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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Amiable Dorsai
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Content count
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Joined
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Last visited
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Days Won
17
Posts posted by Amiable Dorsai
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1 hour ago, Zorua said:I got a comment on my Powers story. Man, is it a wall of text. Very few capitals, next to no punctuation, and no paragraph breaks.
Back some time in the Jurassic, I wrote a few Harry Potter fanfics. Most of the comments I got were from people who could communicate in written English. Some were not.
The latter category often provided interesting puzzles. I never did figure out a few of them.
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Somewhere, Siannis and Royko are sharing a few beers, and Goodman is frantically revising lyrics while listening to their jokes.
Apologies to non-Chicagoans for references you may need to Google, but Mrs. Dorsai just told me that the impossible has happened. I'm croggled.
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2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:I know how that feels. I normally don't consider myself sportsball people but back in 1992 I watched the European soccer championship religiously because Denmark had made it into it because of an eleventh-hour cancellation. When Denmark won the championship I was sitting with friends yelling loudly at the TV screen like a maniac.
Maybe that's it, everyone seems so happy. If I had a sport I followed, I suppose it would be baseball, just because so many of my people follow it and there's a social aspect that it would be nice to share. There are "Go Cubs go! signs everywhere; if they win I think the city will go nuts.
13 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:ETA: Wow, it was at least ten minutes before I heard a single chorus of "Go Cubs Go!" (Noone ever seems to sing any of the verses, only that damnably repetitive chorus....)
"Hey Chicago! Whadaya say? The Cubs are gonna to win today!" Beats listening to the "Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request" which I think will get a revival if they lose the Series. Funny that the same guy wrote both the most upbeat and the most downbeat songs about the same team. Steve Goodman left us too soon.
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Mrs. Dorsai watched the Cubs, Our Cubs, the Chicago Cubs win the 5th game of the World (yeah, yeah, spare me) Series. Neither of us are sports fans. We both, somehow, care. The Cubs are in the Series. It feels like an alternate reality.
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8 hours ago, hkmaly said:Would definitely be more interesting and would teach you something about physics, but it wouldn't be any more realistic. You can't see atom because you need photons to see and photons are "too big" (have too big wavelengths) for that. At least the photons which won't kill anyone around (except Hulk).
Ray shrinking to 50% and not dying fast is already physically impossible due to various square-cube laws effects. If he's using magic like Rhoda ("sweet" magic), he can be just as able to avoid any unfortunate sideefects of shrinking under Schwarzschild radius.
Yep.
I did learn a lot of science from the comics.
Sadly, I had to unlearn a lot of it.
My first laser was a HeNe, about 10 milliwatts. Huge for a HeNe, not so huge for a kid who wanted to blow stuff up. I actually managed to make a hologram, though the druggist down the street who developed it was sure there was a mistake. we had a pre
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19 hours ago, hkmaly said:They always are. What you expect will change? That they will get into visible superposition?
Oh my, what a picture.
Back in the sixties Ray Palmer (The Atom) would occasionally shrink to the point where he could see individual atoms. Sometime after, I read George Gamov's Mr Thompkins stories, about an ordinary man who gets to see what happens when various physical constants, like the speed of light or Planck's constant, changed to the point where relativity or the uncertainty principle became palpable. Would that whoever was writing The Atom back then had read those stories. The comics would have been more entertaining, and I could have truthfully told Mom that I was learning something. :-)
On the other hand, if Ray shrank to below his own Schwarzschild radius, the series would have ended rather abruptly.
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If shear determination can fuel magic, Catalina and her clothes are about to be subject to quantum mechanics. . . and not just in a statistical way.
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12 hours ago, Scotty said:A few....hmm probably 15 or so, years ago, some one in where we think was New York, kept trying to send faxes to our phone number. the phone would ring, we'd answer and all we got was the loud screeching that sounded like a 56k modem having a seizure.
This went on every half hour during business hours for 3 days.
Oh lord, this happened to a friend whose lab had only one line back in 19(mumble). Shortly thereafter, we had a salesguy in to demo a new, all-singing, all-dancing fax machine that had all kinds of interesting and useful-looking features. The one he was most proud of was the machine's ability to keep on trying until the fax went through or the Sun died.
I insisted we turn that one off.
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On 8/10/2016 at 0:46 PM, Vorlonagent said:...which means the mightiest tree in the forest feels safer...
Utnill we cut it up to make decks. . . .
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So who or what would you choose? This being EGS, and me having knowledge the interviewee almost certainly doesn't have, I think I'd choose to be an Immortal.
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4 minutes ago, Stature said:It is still a Monday NP??
Surely you could edit it yourself, mate.
Wow, I could! I don't think we could do that before The Crash, could we?
Surely, it's still Monday somewhere.
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Yeep! Munged the title. Hack?
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9 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:The Doctor Who costume I think impressed me the most was a TARDIS dress which had a clasp at the waist which the maker could unhook, and swing the front of the dress open to reveal a gorgeous TARDIS interior panel. Haven't been able to find a picture of it yet. There've been some awesome Weeping Angels, too, although those have to be performed right to really work!
ETA: Found it!
That's brilliant, I love it!
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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:Except it's quite likely Raven is also much HARDER target for possession.
Yep. No pain, no gain. I don't have any real feel for how much of a risk taker Sirleck is, but the prize of a quasi-immortal body like Raven's has to be mighty tempting, especially if he thinks all he would have to face after possessing Raven is the Addled Immortals. If he knew someone like Pandora would be gunning for him, he'd probably run away screaming.
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Just getting back from a new (yet another new) sleep doc. I actually have some hopes for this one-- he didn't suggest yet another sleep study to see if I have apnea (I do, the CPAP handles it, can we move on?), nor try to prescribe the latest, greatest, new sleeping pill. Instead, he actually listened to what I had to say, described the course of therapy he recommends, and gave me some homework in the form of a sleep diary.
This might actually work.
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On 7/22/2016 at 5:56 PM, Scotty said:A few clouds
32°C
Feels like 40
Blarg.
We were in Glasgow, Scotland one summer when the heat in Chicago was literally killing people (mostly elderly, infirm people with no access to air-conditioning), a Scotsman who was complaining about the 32 °C temperature asked me about how hot it was back home. When I said 40 °C (104 °F), he exclaimed, "I finally understand why Americans always want ice in their drinks!"
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Two powerful entities are about to duke it out in Grace's mind. At least one of them will not feel bound by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. Poor Grace.
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I use three different computers on a fairly regular basis. The one I'm on now is Windows 7. It's mostly fine for my purposes, though I occasionally miss features of XP. The other two were Windows 8, which I despised, but Win 10 filled me with fear and loathing. I forgot to lock down the least used of the Win 8 machines, the one I travel with, and it got the stealth upgrade while I was at a science fiction convention. I liked it so much more than Win 8 that I installed it on the remaining Win 8 machine.
Win 10 is actually pretty good if you have a touchscreen, but this machine is a desktop that can't take advantage of it. It stays Win 7 for now.
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7 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:. . . As for why they wouldn't have noticed each other, we do know that Ashley is from California. When did she move to Moperville? Ashley's first appearance in story-time comes after Family Ties, so it's the new year and the spring semester. Ashley could have been at Moperville North for only a few days before she hooked up with Elliot. Another point: Ashley seems surprised that it's going to be very cold somewhere near Chicago in January. Kind of like she still hasn't shaken California out of her head yet, no?
Ashley's been in Moperville long enough to form a close friendship with Liz and to have gone to the movies with her the previous summer. She seems to have been so focused on impressing Elliot that the weather was, at best, a secondary concern. Which is an interesting aspect of her personality--she can get so focused on something (the date, a book) that everything else fades into the background. Just a quirk, or does Dan have plans?
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5 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:As far as I'm concerned, "ain't" is perfectly fine, but it's also useful for conveying information about the speaker when writing dialogue.
Yes, usually implies a lower-status individual. I was quite startled by one of PG Wodehouse's early Blandings Castle stories when Lord Emsworth (a not too bright, but definitely upper-crust character) used "ain't" several times. I believe Lord Ickenham (otherwise known as Uncle Fred), a very bright character, also used the word once or twice. Wodehouse had an excellent ear for English, it seems unlikely that these were accidents on his part.
Both characters' formative years would have been late nineteenth century, so I surmise that "ain't was a word in good standing then.
Of course, I just thought to check, there's a Wikipedia article that discusses this very thing. I wonder how good it is.
Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)
in Off Topic Discussion
Posted
That fact gives me some small hope that the Republican-controlled Congress won't simply roll over for him. I also hope that he fulfills his campaign promise and appoints a new Justice as much like Scalia as possible--those "checks and balances" are about to get a serious workout, and a principled originalist might be just what we need to salvage the Bill of Rights. It would also be nice if the new Justice had enough respect for stare decicis to uphold Obergefell v. Hodges.
And I want a pony.