Game Tools: a different sort of height/weight chart.

It's common for gamers, especially male gamers to be unclear on exactly what the combination of a given height and weight really looks like; how often have you seen a 5'8" 130 lb. woman described as "petite" in a character description? Standard height/weight charts don't really give an idea of what people of a given height and weight look like.

Enter the Photographic Height/Weight Chart,  which uses pictures of real people in its categories.  While it's far from perfect, it should be useful for someone who has an idea of what their character looks like, and from there they can figure out the  weight.

Bollywood goes Military Industrial Complex

Or to be more accurate, an Israeli defense company goes pseudo-Bollywood in a video for the Indian defense ministry's annual air show. The result...is...not good. We have the flower -draped missiles, a George Michael clone for the male singer and the desultory dancers, but really what brings on the pain is the refrain: Dinga dinga dee!

Be careful watching this, lest one's love for Bollywood be damaged.

( Dinga dinga dee! )

UTGM: Basic cosmology

(Since my writing on the major political powers in the setting is still giving me fits, I'll discuss the cosmology of the world.   This is really just a rough description of what you'll see in the night sky: but that's important enough, as the night sky of UTGM is different.)


THE NIGHT SKY :

Over the last couple millenia of the current age, hundreds of cultures have watched and defined the night sky in their own terms, from the poetic, to the mythical, to the nascent scientific.  All agree on what the major features appear to be, even if they disagree on the meaning.  So rather than reciting any of the hundreds of mythologies and religions, let's simply describe what your average inhabitant may see at night.

From nearest to furthest:

The Great Arc/Heaven's Arc/Heaven's Stream: There is a swiftly moving around the earth, one most visible at sunrise and sunset as a giant gold band, and at night as a stream thousands of swiftly moving stars. As the names suggest, this stream of planets has held an important place in many mythologies, often as a pathway between the heavens and the earth.  Those with the best vision or seeing magics who observe during twilight say that many of the brightest wandering stars in the Great Arc actually have shapes of circles, rods, and rings, but the rest are simply bright particles, like the planets, except closer and swifter moving.

The Moon: Beyond the ring is the Moon, which is indeed green, though it also has a band of blue around it..  It's continents and oceans are well charted, as well as the lights that are visible on the darkened parts.  Even the  lights that slowly move have their winding paths mapped.

The Wandering Stars: There are thousands, perhaps millions of wandering stars, filling the night sky  in a luminous cloud that keeps even the moonless nights from being completely dark.  Notable among these countless wanderers are Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the bright blue Mars, but there are hundreds of other distinctive planets known. 

The Fixed Stars: A few ancient legends say that once these were the most common inhabitants of the night sky.  But now, only a few fixed stars can occasionally be glimpsed from behind the Wandering Stars, and even they are usually obscured.