I imagine, if we *were* to do something other than a quick layover on Mars, it would be something like the Soviet plan for planetary observation - see, contrary to the "space race" mythos they weren't really interested in going to the moon. There's nothing of value on the moon, it's just neato. What they wanted to do was build a massive rocket (still to date the most powerful rocket ever built - I mean look at this shit it's star wars calibur shit http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/russia/n1-1.jpg - yes that's 30 rocket engines in the first stage). You would then use *several* of these massive rockets to lift various pieces of a space station into orbit, using rendezvous missions to construct the platform piece by piece. Then you would send up additional rockets and attach them for propulsion to another planet (initially the plan was for Venus, but once it was discovered that Venus is a literal hell-scape with acid rain, Mars was picked as the alternative target). Then you would just float the platform to Mars, and it would be a base of operations for an extensive study of the planet and its moons, and any manned missions to the planet itself would be supported by the space platform orbiting Mars itself.

The benefit of this, is that you don't have to worry about colonizing Mars, you don't have to worry about it being a one-way trip, and you can carry myriad supplies and scientific implements in the on-board storage of the facility (it doesn't matter how oddly shaped you are in space so long as your propulsion system can get you going in the right direction without making you spin in circles). Then you just dump any new supplies and astronauts on the platform orbiting Mars, and periodically, you bring samples and people back home. You can also just ship new pieces for the space station as needed if any upgrades are required.

Unfortunately the whole program was scrapped because the N1 rocket kept tearing itself apart :(

C&C and Red Alert 1 will always hold a special place in my heart. First RTS' I ever played.

RA2 made me mad because GI's were so fucking strong lol but it was still fun.

It's most likely a routing issue - it can even happen to servers in the same city (for example server A. is in city X, as is server B. however server B gives 150+ ping for inexplicable reasons).

Chances are, the server itself or one of the places you use to *get* to that server is especially heavily loaded, under maintenance, or malfunctioning somehow, so you're being routed to some wacky place first, and then back again.

I know the worst example I ever had, was for some reason, one night whenever I tried to connect to a Chi ESEA server, my internet would *start* to go to Chi, and then turn around and go to NY ---) Washington DC and THEN to Chicago - which is a pretty *big* trip out of the way (which cave me 150+ ping for a server I could drive to fairly easily) lol. If you can find out who hosts the server, you can try contacting your ISP and/or the server provider and asking if they're having some sort of problem - occasionally they can actually fix such routing issues for you. I know Tooth had to do that with NFO servers lol they were just doing wacky things with his ISP.

If you're on windows you can look at where you're going this way:

CMD --) tracert (IP here) for example: tracert 192.510.253 etc etc

That will then give you a listing of a bunch of ips - then you just google "iplookup" and type in the IPs it gives you to see where they are geographically to find out what the hold up is - you may also see places timing out which can mean outtages or overload etc.

Hopefully they can get the servers this 6 meg patch and all will be good and happy and keep next week clean lol.

It all depends on who you end up living with (unless you're lucky and live alone) and how far away you are.

If it's a significant commute (sometimes I lived ~30 mins from campus - sometimes I lived a short walk away lol) that'll change things up somewhat.

The easiest thing to do for furniture and utensils, is almost every year during the moving-in phases the actual local people there will have garage sales almost without fail - you just have to walk around a bunch to find out who is selling their old junk.

If you're relatively far away, find a spot to chill - I always hung out in the library basement because it was almost always deserted and had couches in it that I could use - and most of the best books. Libraries are also the best place to meet new people lol.

Make friends with your neighbors and share food with them.

Story time:

After being thrown out of the dorms and also having a kid midway through sophomore year, I had to find somewhere to live quickly because I had an *extremely* long commute from home, I ended up living with 2 women who happened not to be interested in men. It was *really* nice, They could cook, kept relatively quiet, helped me take care of baby on occasion, and did generally fun stuff fairly regularly. The only downside was that it was a duplex, and we had the upstairs so it was always super hot in the summer. But it could've been worse. After they both graduated I ended up living in a *large* house that had been cut up into apartments with Palestinians, and that was by far one of the better parts of my life lol, and then the following year I got my own house (I had a great summer job and a professor went on sabbatical and wanted somebody to keep the house lol) where my girlfriend at the time and I could live with kiddo, Living in the dorms was fun, but living off campus proved to be *way* more fun. Plus I got to have my own room so my not sleeping at night wasn't as bothersome.

Don't be so anxious about the future rankings of the IM teams, in the further future we'll all be dead anyways.

I brought mine - but that was 2006 :p so lap tops were garbage tier at that time. But some people did really like machines that took 4-5 minutes to start up and be usable.

It depends on where I am, if I'm at home I sneeze loud as fuck, if I'm in public I try to keep it to a reasonable level, and I am a father.

I will be much more excited if we end up naming the team: The 1942 Spring Offensive.

My home state has been getting *all* the luck lately :/

I hear a rumor that we're all paid up. The return campaign begins :/

I like coaching, but it's not something I can do every week.

In the main, I find it's best to just give each person a few simple responsibilities, and then I spend some time watching them to make sure they're at least attempting to carry these out and if not I attempt to shame them into conformity or just repeat myself over and over until they finally do the desired thing lol.

The most important thing is helping them to recognize when it is and is not OK to die and when they shouldn't care if they die or not - and where best to stand given that particular situation. Then you shame them if they still fail. I don't really worry about individual situations and actions outside of that - because they will basically have to be taken pure and learned through experience. You can tell a guy "you should do x there" but it won't really make sense to them - they don't know why, typically, they should be doing x, and they won't have the experience to recognize that the situation is such that they should do "x" when it happens again in the future.

I also try to foist responsibilities onto the flank players - making sure they try to keep each other in line so you don't have scouts trying to peek doors constantly.

I also spend the first 1-2 rounds calling exclusively *or* for a change of pace let them hang on their own for a round or 2, particularly if it's a later mix, to see if they attempt to apply things other coaches have taught them - then call exclusively for a round or two. In part to provide them with an example of *why* a leader is needed.

For an example of shaming, I'll ask the medic if they know how to keep track of ubers - usually they say yes actually. Sometimes you'll get the poor guy or gal that says "I have no idea what I'm doing" and I go a bit more in-depth and take it easier on them. But if they *do* say yes, I'll ask them what ubers are like *constantly* and if they're wrong or don't know I chastise them about how it's their "only" job lol. Usually it works.

For the record I don't like the donk.

The *main* complaint I have with it is that its hitbox feels gigantic.

The jag was also banned once, and now it's back also. It can happen :D

I can certainly understand why he'd be upset - mainly because when you cast fairly regularly (there have been periods where I've cast every game in a season for a casting org - I remember there was a spell with EXTV that if I didn't do the cast; the cast didn't happen) you end up putting off a lot of things you'd rather to be doing in order to cast, because you feel some sort of attachment to the community, the folks you do the casts with, and so on, an obligation if you will, and then when a big cast comes up, you're suddenly cut out - it feels like those sacrifices that you made meant nothing and were not taken seriously (I luckily have avoided such situations mainly by clearly communicating my positions to the people who organize such casts well in advance lol).

The simple fact of the matter is that this could've been avoided with better communication on both sides, despite whatever fanfare may exist for a particular caster it's *good* to rotate in new people and old people even if they don't want to cast regularly, because it *does* drain you to cast several games per week every week for a long period of time - and also builds the expectation that you will be needed in such ways in the future. I know that to be the case for camera types too ;)

Hopefully he'll carry on casting if folks enjoyed it though - casting is quite a lot of fun if you have the itch and get on well with any co-casters you may have (though I secretly long for a repeat of my solo-cast open finals from years ago lol).

People can survive some pretty crazy stuff - the guy largely held responsible for the Chernobyl accident, who took a tremendous amount of radiation, lived into his 80's. They lucked out that the explosion occurred at night, and that the warehouse that actually exploded was relatively far away from the city center itself - for a city with 13 million inhabitants, the fact that only 90,000 people live within a 5 KM radius of the warehouse counts for "sparsely populated" I guess.

Xi Jinping (president of China) announced that the executives of the warehouse company have "been taken into custody" which is probably code for everything will be blamed on them and a few of them will likely be executed to appease public sentiment unless it turns out to be arson.

They've also raised the death toll - we'll see what happens with the pollution on site in the coming months likely - so far they're saying everything *should* be relatively OK.

I wouldn't say the Chinese state is in full cover-up mode because they've got plenty of pretty gnarly photographs on Xinhua new's website, and if we can see that then people in China can lol.

Also according to official Chinese news they're also acknowledging that certain very dangerous chemicals were stored there, that the plant (as of this morning Saturday) was still on fire, and that several of the containers which are thought to hold sodium cyanide are still sealed - although some aren't properly labeled and some aren't even on record as having been there at any point. They're thinking the reason the explosion was so large is because some of the stuff stored there were highly volatile nitrates (basically explosives lol).

They're also reporting that various dangerous chemicals *have* been detected in sewage and in several "monitoring stations" but that those levels are dropping - which I suppose should be expected.

Another interesting factoid is they're apparently dousing the site in hydrogen peroxide because apparently hydrogen peroxide neutralizes sodium cyanide, as a precaution - although I doubt that'll help the fire much.

Here is an aerial photograph from Chinese media: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2015-08/15/134519922_14396077929531n.jpg