Vorlonagent

There are things I think are implied and things that are stated about Dex. Dex is Marked. He has one spell. The fairydoll spell. Under Voltaire's empowerment and guidance, Dex was able to warp what should have been a fairydoll summon into a fireguy summon or a bulldog-dragon summon. That should tell you if it is possible to change Dex' fairydoll. Yes it is. What we don't know is how much change Dex knows how to do and if he has access to the power needed to make changes. My guess would be that Dex ought be able to learn how to do simple color and body shape morphs with his doll. No fireguys or dragons for Dex unless he awakens and gets spells that summon those things. I'd argue that it would take a hellaciously lot more power to warp a fairdoll into a fireguy than what a "summon fireguy" spell would need.

As far as the comic has shown us explosive despawning is a feature unique to Susan's dolls.

Their chief weapon is surprise after all, surprise and fear--their two weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency--their three weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatic devotion to the Pope! Their four....Amongst their weaponry...they'll come in again.

You could have the Fairydoll Squad, making the little buggers all over the place: Dex, Nanase, and Susan can all make them.

The Phix for what ails you....

Go superconducting or go home

I think the slay being non-partisan helped it a lot. And the fact that it expressed something being felt on both sides of the Partisan Abyss.

What I envisioned was magic having currents from points where it enters the world and points where it leaves, so moperville's exit point has magic flowing to it from all over the midwestern US. That current is apparently intact even with a dam in the way.

Would that negate the explosive nature of bursting the dam or just delay it? But Sarah will build up her own supply of energy which will enable more useful casts as time progresses. Agreed. The key is defining what "too far away" is for an Immortal that is very far past needing a reset. Sarah has already been doing this. Switching rulesets might be a pain for Magic to do. If Sarah's role in saving it a lot of time and trouble is pivotal enough, Magic itself might just power Sarah up. But that's merely speculation. I'm not sure giving Voltaire a free shot at manipulating Sarah is all that good an idea. I THINK Adrian Raven has it, but I don't remember what happened to it.

Closer to the Dam is better but not necessary if one's goal is merely lowering the water level. Sarah only needs to be at the dam to drain the lake completely dry, assuming she can even do that. Sarah will be casting her spell a lot and each cast will be using some of her energy. She will be training to be a mage as she lowers the ambient magic level of Moperville. I expect Pandora would, as a thank-you gift, take her the rest of the way.

It would be an interesting twist that in order to properly defeat the Vampires or otherwise carry the day, Ellen must intentionally zap Elliot to re-incarnate Magus. Pandora, despite her earlier temper tantrum could negotiate that deal.

Sarah lives near the dam. All she needs to do is run around the lake taking bites out of it. I don't think proximity to the dam is as important as energy dissipation. Anywhere in Moperville where Sarah could cast her spell is a good place for her to cast it. Considering what Sarah is doing, she'll be a prime candidate for an Awakening once she's done her part to make for a safe dam-busting.

Me too. I know there are hardware differences between Workstation boards and Desktop (gaming) ones besides the one costing way more than the other. I don't know what they actually are because I don't do much with them besides plug them into systems. I've found regular Quadro boards to be as or more reliable than Nvidia's gaming boards using the same base chip. I am aware Tesla is not "regular quadro". The Tesla boards you're talking about are the ones I'm thinking of, they should have either 2 or 4 physical GPU chips on the one card as well. That's a lot of heat generation in a small space. They may not be too because Nvidia Marketing has over-used the Tesla name a bit...

SOMEONE needs a reset....

I hadn't heard that. I can see how the lawsuit went: Intel sez "IBM didn't make a computer on this chip so we're not bound by the agreement." AMD sez "Oh yes you are" and won. In the meantime, Intel builds the 386SX to try to attack AMD's 286 chip sales and maybe shut the company down.

Suppose either Susan or Diane were created, Ellen-style. Not by the Dewitchery Diamond, just created out of magic. Susan and Diane both have the ability to make stuff out of magic. And that ability is hereditary. Which means of whatever parent(s) the two have in common, one of them should have the ability or at least the potential for it. Maybe it's actually Susan's mom with the ability and in the moment of childbirth created a twin out of magic. The biggest hole is the idea is how Ed Verres wouldn't know about it or learn about it doing research. This sort of thing is right up his ally.

Maybe their software only leveraged the Xeons?

I loved Pandora's, "See, this is the world we live in..." line.

No, the company kept some stuff. I was too honest. Mostly we brought home a couple of 8086 PCs and some of the relays we were using for compressor control. The owner was already looking at a deal that involved new (by late-1980s standards) food packaging technology and a startup facility for cranking packaged food out. I suspect MLooney and others who ate US Army MREs might have my ex-boss at least somewhat to blame for the taste of the food. The big thing I got out of it was PC Magazine and an enduring love of pizza. When lunchtime came I went over to a local pizza place and either went over my code or read PC Magazine. Between what I picked up and what the other programmer knew we were able to take a 286 motherboard sitting around doing nothing and make a system out of it. Its 8Mhz processor blew away our 6 MHZ 8086 machines. By then I knew there was this company called AMD out there that Intel licensed to help with 286 demand (Intel literally couldn't make them fast enough). Intel froze them out of the 386 so they sold budget 286 chips overclocked past intel's self-imposed upper limit of 12MHZ. 16 MHZ or even (gasp!) 20MHZ. Intel once again went back to the "brain damaged chip you can afford" well and created the 386SX. 32-bit processor, 16-bit data path. The first computer I ever bought was a 386SX. It was also the most expensive computer I ever bought. I think it was over $3000 for a 16MHZ 386SX, 40MB hard drive, 1 MB of memory and Windows 3.0. Win 3.1 came out only a few weeks later. I was so upset... It served me well. By the time I was ready to upgrade, I was building my own machines. I developed a price/performance rule that mostly still serves me today. "The part you want costs $100 - $125, no matter what part we're talking about." It held for motherboards, memory, drives, and AMD processors. I've had to modify some of the amounts over the years. Not everything still costs that much but there's usually an amount you can expect to pay that stays stable over the years until something really big changes. My memory estimate has dropped to $70, for example.

Not really. I had no idea how to do embedded code. I was working for an electrical contractor who wanted to branch out into software. Unfortunately, the owner made promises to the customer out of ignorance of software development times. He had limited code in place (it could give collect and transmit temperature data) and promised a complete system in 3 months. He had first hired a high school kid (son of a computer sci university prof, but still high school) then let him go and got a friend of mine. He needed help and that's how I got the job. My first day on the job, the project was already a year late. The customer was not happy with the situation but they never took it out on us. We did a lot of the work at the customer's business in order to show them that we were indeed working on their stuff, but we were flying largely blind, either writing our own code or trying to salvage the code of the kid who came ahead of us. Eventually the customer started withholding money from other work and the whole project abruptly collapsed along with the job one Friday afternoon. We were told to take everything of value we could carry by end of day and leave. We were supposed to start working back at the normal office but by monday I was unemployed. I'm pretty sure the software project collapsed the entire company.

I have no idea how I could tell what time of day it is where you are. Maybe I could go to your account, poke around and try to find out how many hours off GMT you are compared to me, but I don't see anything like an absolute timestamp on anybody's posts, yours included. Maybe you have a forum setting enabled that I don't? Otherwise where am I expected to go for this information? I was one of two programmers attempting to automate the compressor staging for an agricultural warehouse. I wrote my code on a PC in 8086/8088 assembly. It was then burned onto an EEPROM and then tested on an industrial computer which had next to no inputs or outputs. Needless to say the process was slow and difficult to debug.

Ed Verres doesn't he need gender concepts spoon-fed to him. All he needs is for someone whose opinion he respects say something like, "Have you ever considered the possibility that Tedd is genderfluid?" If Verres is not familiar with the subject and thinks the idea is credible, he will do the research himself without further prompting. He will have charts and graphs (accurate ones!) on the subject by day's end.

A friend once gave me a tour of Foundation Imaging's facilities. This was back in the 90s when there was a Foundation Imaging to have a facility to get a tour of. I still have the friend, at least. Foundation did the CGI work for the first 4 seasons of Babylon 5 and picked up Star Trek when Paramount finally decided to ditch physical models for their starship scenes. Foundation had a giant central computer for rendering work which looked to be mostly a huge data bus and a carp-ton of AMD processors. I don't know if that thing rendered real-time, though it might if it only had one or two tasks at any given time. I also remember working for a computer game company and bumping into a CGI artist in the halls. She had plenty of time for socializing because the render her desktop machine was working on would take a couple hours to finish. My biggest problem with sound and mobile devices is bass. I miss it.

My forum tells me this post was made 16 hours ago. Again, no local date or time. I don't talk as well as I write either. In my case English is my first language, but I also deal with social anxiety so I have a harder time both thinking of things to say and developing my ideas as completely. I remember. I was reading PC magazine at the time and writing assembly code on the forgotten x86: the 80186. As a DOS user I've seen many EMM386 errors...

I expect it will make for some good comics, certainly. Having a third party intercede for Tedd could make things happen faster, but I don't expect it's required. Someone Ed Verres respects has to convince him to accept that what we know about Tedd is true. There's no reason this person cannot be Tedd himself. Technically there's no reason this person can't be Ed Verres.