Watch the skies for GURPS
Supers!
This is one of our best-selling worldbooks, and it's coming back into print with
a hot new comic-style cover by renowned artist Romas, new interior art, and a
great new "retro" page design.
GURPS Places of
Mystery
visits the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, Atlantis, Angkor Wat, the Forbidden City,
and hundreds of other sites -- most real-world, some legendary -- for use in just
about any kind of
GURPS campaign you can
think of.
-- Bob Apthorpe
This sounds like a job for Bactine(tm)!
(Okay, maybe it's not that much to worry about)
-- Bob Apthorpe
Oops, looks like I blew the lid off another "Black Project"...
-- Bob Apthorpe
Oh, and speaking of the Convention and Trade Show page - five more conventions have been added to the page. Three are scheduled for March and one for April, so if you haven't checked the page recently, you might want to give it a quick glance.
-- Bob Apthorpe
Other improvements this week include updates to the online catalog. Shipping discovered a cache of Hacker behind the Ark of the Covenant while doing a little spring cleaning today. There are very few of these so order soon. You never know when we'll find more. Probably the next time we dust behind Walt Disney's stasis tube...
-- Bob Apthorpe
If you have the GURPS Basic Set, 3rd Edition and you don't want to get the revised edition just to get 16 pages of new text, here's what you're missing - Appendix to GURPS Basic Set, 3rd Edition Revised (105k). Or, get the ASCII version (39k).
This Appendix includes:
We are committed to supporting our product lines and we think this a pretty good way of providing that support. And occasionally we feel like tooting our own horn when we do stuff like like this.
Okay, enough ego puffery - we've got work to do.
-- Bob Apthorpe
A big round of applause for Beth for her tireless effort - we all owe her big-time...
Today's non-smutty newsgroup is alt.food.peeps
-- Bob Apthorpe
No, really!
No "toy boats" these -
1:144-scale radio-controlled miniature warships fitted
with tiny bilge pumps and fully-functional main armament. Find a shallow pond,
divide into teams and wage war on the enemy! Do the ships sink? Of course! What
fun is it if you can't sink the other guy's battleship? Where's the challenge if
you have no chance to be sent to the bottom?
As you might imagine, there are several schools of limnetic warfare:
-- Bob Apthorpe
Have fun!
-- Bob Apthorpe
This goes way beyond Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" and the occasional
armload of
Harlequin Romances lifted by a disgruntled grocery checker, we're talking major
crime and
ancient dusty tomes. The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America has put
together its'
version of the Ten Most Wanted list - the Book
Security Alert on stolen books and forgeries.
Notably absent was the reported disappearance of certain books from the library at Miskatonic U. . . .
-- Bob Apthorpe
Yes, now you too can Throw A Dart In the Eye of Evil! Go poke out some virtual peepers now. Remember, don't do this at home, especially with real darts and real eyes. Do it at work or school and waste valuable computing resources while helping the The Tick fight evil.
You owe it to yourself. You owe it to America.
You owe it to The City.
-- Bob "He baked a muffin that stole my car" Apthorpe
A snippet spotted in Pilot Magazine and entered in Bike Magazine:
And speaking of the RAF, the UK airmen appear to have more of a sense of humour than with which we would first credit them:
Hey - here's another tangent for GURPS Tech fanatics: until GURPS Vehicles, 2nd Edition comes out, here's some aircraft design information you might find of use, courtesy of Virginia Polytechnic Institute. This evoked an audible reaction from me (sorry, engineering degrees will do that to you). No pictures (!) but gobs of references. Don't let Kromm see this. . .
-- Bob "Don't ask me about the NB-36 because I can probably tell you more than you really want to know" Apthorpe
Anyway, keep your eyes peeled and remember, these guys are to be considered armed and extremely dangerous, so don't try apprehending them at home.
-- Bob Apthorpe
In keeping with our committment to keep you informed of the important
news of the day, we bring you word of
The Exploding Head Page.
Yup, you guessed it - you pick the celebrity, point, click,
BOOM!
Hours of amusement and best of all, it isn't smutty
in the least. So plunk Junior and the twins down unattended in front of Netscape
and
let them explode heads to their underaged hearts' content.
The best part is that this page has already been "approved" by the Powers That Be. Yup, our pals at the Secret Service paid the author a visit to make sure he wasn't really planning on exploding Bob Dole's head. To the Secret Service's defense, that really is their job - protecting heads of state (pardon the pun) and other governmental poobahs. Still, you've got to wonder what credible threat is posed by a person with a scanner and a web page. At least the Secret Service has a tad more justifcation for their actions than, say, some twit Senator from Nebraska and his blue-nosed cronies...
Enough rantiness - "may the Good Lord take a likin' to ya and blow your head up real soon!"
-- Bob [XXXXXXXX]
First off, we really do have a new issue of Pyramid
heading to stores now. Issue 18 has a whole mess of neat stuff in it, including a
rare
INWO card previously available only in the French
magazine
Lotus Noir.
In other news, people have been asking me "So Bob, when are you going to go on another frothy rant about the Exon Bill - urp - Law?" I've thought about it and I decided I'd let it go - I found a very succint article on the subject by a man who spent over a decade as a Texas judge.
I must warn you, though, if direct and unambiguous speech offends you, do not read this. If you are a child or an idiot or a prude, go elsewhere. Peruse the rest of this site. Go lock yourself in the closet, bury your head in the sand, or go look at some pretty pictures of household appliances. Just don't read this:
THE X-ON CONGRESS: INDECENT COMMENT ON AN INDECENT SUBJECT
-- Bob [XXXXXXXX]
-- Bob [XXXXXXXX]
GURPS Ultra-Tech has returned from the printer and
is being shipped to distributors as
this is being written.
GURPS Ultra-Tech is a 128-page sourcebook for science-fiction technology, from the 21st century to the farthest reaches of the future. From the vacuum of interstellar space to the murderous intrigue of the court of the Galactic Empire, to the lowest dives of the asteroids, an adventurer is no better than his gear. GURPS Ultra-Tech, Second Edition, Revised has been reorganized for ease of use - equipment is now sorted by type, not by Tech Level.
-- Bob Apthorpe
I'm back from Utah. It was snowing there, but then, I missed an ice storm
here, so it all evens out.
I was at Life, the Universe and Everything 14. This was the convention that's actually a symposium on SF, sponsored by Brigham Young University. Definitely worthwhile! The academic speakers gave the panels an interesting flavor. I enjoyed it.
They also had a great Science Guest - Christian Ready, program coordinator for the Space Telescope Science Institute. That translates, according to the symposium's program book, as "responsible for the design, implementation and overall execution of observations taken aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Now that's what I call a neat job! He had a lot of beautiful photos to show. (And he plays INWO, and hadn't yet seen the Hubble Trouble card -- but he's got some now.)
And I got to tour three good science museums, plus the Mormon historical museum in Salt Lake City. Quite a week. Now back to the salt mines . . .
-- Steve Jackson
What am I talking about? Well, I got this in the mail recently:
"Just thought I'd point out a teensy little bug in the online ordering form. Pretend you're me. My name is Doug. I live at 123 Main Street in Saskatoon. Saskatoon is in the province of Saskatchewan. I mean, come on, you remember *Puerto Rico* and you forget Saskatchewan? :)"I was aghast - I thought I had included all the Canadian Provinces, the 50 states as well as Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia and the Armed Forces - America, Europe and Pacific postal codes. I rechecked the catalog, and lo: Saskatchewan was missing!
I'm not sure what the rest of Canada thought of this but neither I nor the proud people of Saskatchewan were pleased with my results. This problem has since been rectified: Saskatchewan has been added to the state & province list and the provincial digraph has been corrected (how I got SA instead of SK, I'll never know).
On the subject of Post Offices, I've got some interesting info for North Americans:
Again, my sincere apologies to the Province of Saskatchewan.
-- Bob Apthorpe
-- Bob Apthorpe
In other news, it's been pretty cold here in Austin. Unseasonably icy weather coupled with Texans' inherent inability to drive in Real Winter driving conditions provided Jim and I with hours of entertainment. We spent most of the day watching people cross the icy Bridge of Peril just north of the office. Watching the locals drive on ice has convinced me that working from home is a very good thing. . .
-- Bob Apthorpe