Vorlonagent

I apparently owe you an apology for misreading you.  I didn't realize it even as I sat down to write this reply.  Unfortunately I do not have the time to address the substance of your rather long post at the moment.

It was not my intent to characterize all those on the left as I did, but looking over my post I can see how that came across.  I would have addressed that last post but I oped to keep things simple so as to focus on me-you and not get distracted in issue-stuff.  We have already seen how well that went.
I already posted
That really was intended to suggest flexibility on specifics.  I was waiting for a "Cool!  let's get into the details!"
As i say, it wasn't my intention.  I have an explanation, which is not the same thing as a justification.  I erred at least twice by you.  And maybe a third time by not expanding on more common ground.  I honestly thought I was meeting you halfway.  I would have been if I was perceiving you properly, which I was not, so that's on me.
I communicated poorly with that post and things just got worse from there.

At that time I did not understand why you were telling me that I was saying something that I knew I wasn't saying, so the rest of your yesterday post came across as a superior -> inferior lecture, with you casting yourself as the superior of course.  I now realize you were not doing anything of the sort.  You were trying to draw me out into a proper discussion.  I hope we can get back to that or at least agree to disagree amicably.

The final line of your post still reads more like an ultimatum than an invitation to a civil discussion.
As I said my one-line reply was intended to not get caught and deflected by issues.  I definitely thought I had obviously been mistreated and misunderstood and that was reflected in what I said.  
I apologize for misreading you.

I just had the unpleasant experience of opening up a HP ENVY 15t laptop.  I needed to upgrade its hard drive from 1TB to 2TB and it was priority work.  The 15t is a few years old.  My lab maintains a backlog of laptops going back about 7-8 years. The 15t looked to be built intentionally to frustrate, as if the designer took a sadistic joy in making the laptop hard to work with.  And it's not like it's a thing with HPs from that era.  I got a HP 14t in the same order and it's easy-peasy to open up.
First you get at the guts by popping up the keyboard.  That's never good.  If there's one thing you don't think about but should when buying a new laptop, this is it.  You always want to take the back off to get at stuff like drives and memory. The best case is only needing to remove a relatively small access plate on the back. HP secured the back with no less than 15 screws.    The back is a shotgun blast of screw holes. Some screws are hidden.  Two screws sit under the back two rubber feet.  You have to pry up the stickyback feet themselves. The feet come off revealing two more screws to be pulled off after that.  There's yet another screw hidden under a thin stickyback piece of plastic and one final screw you can only get at by popping open the optical drive. But that wasn't enough.  Several of the screws were a wide short flat-head design which had an unnecessarily tiny Phillips screw slot.  My fine-work screwdrivers don't give me the grip to move them and the screwdrivers that do are too big.  I managed to find one that did both and the screw didn't budge.  I had to wiggle the keyboard back and forth while attached to the case to loosen up the screw and broke part of the case doing so.  But I was able to remove the screw. This is all before we find out that the keyboard is inset into the laptop body.  Most keyboard deigns have it flush to the back, not dropped that little bit into the back.  Prying the keyboard up just got to be extra fun and I never got it entirely free.  A part of the keyboard and the broken case just wouldn't separate. The hard drive had an unrelated ribbon cable running right over top of it.  The cable had to be detached, which is easy to do but something you really shouldn't have to do. The hard drive itself was connected by a really narrow ribbon cable which came out because the SATA power + data plug did not want to come off the old drive or go on the new drive easily. The  final touch came after I tried to power the lap top up.  Nothing.  HP gave the power button its own ribbon cable and it had come out of the connectors on both ends.  the motherboard connector was easy enough to do but because I couldn't entirely detach the motherboard, attaching a narrow ribbon cable to the back of the keyboard was especially annoying. This was the single most annoying laptop I have ever had to take apart...and I've worked on 30 or 40 machines.

I am still very fond of the man. He may not have achieved top tier fame but he is so very good at what he does. Mind you, at times I wonder at the poor man's luck. He once played the part of an evil AI in a very bad hacker movie called 'Game Over.' For some reason the producers of this execrable disaster thought it was a good idea to have Koenig's voice dubbed over with that of an electronically distorted manic ten-year-old with no acting talent whatsoever. It is enough to make me cry. The one good actor they had and they had to remove his own voice from his acting.

I just had the unpleasant experience of opening up a HP ENVY 15t laptop.  I needed to upgrade its hard drive from 1TB to 2TB and it was priority work.  The 15t is a few years old.  My lab maintains a backlog of laptops going back about 7-8 years. The 15t looked to be built intentionally to frustrate, as if the designer took a sadistic joy in making the laptop hard to work with.  And it's not like it's a thing with HPs from that era.  I got a HP 14t in the same order and it's easy-peasy to open up.
First you get at the guts by popping up the keyboard.  That's never good.  If there's one thing you don't think about but should when buying a new laptop, this is it.  You always want to take the back off to get at stuff like drives and memory. The best case is only needing to remove a relatively small access plate on the back. HP secured the back with no less than 15 screws.    The back is a shotgun blast of screw holes. Some screws are hidden.  Two screws sit under the back two rubber feet.  You have to pry up the stickyback feet themselves. The feet come off revealing two more screws to be pulled off after that.  There's yet another screw hidden under a thin stickyback piece of plastic and one final screw you can only get at by popping open the optical drive. But that wasn't enough.  Several of the screws were a wide short flat-head design which had an unnecessarily tiny Phillips screw slot.  My fine-work screwdrivers don't give me the grip to move them and the screwdrivers that do are too big.  I managed to find one that did both and the screw didn't budge.  I had to wiggle the keyboard back and forth while attached to the case to loosen up the screw and broke part of the case doing so.  But I was able to remove the screw. This is all before we find out that the keyboard is inset into the laptop body.  Most keyboard deigns have it flush to the back, not dropped that little bit into the back.  Prying the keyboard up just got to be extra fun and I never got it entirely free.  A part of the keyboard and the broken case just wouldn't separate. The hard drive had an unrelated ribbon cable running right over top of it.  The cable had to be detached, which is easy to do but something you really shouldn't have to do. The hard drive itself was connected by a really narrow ribbon cable which came out because the SATA power + data plug did not want to come off the old drive or go on the new drive easily. The  final touch came after I tried to power the lap top up.  Nothing.  HP gave the power button its own ribbon cable and it had come out of the connectors on both ends.  the motherboard connector was easy enough to do but because I couldn't entirely detach the motherboard, attaching a narrow ribbon cable to the back of the keyboard was especially annoying. This was the single most annoying laptop I have ever had to take apart...and I've worked on 30 or 40 machines.

The Moderator: *throws himself into a trench to hide from the next incoming artillery barrage*

I pondered for a while where this should go and after due consideration decided to put it here.
At the moment, the Danish extreme right wing is splintering into several small parties. The only thing they hate more than one another is anything that is not Danish.
Someone took all the conditions these people demand be satisfied before you count as Danish. It turns out that when you put them all together, they are impossible to fulfil. Thus, according to them, nobody in Denmark counts as Danish. Sigh.

Yes there is and Ashley is making it.  Did these old white men in Ashley's story need to be plotting to do something politically undesirable?  No they did not.  It was all set-dressing for the transformation story, which in turn was just there to show us things about Ashley and transformations that Pandora told us about. 
Politics wasn't the point to any of it so why have it there at all?
Dan reduced the impact greatly by making it a story written by Ashley and did it very well. 

Today's NP eased a lot of concern I had about Monday's NP.    I suppose Ashley needed a setting of some kind for her transformation story.
It's a "little bit is OK, a lot is bad" sort of thing combined with the natural "if I ran the zoo" opinions we all have (we all have them, right?)  Each time politics are injected into an apolitical comic, the bar for doing it again is lowered.  The creator has to know where to draw the line.  Not all do.

I've seen a lot of references to Sirleck's former host as being a nasty, bad person.  Do we actually know this to be true?  Could he have been a kindly grandfather, a philanthropist and mentor, who only started pulling crap like making his secretary dance for him after Sirleck took control?

This reminds me a little too much of the "Once I've lost ten pounds, then I'll...." that keeps so many women from actually living their lives.  You don't know when, or, sadly, if, that's going to happen, and you shouldn't put off doing something important for too long waiting for it.

I think Arthur is talking about the Will of Magic.

It's not just a more-detailed explanation, it's a complete recontextualization.  It's Lucas saying, "I'm changing how The Force works and you can't do anything about it."
The Alec Guiness Obi Wan Kenobi tells us the Force is an energy that flows through the universe.  He doesn't say it is an energy field generated by subcellular organelles present in some living things.  The Force is presented as transpersonal, larger than the individuals that draw on its energy.  And Obi-Wan would know about Midichloreons.  He's a trained Jedi.  I think Prequel-Obi-Wan was even present when Qui-Gon Jinn tested Anakin Skywalker's blood.  There's no reason to conceal midichloreons from Luke.  That simply wasn't how the Force worked and never was until Ep 1.
The mysticism angle is important to The Force as presented in Star Wars and Empire Strikes back (the two films that really sit at the core of what was best in Star Wars).  It's not a trivial add-on.  The Force is High Magic it sits at the intersection of the deific and the magiccal.  The Light side, which is what most of us think of as The force doesn't only empower, but it provides a moral/spiritual compass. 
Lucas demolished all that and replaced it with a hive mind/colony creature composed of parasitic organisms.  It's a bit of a comedown.  Not only that.  he didn't have to do it.  As Don implies above, 999,999 out of 1,000,000 it is a poor choice to explain a magic system that readers or viewers already accept as is.  Which means.  Lucas went out of his way to do it. 
The Light side of the Force was one of the core things that connected fans to the universe.  Writing this now I think audiences in 1977 and onward found reassurance in The force in the same way Star Trek fans found reassurance in seeing the Enterprise's bridge filled with people of all races 10 years earlier.  Lucas replaced it with a mechanistic and completely unromantic model which in turn demolished the film for a lot of people who loved the first three Star Wars films.
Nor were Midichloreons a single bad mistake in the Star Wars prequels.  The concept was not an exception, it was emblematic of the rule.  Lucas midichlorean-ized Star Wars from beginning to end and would have done far worse if had fans not complained.  Midichloreons sum up a staggering MISunderstanding of Star Wars by the single individual who ought to know it best: George Lucas.
With all due respect to Critterkeeper, The technical advances and improvements that Lucas innovated with money from Eps 4-6 does not wipe this sin away.  Nor does my anger at the star wars prequels bot out the good Lucas did.  I thank Lucas greatly for all the good he has done and damn him for all the bad.  Being human, I tend to come to the bad more easily.

We don't know if Dex' fairydoll is as impressive as Nanase's.  It probably isn't.  He could probably summon it without aid.  Even if he doesn't have the power, he could probably spend physical energy to finish the spell off.

I wouldn't think a Mark could change, though I have to admit "nothing is known to be impossible for magic other than time travel", so there might be some rare edge case where someone's Mark spell evolves before they Awaken.  It can't be a common case.

It's worth noting that those spells we've seen evolve, such as Elliot's Cheerleadra or Nanase's fairydoll spell add capabilities, but do not seem to subtract or alter what the spell already does (again, "Nothing is impossible for magic...blahblahblah" so there probably is an edge case or two of THAT out there as well)  nanase's fairydoll added "a "fae punch" subspell" and I assume Cheerleadra didn't start with the ability to act as a cell phone.
RE Dex: magic is somewhat pliable and changeable.  You can' change a spell to some degree if you push hard enough.  Dex was both guided and empowered by an Immortal (Voltaire), which is why he was able to take a fairydoll spell and summon a bulldog dragon and fireguys by the bushel.  Dex by himself has neither the power nor the skill to do much, if anything, besides a fairydoll.

I think Arthur is talking about the Will of Magic.

I think Arthur is talking about the Will of Magic.

I think Arthur is talking about the Will of Magic.

Am i the only one that was disapointed Dan did not link to that in the comments?

XKCD today.

Today's TWB.


A better description of Monty Python hasn't been done.

The Prof could make it a rap...

Upon due consideration, I think Elliot's brain would operate more efficiently if it wore better shoes.

I am hoping the encounter (well its first or second page) ends with another panel of the Astronaut Uryuom, and possibly the space shark

You could also I suppose call the Jedi Council "A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

http://www.zombieroomie.com/2010/10/25/flashback/

OT, my favorite Yoda shirt was in a pet store, in size X-Small, reading, "Size matters not.  Judge me by my size, do you?"