equal to six times nine.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Milk toast, however, is disgusting. (It's what Dikiyoba's parents used to make for breakfast when there was too much stale bread in the house for the birds but not enough for bread pudding.) I dip my french toast in milk/cinnamon sugar before I dip in in the eggs. Works fine for me.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Speaking of using movies to feel old: I saw the original Transformers movie. As a kid. In the theater. In 1986. Now excuse me while I get my cane. Kids these days... Dude, quit complaining. I saw the original Star Wars in theaters back when I was 7.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan ALL HAIL CAESAR!

Originally Posted By: Actaeon (Overall, though, other aspects take precedence. Geneforge remains my favorite series despite being relatively linear.) The first two weren't particularly linear. Not coincidentally, the first is almost universally regarded as the best game in the series and often included as one of Jeff's best ever, and the second usually places very highly in rankings both within the series and as a whole. By contrast, the third game, which is also the most linear of the five, is widely panned.