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detrius

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Posts posted by detrius

  4. Posted

    3 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Here is.

    OK, why did Grace's cloths just become full sized?

    If you look at her face, you'll notice how tired she is.

    She just shrank herself and her clothes to the maximum degree. My guess is that she has to actively keep this up and the final transformation just drained the last bit of energy from her, so she now needs some time to recover.

  8. Posted

    2 hours ago, ijuin said:

    An in-universe justification for wands would be that they are much more maneuverable and concealable than staves—and concealment was important when the Masquerade was a major concern.

    In that case, you'd see enchanted everyday items such as pens, watches, lighters and pocket knives instead of wands.

    Staves and canes also used to be part of everyone's EDC kit (Every Day Carry) until about 100 years ago, so they would have been rather inconspicuous items.

    The main reason why they went out fashion is because modern-day cities are much cleaner than cities just a few decades ago. There's literally much less shit on the streets nowadays, so most people don't need a third leg to avoid slipping.

    Just look up Col. George E. Waring Jr., who in 1895 led an army of white-uniformed street cleaners into New York to remove millions of tons of feces, corpses and urine from the streets: http://scrapyardexhibit.org/the-colonel-who-cleaned-up-new-york/

    So I guess it would make sense if at least historically, magic staves were a lot more common than magic wands.

  9. Posted

    4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    In Danish the word for them is 'tryllestang' or 'tryllestav', respectively 'magic stick' or 'magic staff', usually referring to something wand-sized.

    Well, in Germany we say "Zauberstab", which of course means exactly the same thing.

    Quote

    Sports referees over the ages have been known to carry small rods or wands to point at or prod players they wished to instruct or penalise. A poke with a wand is faster than saying "You're out" and clarifying whom you mean. In this instance I am particularly thinking of wargames and military exercises. The point is, as @detrius indicates, the wand serves as a symbol of authority both physically and symbolically. In this case it is small because a player who is counted out will probably appreciate not having it driven home by a club. :danshiftyeyes:

    An even better example might be the baton used by a conductor to direct an ensemble of musicians.

    Haylo and The Old Hack reacted to this

  10. Posted

    This strip made me wonder about wands, specifically the traditional black-and-white wand of stage magicians.

    When you think about it, a wand is actually quite useless. It's not good as a weapon or as a kitchen utensil. You could use it for stirring, but you'd replace it with a spoon as soon as possible (and some witches in folklore actually use spoons rather than wands). They're a bit too big if you wanted to use them as chopsticks and you'd need two of them anyway. They're also not pointy or sturdy enough to be used as needles.

    And yet wands are "a thing".  We're not calling them "straight-sticks" or "stafflets", there's a word for them (at least in the English language) - and they're a symbol for vast and arcane power.

    It seems to be a bit of an odd choice.

    The one thing wands are good at is pointing. It's not hard to imagine a group of hunter-gatherers sitting in a circle 30.000 years ago, with one of them holding a small stick and talking to the others while they use the stick to emphasize their words.

    "See that little stone over ~here~? Let's say that's the mammoth. If ~you~, ~you~ and ~you~ hide in the bushes over ~there~ and make a lot of noise, the mammoth will get scared and run right over the cliff on ~this~ side and fall to its death. Easy dinner."

    So over time, the little stick might become a tool associated with people who explain "things", because they're the ones who "know stuff". And this gives them power.

    There's of course also the "big stick" AKA "the club", which is associated with physical power.

    So when humans finally invented their gods, those gods naturally also carried sticks, big and small, to signify their might - and also as a conduit of divine power: Hermes used his rod to put people to sleep and Circe used a wand to turn men into pigs.

    So sticks mean power, which is why kings and queens have scepters. And smaller sticks mean this power is less about the physical and more about the arcane.

    When stage magicians then adopted the tuxedo with the top hat and the white gloves as their working garment in the 19th century, the wand followed the same colour pattern. The black makes it easy to conceal and the white tips are meant to attract the attention of the audience, while still being easy to hide when necessary. And it has tips on both sides so it can be held either way, meaning you don't have to worry about the orientation of the wand when you're "pulling it out of someone's ear".

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  11. Posted

    On 18.10.2019 at 5:20 PM, ChronosCat said:

    While Nanase has plenty of reason to be grateful to Tedd for playing around with mtf transformations, it seems to me Nanase thinks of Ellen as her own person (who has always been female), not as a copy of transformed Elliot. Nor do I think Ellen's powers have anything to do with Nanase's interest in her.

    I suppose Ellen's own interest in transformation could have gotten Nanase into it, but I can't recall any indication of that in the comic.

    Do you disagree with my assessment, or is there something I missed?

     

    Nanase was specifically responding to Ashley saying "I like men turning into women".

    So does she like men turning into women?

    Well, Ellen is her girlfriend, so there's one.

    And yes, you're exactly right: she considers Ellen her own person rather than reducing her to being Elliot's clone, and she thinks of her as a female rather than as a "guy trapped inside a woman's body" or something like that.

    But she's not ignorant of Ellen's origin. She knows exactly who Ellen is and how she came to be.

    So she must have considered the implications of male-to-female trasformations, and the end result was total acceptance of Ellen and getting into a relationship with her.

    She could have decided that Tedd's transformation gun and that magic diamond didn't produce a "real woman" (which would have made her a bigot), but she didn't.

    The difference between Nanase and Ashley is that Ashley's interest is based on a transformation fetish, while to Nanase, it's just the normal state of things.

  16. Posted

    Ashley's boyfriend was revealed to be a super heroine, there were griffins and an exploding aberration.

    Since then, her boyfriend and his sister kidnapped her while being possessed by a ghost and yet another monster, she became a wizard and caretaker of a sentient magic artifact.

    Afterwards, she was unable to talk to her best friend about everything that had happened to her because she had to keep it a secret.

    I'd say it's fair to assume she's a bit traumatized and needs help to process the events, which was the inspiration for throwing this party in the first place.

    Considering all of the above and taking Nanase's different hair colour into account, I'm not suprised by Ashley not being able to instantly remember where she met Nanase before.

    It's actually nice to see characters that are being affected by events. Imagine a TV show where people get turned into lizards and one week later, they're back to their human selves and sipping coffee as if nothing happened - now that's just bad writing!

  20. Posted

    Quick comment on the effects of coffee and alcohol:

    Coffee doesn't sober you up.

    If you're drunk and drink coffee, what happens is this: in addition to making people drunk, alcohol also makes them sleepy. Coffee just nullifies that secondary effect, it doesn't remove the alcohol in the bloodstream - you're still drunk, but now also awake. This means it enables people to consume more alcohol and get even more drunk. Or attempt to drive home. Which is why combining alcohol with coffee is a really bad idea.

    This makes me wonder what kind of party Ashely is talking about, because this little bit of information makes them sound like total booze sessions.

    And did someone trick her into this? I can see her providing coffee if she thinks that it makes people "less drunk", but not once she realizes the potential for harm. So was she just misinformed or did someone goad her into this?

  22. Posted

    3 hours ago, ijuin said:

    Edward has shown a degree of corruption, in terms of diverting resources and engaging in coverups for the sake of his personal relationships--e.g. some of those parts he requisitioned for Tedd's research almost certainly were purchased through work channels, and he has engaged in deflecting the FBI from investigating his child's friends even though strictly by-the-book procedures would have required it. He also got away with assaulting a surrendering person (Abraham) in the defense of his niece, and instead of getting fired, he was "kicked upstairs" due to being too well-connected and otherwise competent to get rid of.

    Eh, Abraham had just attempted to murder a child and wasn't detained yet. In such a situation, basically any cop could get away with shooting first and asking questions later.

  24. Posted

    Does Susan even know the exact details of how Ashley acquired her magic?

    Given that they've gained their powers under similar circumstances (after being attacked by abberrations), I'd think that Susan is probably the person Ashley needs to talk to the most.