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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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malloyd
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Posts posted by malloyd
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8 hours ago, WR...S said:...er, why would Tedd's father be suspicious of this again?
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.
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12 hours ago, The Old Hack said:As to the second season thing, rules of thumb are often flawed. Most of season two was bland at best and a huge loss of potential at worst. There may have been a good episode in season one but I cannot remember any offhand.
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.
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5 hours ago, mlooney said:Much like The Lord of the Ring starts with Frodo as the hero, it ends with Sam as the hero.
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.
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3 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:Even as an adult, I understand bouncing better than I understand Bernoulli's principle. Bouncing over the North Pole from Europe to America seems to make about as much sense as flapping metal wings.
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)
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2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:DC Lore prior to the mid-1980s Crisis on Infinite Earths, which reset the DC universe, had a proto-hominid species seeding multiple worlds with humanoid life forms, including both Earth and Krypton. It's how Supes looks so human. He is in fact a distant cousin.
Earth had these seeded humans but also hosted a unique subspecies that was called Homo Magus, which was capable of magic. Homo Magus tended to dilute into the general population, giving all humans what amounted to some magic resistance but no real ability.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....
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2 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:Could this be prevented by creating an immortal town hall, forum, congress, or round table? Some place where immortals can take their ideas and grievances and actually talk about them? Maybe even have the opportunity to amend the immortal code by referendum?
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).
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6 hours ago, ijuin said:What's odd is that Rhoda hasn't reacted, given that she is paying quite a lot of attention to Catalina . . .
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.
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59 minutes ago, ijuin said:How can he show himself to be responsible with priceless and irreplacable repositories of knowledge if he no longer possesses any with which to demonstrate responsibility? Is this a Catch-22?
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.
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4 hours ago, Scotty said:At the moment, Elliot has a one up on Ellen in that department, at least for languages that they're confirmed to know, Elliot knows Uryuomoco which he learned from William when him and Gillian visited Tedd's to get their human forms. We have yet to see Ellen bust out any other languages, but yeah there is a bunch of stuff that she could have learned in the second life (aside from history that's a given) that Elliot never got around to learning.
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.
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4 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:Wow, sounds like the only way to get it to work is to wave your magic wand....
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.
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19 minutes ago, Scotty said:So, Elliot didn't know that Dunkel was German for Dark, and only vaguely guessed that his ancestors were european, meanwhile Ellen in her second life dreams, attended what appeared to be an Oktoberfest event where she's dressed in a dirndl, so I'm wondering if alt-Ellen's family was more into family history than prime-Elliot's family. I do get that Oktoberfest isn't a german only event these days, my brother will be attending one in a few weeks and our family is mainly scottish/english/french, but his lady friend is from a german family and is planning to dress up for it so that means my brother is looking for lederhosen. Still, in alt-Ellen's case it could go either way but I don't want to consider it a coincidence too easily.
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....)
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1 hour ago, Tom Sewell said:If there's any Immortal that Edward actually knows, it would most likely be Pandora.
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.
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43 minutes ago, hkmaly said:Chimeras from uryuom eggs are not "normal" crossbreeds. Obviously, the eggs contain some sort of enzymes which can do more complicated DNA merges than standard crossbreeding. Grace likely have more chromosomes than human, BUT she also have uryuom enzymes allowing her to still breed with humans.
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.
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4 hours ago, HarJIT said:Unless, that is, Elliot and Ashley happen to have different enough mitochondrial DNA to distinguish them, and it this is actually ever tested (which seems unlikely).
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.
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On 9/20/2016 at 0:50 AM, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:HEY SCIENCE GUYS!!!
WHERE IS MY JET PACK!?
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.
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2 hours ago, hkmaly said:Chiral amino acids? Those at least MIGHT be found in bacteria. Also, you can survive longer without amino acids than without glucose.
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.
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8 hours ago, hkmaly said:It was directly said by Raven that boar is NOT affected by this because magic. We can assume anyone enchanted by Rhoda will share this "cheat".
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....
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2 hours ago, ijuin said:I see no reason why the need for food would not scale with the weight of the creature in question.
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.
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8 hours ago, The Old Hack said:And neither change my point: that the desire and willingness to exterminate a population may or may not exist, but the capability is a separate matter. America is ENORMOUS. Given the relative primitiveness and small numbers of the invaders, they were physically incapable of carrying out genocide on such a massive scale even if they had wanted to.
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.
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12 hours ago, The Old Hack said:More examples of that in history. Some enterprising Roman invented a steam engine. But it was extremely primitive and they lacked a lot of the technology needed to make it useful, so they never did anything with it and it was eventually forgotten. (It was also argued that steam power wasn't necessary due to the abundance of slaves available, but I am not sure I am buying that one -- a big point of the steam engine when it was actually developed industrially was that it could produce exponentially more power than muscle power could.)
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.
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1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:He's not nigh-invulnerable on the physical plane.
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.
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2 hours ago, ijuin said:True, although it was his impersonation of Quetzalcoatl that allowed Cortez to march into Tenochtitlan instead of the Aztecs simply killing him and his men on sight--he had only a single company of men, against an empire with tens of thousands of soldiers/warriors.
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.
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58 minutes ago, Scotty said:Maybe, but considering they've already detected and had Andrea dispatch 6 as well as engage a 7th in roughly 2 months, they probably could detect more vampires incoming before they notice that Adrian is the main target of them.
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.
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On 9/12/2016 at 11:50 AM, Tom Sewell said:Imagine how complicated sports leagues must be in the Ellen's Second Life world (not to be confused with Second Life®, which is a registered trademark.)
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.
NP, Wednesday October 5, 2016
in EGS: NP Discussion
Posted
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.