So I was driving down the highway and in front of me I saw a car with a license plate that said

<3UBRBTL (for those of you who are unfamiliar with <3 it is a heart)

I read it as - I Love UBeR BTLs (Better Then Life)

It made me smile on the inside. Has anyone else had an experience like that?

No.

You are utterly alone in the world.

That is all.

Every day, little buddy.

You need to go back on your medication. Immediately. And if you're not on medication, go rob a pharmacy and get on some.

That said, yes, I've had Shadowrun moments creep into my daily observations before. I can't even begin to mention the number of times I've tried to give stats to characters in movies while I'm watching them, then immediately mentally slapping myself for doing so instead of paying attention.

Well, truth be told the other day I was at work doing a whole lot of nothing during a slow period, and actually was wishing I had a comlink and AR capabilities.

First thing I think of when I wake up and half my thoughts while driving to work. But I'm also a GM and I'm desperately trying to keep up with writing new adventures for my weekly group.

I've had Shadowrun moments regarding who might be following/spying on me, and the best way to off annoying co-workers without alerting the authorities. I've had more problem with GTA, since it's more visual. There are a couple times I'd see a white dude in a grey hoody skulking around and I'd almost swerve over to hit him and collect all his drug money.

+ When you try to convince your girlfriend (currently debating buying lizards) to let you name them Dunkelzahn, Lofwyr, Celedyr, and Hestaby
+When you wish that you could do your job in virtual reality so that you'll get all of those cool icons instead of boring worksheets
+...and realize that your job'll probably enforce a reality filter so that you're still looking at sheafs of paper
+You do this any time you're standing somewhere waiting for something (post office, mall, girlfriend at mall...)
+You spent a half an hour looking through XKCD strips to find that one comic

especially after an all too long game when i am tired and have too much caffeine in my blood . .
my mother once had one of those little glowy things set up in the hallway, without telling me . . so i opened up the door, and see some red dots on the wall creeping into my general direction . . i hit the floor x.x
other time i actually asked my buddy who offered to drive us home why the other cars had better stats than his . .

See, I read that as "Love Urban Battle." Just as geeky, completely different. Viva la difference! And, yes, I realize the letters don't actually fit for that...dyslexia for the win!

It's all Geek to me.

*giggles*

See, I read your post, chuckled, and went to take a shower. As I was idly lathering, I was wondering what exactly a Universal Brotherhooder BTL was. Then I realised you meant uber BTL, not UBer BTL.

So yeah, I have meta-shadowrun obsession.

In what part of the world can have a Greater Than character in a license plate? Where I live you can only have letters and numbers.

You can have personalized license plates I think you can get in any part of the U.S. The only difference is it costs more money so a lot of people don't do it. Also I think people who live in more urban areas have personalized license plates, and you have to look for it. When you are driving how often do you look at people license plates, unless you are stuck in some shitty traffic and have nothing better to do? I think that is the clincher right there.

For what I have seen though CA, and MA are the two states that I have seen have more then letters and numbers. Remember it wasn't this < plus 3 it was an actual drawing of a heart but since the internet only allows me to do <3 instead of actually drawing out a heart... well you know...

Yesterday me and my best friend were talking about crosswalks.

Me: "I always go out of my way to use crosswalks."
Him: "What if you need to cross the street and the nearest crosswalk is almost a mile away?"
Me: "What city were you in that had a crosswalk a mile away?"
Him: "Redmond."
Me: "Well that dooesn't count, you were in the Barrens."
Him: *pointed look*
Me: "Oh, right."

The only real SR moment (We've had so many D&D nerd moments over the years it doesn't near thinking about) that we had was with my ex-wife, who wasn't even one of the Players, but who often watched us at it, when seeing a Dale Earnhardt crash who quipped: "Damn, ten dice at least and still a rule of 1s."

Isshia

I'm actually excited about the possibility of moving to Seattle - for the Awakening, which happens soon. That is a real reason.

My friends and I loosely stat each other, ourselves, and random people who we think of up.

Less like application of SR in the real world, more SR-like. I find that my mind spends its free time figuring out where all the security camera are, how I could get into an area unseen, how to disable large equipment, etc. I worked with a former Special Forces guy and he did this all the time - which is to be expected. I have no military background and find that I still do this all the time.

So you are an secret special forces guy who's waitin for his mental command.

I think thats a perfectly sane and reasonable explanation.

I do that too. And when I go shopping with my girlfriend, I keep an eye on the windows and mirrors, looking for tails. "That creep in the yellow shirt has been following us around for the last 4 shops. You must look great today dear." "No, I wasn't paying attention to the girl in the red spaghetti top with nice boobs and great ass... oops"

I also tend to take notice of bulges in people's pockets(no, they are not really happy to see me), which hand they use to write(gun hand), etc. I can tell accurately which pocket they are going to reach into to get their car keys and which hand they are going to use - freaks out the girlfriend, I can tell you.

So,does Shadowrun make us paranoid or give us a heightened awareness of the world we live in?

Its good to know that I'm not the only one who does this stuff!

Yesterday I was working on a refrigerator at a large trucking company warehouse and ran a mental assessment of the security. A couple of chipheads with survival knives could take this place. no maglocks or scanners anywhere, cameras set at bad angles, no armed guards at all.

Um, ok, maybe I take it a little further than most...

I did this anyway before I started playing shadowrun--though I think I've stepped it up since--I just have better resources/contacts in game than IRL.

I have taken to saying "frag" and "fragging" so much my 58-year-old business partner has picked it up. It was a proud moment, I can tell you.

I'm guilty of checking out the security of places and the "choreographing fight scenes." I actually regard that as a virtue and it amazes me that some people don't think like that. I remember in Nottingham people being asked to leave a bank just as I'd walked in and I asked what was going on. One of the other customers said: "I think it's a bomb scare." By about the end of that sentence I was down the other end of the street and still accelerating. How people could still be standing outside a glass-fronted building wondering if there was a bomb in there is utterly beyond me. Though I suppose I should envy their ignorance in a way.

Yeah, it's a basic self-defense/preservation skill many people seem to lack. About a week ago I was helping a friend pick up her pieces at the Cuesta ceramics lab, when she thought she detected a gas leak in the massive gas-fired kiln there.

While she went inside to discuss it with the teacher, I put as much distance and as many heavy cement buildings between me and the ceramics lab as possible. I don't quite understand it, we've both seen footage of a gas explosion, and I know she isn't stupid--but oh well.

It's just less competition for survival, I guess. Like the people who are so amazed that I can walk a few blocks with out the aid of a motor-vehicle.

yeah, likewise when people thought I was psychotic for riding my bike 20 miles round trip to work during the summer or walking home 7 miles from a party when I was too drunk to drive. People can't seem to comprehend expending effort to survive. Survival loosely exaggerated as we all well know that in this day and age, even the dumbest and most inept will survive and social darwinism and natural selection have been halted by society.

I also find myself surveying all of my surroundings. I remember that it takes a threshold of 3 to see small items and 4 to see micro items, and I'll look around scenes till I deem that in RL I have achieved a threshold of 4 on my perception test. Don't want to miss those coins people leave on the ground...

Oh yeah, and I have actually toyed with the idea of moving to Seattle more or less out of what i have read from the SR fiction... I'd say that qualifies me to be an uber SR geek.

heh, i know that feel, only i want VR!

I was stripping and cleaning my M4 yesterday (yes, I am in the Army) and I tried to figure out where the best place for the smartlink's camera would be.

Did you find a good one?

... when you call picking up your friend at work an "extraction."

... when you refuse to buy a med kit from the pharmacy unless it's Rating 6.

... when something goes horribly wrong and you think, "okay, now it's a shadowrun." [This one's from my girl.]

My wife and I play "The World is becoming Shadowrun" when we watch or read the news, figuring out which news item is a SR-esque conspiracy (or should be). Sometimes we have to go really out of our way to make it fit, but it's scary how many things need no tqeaking out all to fit right in the SR universe. The recent focus on Georgia, while Obama was out on vacation and McCain was around, so that the news could waggle their fingers at Obama was one example. Sure that may not be exactly how it went, but it makes for a great example of SR politics.

Yeah, the bayonet lug. I mean, why bother? They don't even issue us damn bayonets any more.

In any case, I came up with another. I'm currently deployed to Iraq and I was talking to a Kurdish Iraqi Army the other day (who spoke surprisingly good English, by the way), and kept thinking to myself, "This fragger is working for Aden, I know it."

How about when I called to have someone pick me up and errantly remarked that "the LZ is green."

Or maybe when I looked at the massive amount of housecleaning I had to do and wished for a hearth spirit.

Referring to almost any new movie as "Shadowrun with ..."

Calling UAV's, Roombas, and industrial robots "drones."

I'm a bad one for casing places out. Cameras, security, mirrors, ways to ignore or avoid them, all that fun stuff.
In addition: Carrying a knife everywhere I go
Knowing how to make a small gun from some wood, a knife, five nails, and a rubber band
Being able to walk into a room full of boobytraps(some hardcore paintballing), and either avoid/disarm/set off prematurely/etc every single one without the guy in the next room noticing.

And my ultimate accomplishment: Being with people in an open field, leave without anyone noticing, and come back without anyone noticing.

Does fantasizing about hot elves while making out count?

Are you implying some people don't do this?

After seeing some particularly disturbing sexual acts on the internet, wondering what it would be like if those involved trolls and dwarves instead...

But where did these "interests" and skills come from? Did you first do them in your SR games?

Given that I carry a gun with me pretty much where ever I go...

I always position myself in places where my back is up against the wall / in a corner. That way, no one can sneak up on me.

I also survery the area to determine the best / safest ingress/egress routes along with secondary & tertiary ones.

I pay attention to door & people placement as well as security systems. One place I worked at had a laptop stolen from the 3rd floor one weekend. Happened during my shift while working on the 2nd floor. The police wanted to talk with me (duh). I explained to them the ease of access to the facility to one that did NOT have an access card. In fact, the place could be entered by someone waving a legal notepad or flyswatter between the doors. Gotta love motion sensors. The police officer sarcastically thanked me for making his job that much easier.

It's not that I am an expert on B&E, it's just that I pay attention more than the average bear. Because of this, I see things everyone else ignores. Drives my kids nuts (especially when it comes to Sense Motives, hehe). Has driven my wife to pay more attention and ask me for help in developing those skills. It's kind of funny in that a boot camp saying is so very pertinent... 'Attention to detail, Recruit!'

As for stats, we've both got healthy Firearms skills with specialization in Pistols.

My best accomplishment in Stealth... walking across a woman's yard (trick-or-treating) while she was looking right at me and I still startled her when I said "Trick-or-Treat". She apparently did NOT see me walk up.

All of that pretending to be a ninja as a child has translated well into adulthood. I often startle people at the office by sneaking up on them accidentally.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine. I said that when the awakening comes, and I turn into a troll. I want to hide in his attic so that I don’t have to go to one of the camps. The only condition he came up with was I had to keep a diary. So that when he sold me out he could sell it, and make a profit.

Sometimes I imagine upping my accidental dismemberment insurance and sawing off my left arm so I can afford a cyberarm.

You know you're an SR geek when.....

you mentally figure how many d6's you'll need to make your train on time.
you mentally picture the tallest person you know as a Troll.
you mentally picture the skinniest girl you know as a hot bisexual elf.
you keep bugging the guy at GameStop for when the new commlinks will arrive.
you keep checking the company's business profile to see if they got bought out by a Dragon yet.
you look at R/C commericals & wonder where you could mount a pistol on it.
you watch Ghost In The Shell & wonder where the heck are the elves?.
you support Native American rights....just in case.

All of your characters have SOTA weapons and augmentations but live in a dumpster.

when you sit at a live football game (for me it was a college game) and wondered why they couldnt put up an AR in the arena so you could see little tags coming off the players, telling you whom is whom, basic stats, etc.. seeing where the line of scrimmage is, where the "first down line" is, etc. And as I sit here wondering where it all is.. the geek came out in me, and was designing the sensors arrays including placement, where to place the RFID-isq tags on the players/ball, and how it would be easy to put a LCD type film over your glasses (sunglasses in my case) where that info could be displayed. (this was the conversation I had with myself last sat).

at work I wish we had RFID tags on our badges so I could track down co-workers and see "what zone they are in" to see if it is safe to track them down or not.

All the time chummer. All the time.

I actually earned the nickname "ninja" (hence TKD Ninja In Black with TKD for TaeKwonDo) because I took my ninja fantasies from my childhood a bit too far. In college I created a game with all of my dormmates (roommates and neighbors) called "ninja attack." Assuming you weren't seen before you jumped out and hit someone (in a vital would-be knife or blade kill zone) you scored a point. If you were seen, no good. We kept tally for a couple of months but everybody stopped playing because I was winning by 4 times as many points as everyone else combined. Seems nobody else had the conviction to climb trees and wait for opponents walking through the quad and jump down right behind them. Now it makes sense why I always failed a class or two a semester...

Every day I think of something shadowrunish to the point ive been tempted to try to throw together a ghetto Shadowrun LARP

You know you're an SR geek when you're involved in a nasty accident, and one of your first coherent thoughts upon waking up in the hospital is that a cyberskull would have really prevented a lot of drama and medical bills.

Actually, I'm lying. I didn't think that all. My first thoughts were more along the lines of "WTF!?" and "She can't have said perforating head injury, I'd be a fraggin' vegetable if there was an exit wound."

On a lighter note, man, does it feels good to be posting again. I've had a rough summer and the stupid car accident kind of killed my first attempt at a long running campaign as a GM.

Well, I for one am glad to see you came through with your sense of humor apparently intact.

Oh, and I actually ran a Google search looking for Ares Macrotechnology last week. I didn't really think I'd get any non-SR returns (which I didn't, by the way), but it was fun hoping.