The Old Hack

I agree so very much with that. I don't think Edward understands how much he has hurt his son, but Tedd no longer feels safe around his father and that is a terrible situation for both of them.

JOHN DELANCIE. GOLDARNIT.

Okay, for some reason, I love this particular NP strip more than any other I've seen in quite a while. Well, this one and the one where Grace brought the Fall of the Broman Empire.

That was one reason I fell in love with EGS, yes. Admittedly, for a truly serious treatment of this, I can only highly recommend Lois McMaster Bujold's Mirror Dance, which deals extensively with the legal rights of clones. In fact, I recommend the whole Vorkosigan series.

Trust me on this. This is not news.

I've tried battlemech. I didn't much care for it. I am not visiting that restaurant again.

I read the first two novels and loved them. Admittedly, I had read practically all the books Sir Terry was lampooning. I loved most of them, too, but the lampooning of them was so warm-hearted and gentle that this did not prove to be any conflict at all. Oddly enough, I barely read any other Pratchett books for years -- I'd liked one or two, but they weren't what I'd expected so I kind of set them aside. When I rediscovered Pratchett years later, it was a small revelation and I loved his new books more even than his 'classics.'

Hush you. Egyptians had sacred cats. We have sacred high explosive ducks. So there.

This is all assuming that Elliot was born a regular XY. For all we know, there could be something unusual about Elliot's genes. Or Tedd's, for that matter.

This was the entire creed of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What made Buffy the most effective Slayer ever wasn't her being particularly powerful. It was her ability to form a team around herself and make use of its talents.

My first serious Traveller character ever was way back in the original edition. She rolled the powers of Telepathy and Teleportation with a rating of 9, which was really good. The thing was, due to the way the system was put together, she eventually became a fairly strong telepath skill-wise, but never ever managed to increase her teleporting ability above rock bottom. Which was to say, her own body only, nothing else. I still managed to get use from it but it took a good deal of care and forethought. One method was to ensure that there was usable gear available in places I intended to infiltrate. Of course, as JML mentioned, my character's powers were highly illegal and she ended up working for the Empire as a secret operative to stay out of prison. My GM, being the Devil incarnate, eventually turned my psionics against my character when the Zhodani made a clone of her and had her trained from an early age, resulting in a physical double of my character with stronger psi talents and skills than I had. This scenario gave me a LOT of trouble, not least of which was that my double was clearly all but impossible to restrain or imprison conventionally. It did not make my situation easier that I insisted on trying to take her alive since my character considered the clone her twin sister and thus family turned against her rather than an enemy. Eventually I came up with the solution of paying a fortune for having her cryogenically frozen and transported to the Solomani Rim (the other end of the Empire.) Since that was a two-year trip each way using the fastest couriers available, I figured it would at least get her out of my hair for a while. And who knew, maybe she would even find a better reason for living than running errands for the bloody Zhodani.

I would argue this by saying that I would probably have enjoyed my younger life much more if not for all the older people in it, but now that I have turned fifty I have finally mastered the essential art of telling Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.

The famous gridlock in the Danish Parliament regarding government-legislated control of ducks, for example. One side kept stressing that the number of duck-related massacres was getting out of control whereas the other insisted on the Danish Citizen's God-given right to train and attach high explosives to kamikaze ducks.

The Moderator: Gentlemen, I appreciate that there are at times situations where the Internet's lack of tone and gesture may escalate an innocuously-intended if perhaps abrasive-appearing remark into an argument. However, it is also possible to respond to such an event with a more restrained 'dude, that seems a little abrasive' rather than taking the originating party to task for his statements. Therefore, I request of the both of you to please drop this matter or alternately take it to private messages. Respectfully, ~tOH.

A few comments about characters and power level. Relative power level of characters is mainly relevant in a heavily action-oriented comic. This is not what EGS is. EGS is a sort of supernatural slice of life where characters, their development and the social challenges they face are of far greater importance than any action scene. In both 'Sister' stories, the villain (Goo, Abraham) was backdrop to the character development. In Painted Black, Damien's near invincibility was mainly important because of the effect it and his sociopathy had on the other characters. More recently, the power levels of the characters proved completely irrelevant when Ashley settled the conflict by use of a well-aimed football and a few well chosen words. EGS is an intelligent comic. It is not Liefeld-esque action where power level acts as a substitute for plot and characterisation. Again and again we see how thinking wins out over raw power. There is no danger of power levels ever shoving a character aside as long as it is inspiration and cleverness that ends up saving the day. And even Lord of the Rings, with Gandalf chosen as example of someone 'overpowered', ended up having the day saved not by power but by two acts of mercy and the simple dedication of hobbits, the true everymen of Middle-Earth. Comics and stories that let power level dominate them are of a completely different breed. I am not saying that they are necessarily bad, mind you. They can be, but this is most often due to lazy writing or the author falling too much in love with their Mary Sues/Marty Stus. In order for power levels to truly get out of control, the individuals in question must not only have vast power but also unusual reach in time and space as well as at least semi-omniscient knowledge. A Superman is not a problem as long as he can be distracted or mistaken. But if you give him the ability to go anywhere in no time as well as full and constant knowledge of what is happening, he becomes impossible to compensate for in any way that makes sense. A good example of this was the Forgotten Realms as marketed by TSR. They had a bunch of NPCs called the Seven Sisters as well as Elminster himself. All of them were, individually or together, near or completely invincible. They could all teleport and several of them had impossibly powerful divination spells. TSR's stated purpose was to make a world where 'good always won' so as to not worry parents about what sort of game their children were playing. What they created was a world where no action taken had any meaning whatsoever because even if the world were coming to an end, Superelminster and his Super Friends would always swoop in to save the day. By removing evil's ability to pose a threat, the Gods of Evil themselves held all the menace of Team Rocket or possibly of Ellen back when she thought she was evil. And at the end of the day, any actions the player characters might take would at best be viewed with indulgent amusement by the TSR-driven Mary Sues of the Realms because the PCs had saved them like thirty seconds of light work by saving the world. But this is not EGS, and arguing about 'overpowered' characters makes about as much sense in Dan's stories as it does to discuss character development in a Liefeld comic.

You could try marmalade jars instead of Canopic jars?

I've heard of this. It's called mummification.

You mean it used to be west of you.

Probably your dishwasher finally succeeded in summoning an Elder God and you just haven't noticed yet. You will when it has finished eating Sand Springs.

Bah. Go Chocolate Chip Cookie Team NABISCO!

The bottling spell of the Good Magician in Piers Anthony's Xanth series. I've loved that spell since I was a kid. You cast a spell at any object in touch range and not in the possession of another person and it gets magically stored in a bottle. To retrieve it, you just open the bottle. And the bottles could be really small, too. (In the series, it was also possible to trap demons in the bottles, but to do that, you needed pentagrams and an either cooperative or helpless target.)

Look, couldn't you put an Elder Sign on that thing? It's starting to make me seriously concerned.

Can do.

While on the surface a reasonable proposition, I plain don't dare to. Gomer Pyle might be stationed there, and then where would I and my Vikings be?

I reiterate, France is full of Frenchmen, and worse still, Paris is full of Parisians. And the closer you get to Paris, the more provincial the locals become. It's a nonstarter.