malloyd

ls there actually any reason to connect "awakening" with the number of spells you can use or their power? It seems to mean something like "the Will of Magic starts granting you new spells without you having to do anything". For all we know it's possible to be the world's most powerful and versatile wizard but be disliked enough by the Will of Magic that it never gives you anything for free. Obviously getting stuff for free makes it all *easier*, but there may be approaches to acquiring magic that do not require it.

I think it's just Dan baiting the OTT shippers with a hint Edward suspects something. There's no reason for him to be suspicious of Sarah wanting to talk to Tedd or Grace, she's one of Tedd's oldest friends, has taken to spending hours at his house again lately, and Edward basically introduced her to Grace. Though he might be worried about her personally - parents do tend to extend a bit of parental concern to their kids friends.

Fan ratings usually put Datalore or Arsenal of Freedom at the top of season one. They're OK, but I wouldn't say great. There's a LOT of wasted potential in NextGen, they had some genuinely talented actors, what with Stewart, Spiner and Burton in the main cast, and most of the rest of the cast and guests are at least competent. Too bad they didn't get better scripts. And of course if you have good actors, you naturally want to cast them as an emotionless robot and a character with a prop obscuring his face. It's amazing someone didn't decide Picard had voice damage and make Stewart deliver his lines through a voder. Maybe the prop budget didn't stretch.

Hasn't Elliot always been the main character? He speaks the first line in the comic after all, and I think is in more of the arcs and action scenes than anybody else.

Eh, bouncing is about as good. The Bernoulli effect is too small by about an order of magnitude lift an airplane. Lift is probably better understood starting from the third law of motion as reaction from redirected airflow (works better for supersonic flight, though as reaction to shed vortexes that are given downward momentum it's not terrible even for subsonic lift), or from irrotational circulation (which is where aerodynamics texts usually start). The children's book airplane version of the Bernoulli effect is usually nonsense anyway, seemingly built around some fantasy in which adjacent packets separated at the leading edge somehow need to be neighbors again when leaving the trailing edge. Lift that and imagine air sucked around the trailing edge to the bottom of the wing and are on your way back to irrotational circulation (or generating those vortexes)

Is it just me, or does this seem especially idiotic to anybody else. We're going to explain why everybody is humanoid and capable of interbreeding with a story about how they are all related, and then we're going to add this unrelated species that is humanoid and capable of interbreeding....

The whole setup is so alien it's hard to tell how it works - rules are enforced if you think you are violating them, but apparently don't go away if you think the rules are ridiculous. And what about if you don't even know what they are, say because you reset improperly and didn't carry that information forward. If Immortals really have set up a situation in which they are somehow bound by rules that perhaps none of them still support, they really do need to figure out some way to alter them. Of course political solutions may not come easily to mind; I certainly get the impression Immortals aren't real good with social stuff. There are after all well established methods of convincing people to do things for you - you find people who want the same things and persuade them to cooperate, or you pay them money - the large scale structures doing this are called political parties and corporations respectively - and while building one you mostly control isn't exactly a short term goal, Immortals aren't short of time.... Has he even tried to recruit help by explaining what he is trying to do? The world is full of groups working toward all sorts of goals that appear utterly ridiculous, so it's not like it's hard to find people. Surely the idea of building a small cult of loyal human followers isn't one immortals are unfamiliar with. If Elliot is all that pivotal, did he even consider starting with *talking to Elliot* and convincing him? Might have worked, especially if he were approached alone rather than in this (much more skeptical) group and told something suitably slanted (the rules do after all still allow Voltaire to lie).

Catalina hasn't reacted much either. Does she not get any sensory feedback? Calmly sitting on a bench seat with that tail.... I suppose it's possible one or both of them just assume this is just another uncontrolled manifestation of Rhoda's transformation power, which they know by now is not something they need to worry about much.

Get a shelf of books and start a program of library destruction. Once you've burned every other library that had a copy of any of them, yours are priceless and irreplaceable.

Now that I think about it, that probably includes a lot of stuff the DGB is in charge of covering up. Aliens are out in the open there, so she likely knows a lot of the same kind of trivia about the major nearby alien worlds as we'd know about the major foreign countries. One other thing that occurred to me back in Family Tree when she caught the Charlie's Angels reference and seemed excited about watching it with Nanase was how often that must *not* happen for her. She's almost more out of touch with geek culture than Grace ever was - the world she by her own admission recalls more clearly diverges from ours with the open presence of aliens centuries in the past - there's no way anything remotely like the science fiction at the root of that is at all similar. For that matter it's before most of the touchstones of our wider culture exist - it predates the actual Classical period of classical music for example, and is pushing on predating the invention of the *novel* as a literary form. She must come out with allusions and famous quotes all the time that nobody understands, from great cultural works she can't even share because they don't exist here.

Pretty much. I've always liked Larry Niven's line "LL could more easily breed with an ear of corn than with Superman". It is just about possible you could *eat* an alien organism or vice versa. Not most of it (you can't even eat the vast majority of the biomass here on Earth, what with it being corals and trees), but it's not ridiculous something could be edible with minimal or no processing. But you will not be transfusing alien blood, catching an alien virus, grafting on alien limbs, bearing a part alien child, or implanting your brain in an alien body, no matter what a century of science fiction says.

There's a lot we don't know about Ellen's second life. For all we know Oktoberfest has been a widespread American custom for centuries there. But yeah, there is a lot of potential for Ellen to know stuff Elliot does not (outside of music, which is already confirmed). I still think the most likely one would be languages - when aliens who can teach languages in a couple seconds have been an open part of society for two centuries, language classes will be *different*. There's at least one good joke to be had in the cast discovering Ellen speaks a dozen languages (apparently not including Japanese, though Nanase could still be startled to discover she's fluent in French....). I think the other good joke based on world differences would be some understanding of magic theory (e.g. Tedd exposits on his latest discovery. Oh yeah, that's one of those Nuzquora's equations things we learned in 10th grade science right? No wait that was the other you....)

I imagine Edward knows many of the immortals around Moperville. Jerry does after all call him a VIP in the world of the paranormal, which suggests both that there is a paranormal community of some sort and many of its members know Edward. Which is only to be expected. Immortals may prefer to police themselves, but organizations ranging from criminal Triads to the Roman Catholic Church prefer to police themselves. That doesn't mean governments let them.

Maybe if uryuom "eggs" are actually sapient nanomachines. You can't just "merge" DNA of two organisms on a large scale and expect to get something viable, let alone something that displays characteristics from each "parent" organism. You are going to need to make *decisions* on which genes to include and which to drop, what order to turn them on, what do to about two structures that would conflict (or compete with each other for resources during development).... It's easy enough for genetic engineering to fail for "simple" insertions of a few genes from closely related plants and get non-dividing cells, disorganized tumors, or seriously sick plants. Building an unprecedented new species (and that's what every new combination is after all) well maybe someday but the computational power you'd need will be pretty incredible - expect to need to run a near molecule level simulation of a substantial fraction of the lifespan of the organism.

I suspect you'd just assume some sort of contamination from the sperm mitochondria. It happens occasionally. Though this makes the unwarranted assumption that transforming people doesn't alter their DNA. And that biology in this universe even involves genes - which given the sorts of viable crossbreeds with characters from multiple parents, it probably does not. Fiction involving that sort of thing usually draws from an older more intuitive model of inheritance that assumes stuff like continuous mixing rather than the digital algorithm one implicit in genetic code.

Held up by liability concerns. If you think incompetent or drunk drivers are a problem, you don't even want to think about jetpack pilots.

And it's only an issue if your magic mirroring process has a particle exclusion. You have more pressing problems if you come out of it made of antimatter.

In all honesty any story that involves survivable growth or shrinkage probably has to cheat on the laws of nature. It's a fantasy element, not a science fictional one. Change size by a few percent and you don't have to worry about how much food you can or can't eat. It doesn't matter, because your changed size digestive enzymes no longer have the right distances between their binding sites to digest it anyway, and you can't breathe normal sized oxygen to burn it either. You can go with adding or removing molecules or cells instead of changing their size to try to get around that, but that just moves the problems somewhere else - add or remove many cells from your brain and it doesn't work properly anymore....

Because it doesn't for real organisms? Metabolic rate (and hence stuff like food and oxygen demand, and heat dissipation requirements) scale faster than surface area, but slower than mass. The exact exponent is a point of some debate, but it's somewhere around Mass^0.75, so scale weight up by 1000, and metabolic load only goes up by about 180.

It's worth remembering that Europeans were expanding everywhere else in the world at the same time, and weren't nicer about it, but didn't manage much in the way of population replacement anywhere the natives didn't drop dead from disease. South Africa is about the closest they came, and it's less European than the Valley of Mexico, and nowhere close to North America. I suppose the genes of the population of Singapore are less than half indigenous - of course they mostly aren't *European* either, but still, a marginal success. There aren't many others in the Old World.

The "roman steam engine" is Heron of Alexandria's, one of a collection of pneumatic and hydraulic toys mostly invented or described by writers from that city. Some of the others are pretty cool too. But it is a *toy* - fundamentally a teakettle on a spit with a spout bent relative to the spit axis - not an engine. Its fundamental problem is it necessarily spins the boiler - you can't really scale it up much. When steam engines first started being an industry, a lot of people tried to make turbines work (including most famously James Watt) but were defeated by an inability to build a decently steam tight rotating seal even with 18th century technology. Tight fitting piston heads and gaskets weren't exactly easy either, but at least the technology of cannon boring gives you a head start on cylinders. The Romans could never have gotten any useful amount of work out of things like this. And the story of the whatsit being rejected because of the availability of labor, or it's related form because it would put some people out of work, should always be taken with a very large grain of salt. It's told about dozens of technologies, real and imaginary, from at least the Roman era stories about "flexible glass". Though in this case it's sort of true - the biggest one of these things you could build would almost certainly have done less work than a single slave and cost way more in fuel than slaves doing the same job could have possibly eaten.

I wouldn't be so sure he's that invulnerable off the physical plane. Edward does after all say Pandora should be easily defeated on the physical, but he doesn't say it's *impossible* on the spirit plane. I think there's a good chance Edward, Nanase and Ellen might all have something that could affect Voltaire even if he goes astral. Not necessarily very seriously - neither Nanase's nor Ellen's magical attacks are particularly dangerous even to mortals - but that's not the same thing. And Edward does end that conversation on a note that he's going to get some assistance, which presumably means he's made preparations for coping with an immortal since, and if there's any place he'll have set up defenses, it's his home. Sure for story reasons they won't work - it's too early Voltaire's plot arc for him to get bound or disintegrated here, but I don't think he's gauged his risks properly.

That's actually not true. He had only a single company of Spaniards. When he arrived at Tenochtitlan he also had a few thousand Cholulans and quite a lot (Diaz says 100,000, but that's probably exaggerating even for just the number of troops they had, let alone sent along) of Tlaxcalans too. Cortes was a skilled political player, and not just in Mexico, he won most of his political battles in Cuba and back in Spain to.

You know, Andrea must have been very quick and effective at dispatching them, given that they can't have killed many people in Moperville at all. It's not a very large city, and is a well regulated and policed one. If there were half a dozen extra missing person reports in the last 2 months, never mind half a dozen blood drained corpses, DGB would probably have already noticed. I know it's traditional to ignore this sort of issue in vampire stories, but still.

Would they even have them? The point of divergence after all is well before sports leagues are a thing. We have enough trouble now with ambiguities about who can compete in gender or age brackets defined leagues, or what to do about artificial hormones vs. people who naturally have abnormal levels. I've been half expecting some professional sport to implode under the stress of body modification technologies for a while now, add that sort of issue from the beginning and the para-religious "fair play" thing falls apart, and that's something that played a big role in early development of modern sport.