Vorlonagent

At this point I want to try to do for myself before returning to pharmacology. My intention was to take some of the kick out of my emotions so I could deal with them not regulate them long term. I don't have any professional to consult at this time. My first psychiatrist moved on from the medical group I found her at. Neither of her replacements at all felt on my wavelength.

I feel the same way. My poor insignificant problem. I was on Zoloft for 2+ years and I started feeling dead inside instead of muted emotions early this year. I dropped the stuff cold and made it through the worst 4 weeks of withdrawl but now all my emotions tend to spike to extremes. Better than feeling dead inside but I'm not always coping well. I feel social anxiety anyway. Now, my emotions take any excuse to crank it up to curl-up-in-a-ball fear or defensive anger. I'm working through it but it is not fun right now.

You and the OAV would be in agreement. It's Ranma being really shallow. There are other episodes in the OAV set where he acquits himself better. I'm especially fond of the Tendo Family Christmas Scramble episode. The OAV is a set of like 6 1/2 hour standalone episodes.

It took me a moment to get the cow-gynophagia link. Treating women as a piece of meat indeed....

There's a Ranma 1/2 OAV where Shampo has her feelings for Ranma reversed and his ego forces him to pursue her. Rana tried following the advice of a "Sautome School of Romance" scroll. He got pounded three times by Shampoo alone, I think twice more by Akane and I'm pretty sure Ukyo spatulated him once before the OAV was over.

I can see some furry possibilities adding something to the mix. We assign cats some cultural femininity for example. The webcomic Sabrina has a porn star character who is an anthropomorphized white tiger + skunk mix (Zig Zag). That character plays it to the hilt too. But cows? What's exotic about a cow? A poorly executed cowgirl or any furry intended to be sexy-awesome can detract from the whole too. The result has to be at least S-A neutral... Ah well, it's a thing for some people and they like it. I don't understand it but I'm not going to ding them for it either.

I never got anything out of cowgirls that I didn't get with the same build sans the cow-bits.

Rhoda is going to look pregnant with Catalina before they get out of the mall...at least.

That's "empowering and guiding"...I guess.

Agreed. Facts from the public record, preferably tested empirically (it can be hard to have the same facts sometimes). Then opinions informed by one's values and based on those facts. This is primarily a memory I have that is tagged "start of Obama Admin". I remember because several years earlier then-CA state AG (now governor) Jerry Brown announced the same thing. I'll see if I can find a reference when I come back from my holiday.

Remind me in a week. Since my conversations seem to get really divisive, I'm taking a 2-week holiday from politics to let post election emotions settle. Given next week is thanksgiving in the US I may not answer for a week after that.

It's on now. If Pandora was unhappy with Voltaire before, going after her great godson would just take the biscuit.

The greek warships might win, if and only if they were totally bloody-minded about it and completely heedless of losses. Sheer numbers can overwhelm advantages in technology and firepower. The colonial powers were taught that lesson especially well in africa. A PT boat has very few spare crew and WW2 PT boats, IIRC, are rather open to arrow fire. With a totally committed Greek fleet fighting normally (i.e. without undue fear), arrow volleys would take their toll on the human PT Boat crew even if only 1 in 1000 arrows ever hit the boat. In any real-world engagement, the PT boat would almost-certainly win from the sheer fear engendered by an opponent moving and turning so impossibly fast and dealing out such destruction with its cannon.

I wasn't making wild guesses. I was making a hypotheses based on known data. The alternatives are to simply throw up our hands until Dan tells us either how Rhoda Awakened or tells us every possible way a human could Awaken (won't have complete information before then therefore cannot speculate). Neither of those sound very fun.

I didn't say "true" did I?

You're adding conditions to Occam's Razor, which simply reads, "The simplest explanation is the most satisfying." That's the Razor. Nothing about assessing unknowns or incomplete choice sets. "Simple" means discarding choices we don't know or simply saying "Of the choices we know or can reasonably figure out" (which is what I did) and then choose the simplest choice (which is also what I did).

Right there with you on that one...

Yes it is Simplest explanation. Choosing from known choices = simplest. Sure, but Jerry didn't hesitate to identify Susan's as a major angst-induced awakening once he was sure. Rhoda was being interviewed when Pandora showed up. That's why she changed her look. She changed her behavior to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Note that if it was before the board it was before she met Catalina. Her life has seemed to get a lot happier

They do however spin in midair if a face-up piece of buttered toast is strapped to their backs...

Gill got a hammer within moments of getting her human form (and Will providing the provocation). One can only assume that the hammers did sometimes show up for people who hadn't been taught how to summon them.

"We don't know" is all I'm saying. And then saying from the choices we do know of, there's only one left. Susan rose into the air and the dye drained from her hair. At that point Jerry was still completely sure it was a minor angst-induced awakening. Do you have angsty moments 4 times a month where you rise into the air? If not, you'd notice the one time you did. More importantly would Rhoda have those kind of moments? Her life seems relatively stable and happy despite being in high school, which is normally a wall-to-wall drama-fest.

Much depends on how you play the odds. The more people awakened, the more magic they're doing the harder it is to avoid notice. I can't think of a known way of self-awakening where the self doesn't notice. Susan awakened herself and that was very angsty and dramatic. We have no information that says anything angsty or dramatic this happened to Rhoda recently.

Voltaire would indeed have killing Elliot as a means to an end at the time of this EGS:NP. That end is might not be his final end-goal, but a step along the way. We really don't know why he's doing what he's doing rather than going off and having a tasty mint-julep somewhere. I freey admit that awakening Rhoda (or Justin for that matter) does not mesh well with Voltaire's known "kill Elliot" thing but we're really out of known options or known Immortals who could and would awaken people without their knowledge (or non-Immortal alternatives). It's about as likely that Pandora could have awakened Rhoda and being all chaotic and random-like, promptly forgot (again, I am not saying this is likely but that were so far away from "likely" we might as well consider things on this order of unlikely). It is possible that Awakening Rhoda fills in some other aspect of Voltaire's goals. Certainly Voltaire isn't really concerned about keeping Magic a secret or he wouldn't have staged a fight between Elliot and Andrea at the mall. Maybe he wants to make magic public and/or induce a change in Magic for his own purposes. I claim nothing more than it is a theory that fits the facts. It is probably the least-unlikely option open to us right now.

An archaeopteryx archaeologist!

There could well be plenty of ways to awaken without knowing it. We don't know what they are. We don't even know where to look for them so we can't assess how likely Justin or Rhoda are to have lucked into one. Our options are an Immortal or wild speculation with next to nothing to go on. You want to speculate wildly, knock yourself out. Personally I like Rhoda x Catalina makeouts for that.