The Old Hack

I am sorry to hear. As always, I hope you will manage to cope with all this until things improve.

This is the attitude that promotes so much drivel with the justification that 'it is a good story.' Helicopters on the Moon (vacuum? what vacuum?), 'historical' fiction where lack of research and basic comprehension are handwaved with 'but in my world, it doesn't work that way' and sparkly vampires that attempt to replace romance and emotion with stalking, abuse and codependency. I am fully aware of the fact that one can make a good story based on "what if magic worked" or "what if J.F. Kennedy had shot Lee Harvey Oswald first" or the like. But merely because this is possible is not a license to ignore all facts, physical laws and historical events if one considers them inconvenient. The more you do so, the less convincing your work becomes until in the end it is the sheerest idiocy. Mind you, at times idiocy will sell quite well. That does not make it any less idiotic.

'Of late'? Discounting zombies and his own self, I think Pirta has been ahead of Doc in the grievous bodily harm department almost since she was introduced. Now, if property damage counts, it would have taken her somewhat longer.

The Moderator: Please don't.

Disco Wizard might have misunderstood. And I see absolutely no reason why a previous self should not have included information from its previous self in any 'care package' of memories it might leave to its subsequent incarnation. Like taking a tape recording you got from your mother and putting it (or a copy of it) into the stuff you are leaving for your daughter. That might go a long way towards explaining the long-livedness of the lie Pandora has encountered. It might have been several or even dozens of reincarnations old. When a lie has that much weight of age and tradition behind it, it has an ugly tendency to assume the mass and impact of 'accepted truth never questioned.' *sigh*

While poetic, this is not quite correct. English is a far more vowel rich language than Aramaic used to be. We cannot simply omit vowels from written English because there are too many of them and all of them may change the meaning of the syllable they are part of. Consider: hat, hot, heat, hut, hit, het, hate, hoot. If you were to write English in a syllabary it would not be sufficient merely to include 'h-t' as it would leave so many possibilities for what it could mean even with context to assist. R, mr smpl, tr t wrt nglsh whl mttng vwls. t bcms nrdbl vr qckl. (Or, more simply, try to write English while omitting vowels. It becomes unreadable very quickly.) To give a better idea of how this works with modern languages (please note! It is a while since I took my phonetics classes, I may not remember perfectly!) English is extremely rich in vowel sounds and Danish is even worse. In fact, Danish has so many different vowel sounds that we took one look at the English alphabet, said 'bugger THAT', and added three extra letters to the end of it -- Æ, Ø and Å. All three of them vowels. On top of that, a vowel as it is written isn't just a vowel. In the aforementioned example, we had 'hot' and 'hut'. The way they are enunciated is virtually identical yet they are two distinct words. Or worse, we might have two identically spelled words with the same vowel but it is two different sounds. (This is incredibly common in Danish. I believe it is a plot to drive foreign students of the language insane.) Danish is a huge mess of finicky vowel variations blended with slurred consonants uttered at high speed. We would never have been able to write our speech down in Hieroglyphs.

Nonsense. They could be any age after that. It happened in a previous incarnation of Pandora's, and we don't know which one. For all we know that could have been stored knowledge passed down through several subsequent incarnations.

I don't know. To me it sounds like quackery.

I think you can safely put that wonder to rest at least as far as the actual Rosetta Stone goes. It was not the work of a single archeologist. Rather, one archeologist made the find, and then -- brilliantly -- he distributed copies to every interested Orientalist across the continent, and probably to the US as well. All of these kept exchanging letters and theories, and it was on the basis of all this work done by many Orientalists based in different countries that Champollion made his breakthrough. Mind you, there was an earlier case that worked exactly like you said. Some sort of 'scholar' managed to convince himself that hieroglyphs were a semiotic set of symbols where each one denoted a whole word but could change meaning according to context. The find of the Rosetta stone and solving its riddle put a final end to this balderdash when Champollion definitely proved that hieroglyphs were syllabaric in nature rather than symbolic. (Think an 'alphabet' where each 'letter' represents a syllable rather than a single sound. Also, hieroglyphs did not contain vowel sounds; much like Aramaic, the Egyptian language at the time was rather vowel sound poor and it would normally be easy to work out what vowel was intended from the context. Thus, 'Yahweh' would be rendered as 'YHWH' because everybody knew what vowel sounds it contained.)

Or alternately it worked but just resulted in a new polytheistic system replacing the old one. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

I guess that makes sense. I actually thought part of the problem was that you could get a magical hernia trying to conjure something as heavy as magical charts carved in stone to put on display.

No, though it does explain the ascension to power of Akhenaten.

Cool cats being cool together.

I love the picture of the cat sniffing the tripod the trail camera is on.

I'm sorry, the mail truck from Arizona is running late. Tedd will just have to use a Houston feather instead.

You are just envious because your priests could never pull that off with their stone tablets written in Hieratic.

So does this mean that Tedd will change last name to Ollivander and open a store in Diagon Alley?

Anyone who consciously and deliberately decides to reduce other humans to objects forfeit part of their own humanity. Aberrations have done this to all other humans and have thus forfeited all of it.

My closest brush with: Fame.

Did you also discover their secret?

What? Why? Jeremy already did. Keep up, Pharaoh, for Sobek's sake.

Good Lord. It looks like Formula One died and went to heaven. Man, that thing is gorgeous.

Since that is the part I was criticising, yeah, that is pretty much a given.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2374

...'cause he loved his mother.