The Old Hack

That's going to be a blow to its pride.

Well, we do already have Magic and Alien/Technology as possible Origins now. I am sure Mutant and Natural could get a leg in.

Or maybe City of Heroes, World of Warcraft or Overwatch.

That must be why you rarely see one in charge of loans and reinvestments in banks.

Goldarnit, wasn't that hurricane bad enough? >.<

*grabs the List from /me* *writes down Pharaoh's name, underlines it three times and then puts a cartouche around it* *hands List back to /me*

And with the additional delight of system 1 coming back into play again with all its wands and devices working, so you will have TWO competing systems of magic PLUS an unknown but thankfully smaller number of devices of even older systems functioning anew. Anyone want to see if you can actually control the winds with Kusanagi, the Imperial Japanese sword? This way is better. At least you have smaller numbers and will not have two systems of magic spreading at the same time. It may not seem ideal but it is what the Gooniverse is stuck with.

I guess I'd better mobilise my army of hate-trained attack duck-billed platypi, then. *sigh*

It is tagged with 'Weather', just in case people didn't realise what the thread was about. No, I don't get it, either.

Oh cheer up. It could be worse. It could be raining. Where I am, I mean. *looks out the window* ...I should have kept my big mouth shut.

Commentary wrote: WoM: I cannae change the laws of magic! Tedd: Err, you just did. WoM: ... WoM: ...I cannae change them any more!

...that would explain a lot.

Please! Children might be reading this! Keep your posts safe for work, or at least use the spoiler option so readers can get a little warning!

Eep? ...I think Tedd had better get cracking on making those devices that can help protect ordinary people from magic. And then have them mass produced.

Palpatine said that an entire legion of his finest stormtroopers were lying in ambush down there. My own headcanon is that some bureaucratic screwup sent that legion to the other end of the galaxy by mistake. Subsequently some terrified bureaucrat dispatched a couple battalions of green recruits barely able to tell their left feet from their right in their place, hoping no-one would notice the difference.

It would be a bit like an alien race making contact with us but the only human they got to interact with would be Jack Black on a perpetual sugar high. I think you are right. Especially when one considers that during the initial phases of WW1, the troops actually moved fairly rapidly. It wasn't until the battle of the Marne that things really bogged down, and by then they stayed bogged. This was actually what the Gungans had planned until Amidala talked them into helping the humans. She offered a high-risk plan with a possible quick win as well as a more permanent alliance that the Gungans (and humans) would both profit from. But as you say, if this had not happened, the Trade Federation could still have spent forever trying to pacify the Gungans without succeeding. In fact, even if the plan had failed, I suspect that enough Gungans would have escaped to still make Naboo a very bad bargain for the Trade Federation. Since they are all about profit, it is quite conceivable that they could turn Naboo into such a bad deal for the Federation that they might eventually have departed out of sheer despair at the constant red figures that would be all they ever got out of the planet. By then, the human population might well have been reduced to almost nothing but the Gungans could have cared less. Absolutely. They are fairy tales of heroic struggles, not actual attempts to describe a war of conquest. Oddly enough, the cartoon series "Rebels" does a very good job of portraying the occupied planet of Lothal and how life there would be, including how resistance gradually spread and the Empire clamping harder and harder down. Eventually Thrawn has the planet in an iron grip. But by then the Empire is committing so massive resources there compared to what they had there at first that from the viewpoint of an asymmetric warfare historian the resistance could be viewed as a resounding success in draining effort and tying resources down. All true. It is just that... their weaponry was too primitive and the Ewoks themselves kind of runty. Also, those stormtroopers were supposedly elite units. Given that apart from what they captured the Ewoks only had muscle powered weapons it just doesn't seem convincing. Originally the plan was to have the residents be wookiees. If they had stuck to that, the battle would have been far more believable to me. Harry Turtledove's 'Worldwar' series postulated aliens invading Earth during WW2. They possessed superior weapons and tanks but the human opposition had numbers and the ability to not only replace losses but rapidly improve on their technology. Worst of all, these aliens had only ever conquered two other planets and neither had possessed technology worth speaking of, and they had not waged war among themselves for many centuries... so their doctrine had just not kept up with their technological advances. Their poor doctrine in particular hurt them badly when fighting humans. Also, the Empire believed in cheap fighters in large numbers. The basic TIE did not even have shields but relied on maneuverability to not get hit. Add in swarm tactics and they became a force to be reckoned with. The Rebels did not have as many pilots or ships but what they did have was a better resource proportion of pilot to fighter. As a result they had the X-Wing which individually was superior to the basic TIE and probably at least the equal of the TIE Interceptor. The Rebels could only be very, very relieved that neither the TIE Advanced nor Defender saw production in any large numbers. I also suspect the shield requires considerable power or why else would it have been down initially when the Empire arrived at Hoth? Once it was up it could repel 'any bombardment' but it probably took power from almost everything else the Rebels had. In the season 3 finale of 'Rebels' Thrawn did manage to nearly destroy the Rebel base shield with continued bombardment but he broke off before annihilation so he could capture the leadership. Mind you, that was a jury-rigged shield generator they had scrounged from battle wreckage dating to the Clone Wars so was probably neither current nor performing at optimum capacity, and possibly not even intended to last against large scale orbital bombardment to begin with. A single battleship it might have been able to hold off for a while, but Thrawn had an entire fleet.

A very good point. I can certainly accept this as a hypothesis; it seems sound to me.

The horrible thing is, I feel the Gungans in general (not including Jar-Jar) are just so much better than the Ewoks. Yes, they are comparatively primitive but their weaponry makes sense. Instead of using stone age weaponry it is more like a late 19th century army (with an extremely tough defensive position) facing a WW2 army. Admittedly they get cut to shreds and rout as soon as their big shields collapse but at least that seems reasonable. In fact, the Gungans could potentially be far more dangerous to the Trade Federation if they had been able to fight them in wetlands, marsh or even on the shore of a lake. It is only because they are forced to go on the offensive to draw the Trade Federation forces out that they end up fighting on an open plain where the droids had all the advantage.

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2454

It is possible, of course. But Magic still cared enough to tell Tedd that Pandora had reset so as to remember him as family. Though this might just have been relating what it saw as 'possibly pertinent information', or some similar clinical reason.

"Why does gravity hate me?"

I am sure she had weighty reasons.

My poor old Burmese Catso was chronically confused. He was such a good kitty but he had this constant expression that made him look terminally baffled. He would do things like fall off the bed while shifting position and then sit on the floor like, "I am almost completely sure that I did not mean to do that but somehow this happened anyway. Why?"

Are they at least making you work the graveyard shift? You do have a lot of practice with ancient tombs.

You deserved that for your wanton abuse of phonetics.