The Old Hack

Well, to be fair your handle is animalia, not vegetabilia.

Nah. That would involve going up against Commander Shepard. We're frothing raging berserker vikings, we aren't crazy.

It may have something to do with their absence of an internal circulatory system to carry intrusive bacteria and virae around. And it is still a good idea to clean their outsides carefully before eating them.

Yeah, and glory is just SO useful. In fact, I think I just stepped in some.

Pour la Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité!

You are a wiser man than I am, Gunga Din. When I mount my donkey and my faithful Sanchez hands me my lance, no windmill is safe from me.

Presumably you also have the good sense not to try, then.

I have a can opener and more than a little inclination to use it. Feel free to push it.

Exactly. Now if only more teachers understood that.

The polite vampire is such a rarity these days. *sigh*

I am actually not sure. I merely wince at the thought that blood which might have been used to help a patient who badly needed it to live was decanted into a styrofoam cup and drunk through a straw. They could at least have pretended to administer it in a way that made sense.

Ritually speaking, nothing at all. Medically speaking, from the viewpoint of modern science, drinking blood and expecting a fetus you happen to be carrying inside of you to get any benefit from it at all is utter hogwash.

As my wife would say, don't borrow trouble ahead of time. It may clear up before then. Until then, worrying about it won't help, so if you can, worry about something less stressful. Like if there will ever be a NASCAR/Formula One mashup.

Stupid. They could just have escaped through that CRACK IN THE EVENT HORIZON.

*blink* I don't see even all of these disasters causing the Confederacy to rise again. ... ...what?

The Moderator: I thoroughly approve of the concept of a venting thread. Several threads we have already serve that purpose to a lesser degree in more specific circumstances. Having a general thread in which to post one's primal screams of rage at life might be a huge relief for many posters here. ~tOH.

It saddens me to hear that such a kindly and righteous man would merely have abandoned my home to the depredations of the Nazis.

Read my post above about breaking rules. You can break ONE rule while establishing your setting and your readers will happily go along. Or, at least break a genre-defined set of rules. But for every rule you break BEYOND that, you weaken your story because the readers will start to realise that you haven't done your work and that you are just pulling stuff out of your rectal orifice. Do it enough -- and Twilight has done it to an immense degree -- and all you have left is drivel. To each their own. I merely feel resigned and sad whenever someone condemns a genre whole cloth without considering the fact that quality varies everywhere, that each and every genre contains some good works, some bad ones and a vast amount that merely falls in between the two.

I fail to see how it would sidestep the sheer mind-numbing stupidity of administering blood orally to a patient. By a doctor with supposedly up-to-date 21st Century training.

I don't think he is interested in my graines right now. He has trouble enough with his own.

To be fair to him, the spell was named 'Modern Knowledge', not 'Pop Culture.' The latter spell strikes me as a little bit frightening and overwhelming. Instant geek. Just add water.

I was thinking of a more modern disaster of literature. In Meyer's atrocious Breaking Dawn, that was how they gave Bella a blood transfusion when they decided that her unborn... child, I suppose... needed blood. They made her drink blood through a straw.

At least he didn't make her drink it. *sigh*

Don't remind me. I slept through the whole thing.

I am hardly an expert, only a devoted amateur, but to my eyes it looked good. There is a LOT more to it than that but it served as an excellent overview of various possible ways to write. (I am also very glad that the Korean writing system received a special mention at the end, as well as a whole separate video, as it deserves it.)