The Old Hack

Like dihydrogen oxide? That crap is addictive as all out. I've been dependent on it my whole life. Visit any bar and they will serve it, usually unregulated and with no questions asked. They won't even card you.

A cosmic G-string?

I can think of a rather frightening reason why this plan would be expensive for Sirleck. If enough of his wealth is bound up in Moperville real estate, raining hell down on it will probably cause it to depreciate in value. Just ask the Pharaoh. What happened to the Egyptian market after the Plagues?

To be fair to the Lensmen, they were caught at the tail end of an escalating war of superweapons that had been going on for the entire book series. And every time someone had come up with a superweapon, someone else came up with a defence or counter for it. Just two books earlier the superweapon state of the art had been using two ordinary planets with opposed intrinsic velocities as a nutcracker against a planetary fortress. That stopped being effective when someone else discovered a way to use the entire energy output of a sun as a concentrated beam weapon. Since no-one managed to find a way to move suns around before the end of the series, this placed the advantage firmly at the defence for quite a while.

That is merely a tendency, not a rule. A surprising number of very powerful superbeings have died and never returned. This is because the staying power of death is linked to the popularity of the dead character in an equation that may be written as: (P + (tD/E)) + R > D, then character is resurrected. P equals popularity, tD is time passed since death of character, E is editorial interference, R is readership demand and D is of course death. Please note that while E may be either positive or negative, it may never equal zero as editors are constitutionally incapable of not interfering. In other words, as long as there's a few very powerful but unpopular characters in the graveyard, Dead Dennis is still doing fine.

This is not good. Sirleck plans to arrange a Justin Bieber concert in Moperville.

Pfffft. Sissies. In Doc Smith's Lensman series, when they really wanted someone dead, they hit them with planetary masses of antimatter moving at seventeen times the speed of light.

Glaistig reminds me of a horrible character from a spoof game a friend of mine once ran. We were deliberately trying to come up with broken concepts. So he invented Dead Dennis. Dead Dennis was unkillable due to already being dead and had all the powers of every single dead superbeing. He could of course use all of them at the same time without limitations. He did not work well in teams. His first line was always 'Interesting powers you guys have.'

I do feel it is worth mentioning that I do not recall my teenage years as the time of my life that I was best at risk management.

Naturally. A lot of things could be improved by good RiffTrax. For example, never watch a TV transmission of the Danish Parliament without one.

And here I thought all you needed to do was to drop acid. Nothing is ever simple, is it. *muttermuttergrumble*

In her case, I would recommend a time machine. Which does not exist in EGS. So I guess in her case you are just screwed.

To be fair, Colonel Sanders specifically set Sirleck up to believe that Raven was the son of either Demetrius or Helena -- two young and improperly-reborn Immortals. He might consider them a manageable risk. Pandora, of course, is many things. But a 'manageable risk' is not one of them.

Seconded! Let's get this show on the road!

Sharknado. Thankfully just on the TV. Not where I actually am.

Infidel! Phill shall rise and prove to be the SAVIOR of the Gooniverse!

Nonsense. Just add a slot labeled 'Insert Cow Here' to whatever device you are using and you are good to go.

Well, if anyone would be an expert on manipulation, it would be Phoenixon. Good to see you, and welcome back, old friend.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2187

I have just spent the past week looking into the development of gunpowder and this was the exact mental image I didn't need. Thanks, Critter. I now have new meanings for 'blow job' and 'banging hot' I easily could have done without.

The Demonic Duck, in the comic store, with the TF gun.

Bah. Eratosthenes was a wuss. If he had been a real man like Galileo he'd have waited until Christians came into power so he could have been threatened with burning at the stake for saying the Earth was round.

Or there is also Pratchett's Theory of L-Space. Knowledge equals power. Power equals energy. Energy equals matter. Matter equals mass. This means that a well stocked library will actually distort time and space around it, i.e. a good library is really a rather genteel black hole that knows how to read.

The Moderator: If you wish to continue the above discussion, please take it to the political thread. Thank you.

And I was trying to point out that BEFORE they had the technology, such an expansion would simply not be practical. Examples: It was not actually Cristopher Columbus who 'discovered' the New World. It is known for certain that a Viking expedition made it to the Americas but that its attempt at colonisation failed due to attrition and logistics. It is also believed (and has been proven possible) that an Irish monk named Brendan went to America 500 years before that. But in both cases, sea travel remained too dangerous and impractical for a firm logistical line to be established, and so colonisation remained impossible. It is not a question of 'waiting for the right technology.' It is more along the lines of heavier-than-air flight not really being widely undertaken until around the time of the Wright brothers. Greedy, expansionist rulers existed LONG before colonisation became technologically practical. Once the technology was there, it was really only a matter of time before the kings and rulers of Europe would figure out that there was LOOT out there -- and sent people to go get it for them. Why 1492 specifically? It required two conditions. One, a man with the vision and technology to go out and look for loot. Two, financial backing from wealthy expansionist nobles -- and it turned out that Spain had the resources to spare, having just finished the Reconquista and having cleaned house inside her own borders (robbing and expelling all the Muslims and Jews). And so Cristoforo Colombo managed to cross the Atlantic and discover new lands to loot, plunder, subjugate and exploit. An interesting little fact: A lot of people back then already knew or suspected that the Earth was round. They thought Columbus was an idiot, not because it would be impossible to reach India through circumnavigation of the Earth but because they had done the math and worked out that it would be a LONGER way to sail to India from Spain if you went west, not shorter. They were right, but Columbus happened to bump into another continent on the way and so his idea ended up making a profit anyway.