Which side would you join?

Shyal_malkes · Post by **Shyal_malkes** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 2:21 pm

I recall a tongue incident on this forum...

Sharuuk · Post by **Sharuuk** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 2:23 pm

MikeVanPelt wrote:There are a few things I'm not clear on --

Is this "our world" (more or less), or another? Are there nonsentient raccoons on it? If so, how close, physically, are our friends to them? I'm thinking this might be one way they could do reconnisaince with little chance of being detected, if they can move around on all fours. Perhaps... unless knowledge of the Rac'cona is very widespread among humans. In that case, any raccoon might be seen as suspicious.

I don't think a human has appeared in any of the strips yet, though they've been mentioned, and most Rac'cona seem to know about them. What do humans know about the Rac'cona? There was contact in the past, of course, and some trade is still going on somewhere to account for the human coins the gangstas are using.

As to the first question, our world possibly, but in "The Questorverse". And the Sojourner relegion was founded when a RacConan met a wandering Monk.....so yes there has been contact and unfortunetly conflict with humans.

EXCELLENT AVATAR......BTW....*cue: Londo voiceover* Excuse me.....have you seen my goot friend Meester Garibaldi?

S'aaruuk

Mutant for Hire · Post by **Mutant for Hire** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 2:56 pm

BlasTech wrote:Quickly! Get the fireproofs on, ready the extinguishers and somone bring the marshmellows!

Pah. Kids today. I was back on the Internet back in 1985, when all we had was USENET. We got proper flame wars back in those days, not this weak paltry stuff that passes for flame wars now.

BlasTech · Post by **BlasTech** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 3:01 pm

Thats progress for you

Maxgoof · Post by **Maxgoof** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:05 pm

Mutant for Hire wrote:
BlasTech wrote:Quickly! Get the fireproofs on, ready the extinguishers and somone bring the marshmellows!
Pah. Kids today. I was back on the Internet back in 1985, when all we had was USENET. We got proper flame wars back in those days, not this weak paltry stuff that passes for flame wars now.

Hah! Back in my day, we didn't have any fancy-schmancy internet. We had double u double u double u dot SQUAT!

Well, not exactly. We had bulletin boards. You had to dial in to each of them individually, download, disconnect, make your responses, reconnect, and upload. And there were lots of them.

Madmoonie · Post by **Madmoonie** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:23 pm

Hey...we ran across this music device in history class not too long ago...what was it called? Do you know what "record players" are?

Mutant for Hire · Post by **Mutant for Hire** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:39 pm

maxgoof wrote:Well, not exactly. We had bulletin boards. You had to dial in to each of them individually, download, disconnect, make your responses, reconnect, and upload. And there were lots of them.

That was what I was doing back in 1977, when I taught myself to read faster than 300 baud modems could dump the text on the screen. I'm afraid that the 110 baud modems were a little before my time. But you really didn't get good flame wars in those days, it was all minor leagues.

The JAM · Post by **The JAM** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 9:01 pm

Heh, I remember when Commodore adviced its consumers NOT to get a 9600 baud modem because it was too much for the C-64 and C-128....

Madmoonie · Post by **Madmoonie** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 11:01 pm

Apple IIE's were high-tech at my school when I was in kindergarton.

Mutant for Hire · Post by **Mutant for Hire** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 12:00 am

Madmoonie wrote:Apple IIE's were high-tech at my school when I was in kindergarton.

Commodore Pets and TRS-80's were state of the art when I started. And before that I actually learned to program on punch cards...

Tom Mazanec · Post by **Tom Mazanec** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:20 am

Apple II+ was my first PC. And I too learned to program on punched cards. You numbered them in case the rubber band broke. Each card punch had its foibles...one could not punch Es, another put a blank card after each card, another you had to backspace after each character, etc.

Mutant for Hire · Post by **Mutant for Hire** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:25 pm

That's Apple ][+, bucko, I had one too as the first personal computer I owned, with two humonous and noisy floppy drives too. Ah, memories...

Madmoonie · Post by **Madmoonie** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:27 pm

Mutant for Hire wrote:That's Apple ][+, bucko, I had one too as the first personal computer I owned, with two humonous and noisy floppy drives too. Ah, memories...

"floppy drives?"

Mikhail Dragoslav · Post by **Mikhail Dragoslav** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:46 pm

Regarding the Rac'Cona politics, I'm kind of interested in what the Diaspora has to say and why. What's their reasoning for scattering themselves?

RHJunior · Post by **RHJunior** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 7:46 pm

You know how it is. No way of living is so counterproductive or counter to reason that someone won't insist that we all adopt it....

the Diaspora movement is pretty much a movement by ninnies who romanticize the centuries of nomadic living prior to the settling of the Seven Villages. It's basically a Romantic movement, substituting the Carefree Gypsy for the Noble Savage

It does have a few members that are still wallowing in the lingering remains of Victim's Guilt--- "They wouldn't hate us if we hadn't done something wrong. We don't deserve our own nation...." But they're a vanishing few.

Mikhail Dragoslav · Post by **Mikhail Dragoslav** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 7:58 pm

Interesting...Is it my imagination or does the history of the Rac Cona Daimh: the Wandering Times, persecution by the Universal Truth, settling the Seven Villages, creating their own nation, the invasions, the politics, etc. remind anyone else of anything?

Tom Mazanec · Post by **Tom Mazanec** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:00 pm

A certain nation in the Middle East, perhaps?

Mikhail Dragoslav · Post by **Mikhail Dragoslav** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:09 pm

Perhaps.

RHJunior · Post by **RHJunior** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 12:30 am

It is modeled a good bit on that, yes. Some subtle differences, of course--- the fact that the Racconans were <I>establishing a nation for the first time,</i> not <I>reclaiming an ancestral homeland.</I>

The Racconans never had to deal with the people who tried to obliterate them sitting at the border and whining for thirty years about being "refugees."

Nor did the Racconans have a foreign religion suddenly proclaim their capital city a "holy site" and demand control of it. (Ahh Jerusalem. Settled by the Jews, built by the Jews, lived in by the Jews for thousands of years before Mohammed ever crapped his first diaper.... claimed by the Muslims. Why? Because their head holy hoo-ha had a dream about it once.)

And they're not exactly dealing with a constant parade of suicide bombers and other terrorist attacks, either.

So, just a FEW differences.

MikeVanPelt · Post by **MikeVanPelt** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 1:48 am

Mutant for Hire wrote:Commodore Pets and TRS-80's were state of the art when I started. And before that I actually learned to program on punch cards...

I started on an IBM 360/50; BASIC and PL/I on teletype, and FORTRAN on punch cards. Then, the school got a Univac 1110. Wonderful improvement! Instead of a deck of six or more JCL cards to copy a file, explaining to the mainframe what kind of disk it had, and how, in detail, the data was laid out on it, on the Univac, it was a simple "@copy oldfile newfile".

I also did a bit on a PDP8 and a Varian 620i. The Engineering dept. got an Altair 8080, which was Way Cool, even though it had only 128 bytes (not K, 128 individual bytes) of memory. Programmed with toggle switches, output via blinkenlights.