Vorlonagent

Your coffee maker is a self-aware AI. It passed the Keurig test...

Or just "put yer hands together for this latest morph!" Crowd noise: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

"thank you suh, may I have another?"

At that point, using a personal SEP field would be superfluous...

Depends on how badly you need to heid...

And a forced reset for breaching Immortal law is sort of like a DDoS attack. Yes.

Don't apologize for venting. I'm there with you. I'm fighting depression and I'm healthy. With myself I've found it's not the emergencies or crises that drag me down. It's the annoyances. And they often travel in packs.. Your life seems to have several really large, really ugly annoyances in it, plus any number that don't get posted. I know what's needed is to break them apart and deal with them individually because I am stronger than any one of them. But doing it? Not always easy, which is why it's perfectly OK to vent here if and when you need to. Serenity and humor. Get back to those and treat yourself with understanding and forgiveness when you leave that space because you are simply going to. It's human nature. If you figure out how to do this regularly, please post it. I'm having lots of trouble myself.

Heidi (secret ID form) has proven the effectiveness of being loudly inconspicuous.

For what it's worth, I'd say your stem cell donation completely worked. It did everything it was supposed to do. Please don't start kicking yourself, Prof. That isn't any better. If what you're dealing with doesn't seem that bad now, you can afford bandwidth for some added serenity and humor. Which will in turn further improve your situation.

It just occurred to me that it might be possible to weaponize Immortal law at least as far as Immortals are concerned. Option 1: Force a thought into an Immortal's head that incurs the Immortal law reset, if only for a moment. Option 2: Simulate an Immortal thinking they broke the law. It doesn't seem like Immortals really weigh evidence dealing with violations of their law. It's not "Twelve Angry Immortals". It's just "Oh, violation? Here's my bit of energy for the reset. Now back to my regularly scheduled debauchery." It may not even be that interactive. Immortal law could be a black-box system that deducts energy for violations automagically.

Then we talk about Immortals like Voltaire. Assuming he isn't old and somewhat unbalanced now, if/when he gets that way he won't just be a trickster as Pandora is.

This. Family is very important to Pandora. She seems desperate for "family" to be important to her and to be important to them.

I thought Susan was taller, but susan is tall to begin with... Taller and Shrunk favored the shrunk with Sarah, so shorter and taller may have favored the taller with Susan..

I expect that Tedd makes some major component changes to the watches.

I hear they're forming a club...

I think Will would have at least a high-level idea of the legalities of his existence. He would have some basic understanding about whether and how much homeworld law applies to him. The fact that he is concerned about it, suggests but does not prove, that homeworld law bears on Will getting help with his OOP_CMD and him turning to humans for help with what is essentially an Uryouom problem. otherwise, as I have said before, why explain it? Unless we write this all off to less-than-perfect world-building on Dan's part and then ignore it, we have to deal in some way with the fact that homeworld law was important enough in some way for Will to bother mentioning it. True, but a difference that makes no difference is no difference. ...Vladia's handlers could just ask an Uryouom, "Hey can I borrow your CMD?" The smaller the paranormal community is, the more closely-knit it will be. And Vladia is a greater seynoulu. She's a part of the extended Uryouom world. To say nothing of the rest of the greater seynoulu community. If paperwork forms a significant block to the movement of goods officially, an unofficial market is cr4eated. If uryouoms can buy CMDs freely from the homeworld why can't human institutions on the paranormal side on life on Earth? Why wouldn't an enterprising Uryouom set her or himself up as a middleman, middlebeing, miiddleuryouom, something like that, buying and selling? In 2017 Tedd could 3D print an exterior for his second TF gun. Not in 2003 though. Perhaps Ed Verres found an empty shell for Tedd or had access to 3D printing. Whatever Ed Verres' personal feelings on Tedd and his feminine transformations, he supported Tedd's actual work by bringing home materials Tedd needed to build his second TF gun and probably allow Tedd to make his watches and other magitech equipment.. Generally agreed. The large number of safeties in Will's TF gun is one of the reasons I thought it used off-the-shelf-software, which in turn led to the idea of uryouoms building homebrew TF guns and perhaps other devices that use Uryouom energy the way we might build a PC from parts.

That's the thing. We don't know the legal status of an Uryouom living on earth. Outside the paranormal community it's obvious. Inside...we don't know what agreements exist that govern the paranormal side of the fence. We have not idea why William was concerned about Uryouom law while living on earth, but he obviously was. That works. Got one hot off the assembly line he worked on. Or got the parts from work and made his own. Or maybe building devices that work off Uryouom energy is like building a PC is on Earth. Maybe Will's parent had an unrelated job that got him discount CMD parts. All of these work. I'll recognize the possibility but I'm not sold on the probability of influence. Dan plays his politics close to the vest (which I appreciate) but gun control for or against never seemed to be a "thing" with him. Issues of gender do, hence the religious leaders who got OOP CMDs banned. I see an accent mark on "religious" there, which is as close to a political opinion in-comic as I can remember Dan ever doing.

Publicly as "human" american citizens they are subject to US law. Correct. Privately as uryouoms, they might also be subject to Uryouom law or some limited parts of it. You may have to explain how that works. It's hard for me to understand how a fanatic can hear "this thing is bad" and then go out and build one of them. There is a need for CMDs on Earth because Earth hasn't had First Contact and Uryouoms (among others) need to blend in. If there's no market for CMDs on Earth it's because some other mechanism is filling the gap and providing relatively easy access. The people taking care of Grace's siblings should have that access for Vladia if it were needed or even wanted. Will says CMDs are "common" which should equate to some kind of easy access. Are you suggesting that the Uyouom homeworld would restrict exporting legal-to-own CMD devices to Earth? If so you'd have to break down the motivation for that. I just assumed Will's parent built it from a kit or at least a pre-existing blueprint, used off-the-shelf-software, etc. That or Will and Gill had previous dealings with Verres and went to him directly. The Assault Weapons Ban predates EGS by 8 years. Since Dan started EGS in high school in 2002 the Assault Weapons Ban would likely have been news when Dan was 8 - 10 years old. I'd actually find it a bit strange if Dan were referencing it in 2003.

Why would Will mention legal entanglements that wouldn't apply to the current situation? That's what gave me the idea that Uryouom law might extend to Uryouoms on other worlds such as Earth.

There isn't a battlecruiser that we know of overhead, but there is at least one flying saucer.... I didn't say Earth was under Uryouom law. Obviously it is not. But the Uryouoms living on Earth might be a different matter. Not this story. Nothing to see here, move along... They would have had to have gotten religion after building the device (and giving it to Will). I wouldn't think Uryouom religion would have been silent on the question of CMDs and suddenly wake up and ban OOP versions one day. It was no doubt a while building. Will's parents would have religious objections now, they wouldn't have had them then or the parent that built the TF gun wouldn't have built it. I don't see a reason to ever address the question. It's such a minor tangent to the stories Dan actually wants to tell.

I didn't get that impression. I thought earth-based Uryouoms were bound by homeworld law even living on Earth. In the next comic Ed Verres first question is whether the TF Gun is illegal. I'm willing to go with that Dan not being fully aware how programming works. Dan bends over backwards to explain his world enough as it is. The gimmick that provides the motivation to putting the TF Gun in Ted's hands? I can let that slide. I can only speculate why Will couldn't ask his parent to fiddle with the TF Gun, but possible answers are too busy, tinkers with hardware but not software or just forgot too many details to have any better perspective than anybody else. Will's parent may not be alive anymore, might have returned home, might have moved on to an entirely different world. It could be that it's illegal to program or operate an OOP-using TF Gun...for an Uryouom, but obviously not a human. So does the latest Transformers movie...

No argument. bad Tom really did a number on her. But choosing out Bad Tom to Susan got her Elliot too.

I took it as exactly how goody-two-shoes Ashley really is. She looks like she's honestly geeking out about how cute Bad Tom is and doesn't seem to me at least to be rubbing salt in his predicament. In fairness she may not have recognized him....

My error. I just saw "2009" and remembered the worse of the two movies. Not that Cameron's "Ferngully/Dances with Wolves" remake rates much higher with me...

There were big quatloos on the line.