The Old Hack

Who cares? If your colonists move in and find a nice depopulated area with lots of land ripe for tilling and growing, they'll take it and won't complain.

I guess this is just me but personally I feel that a Kentucky Derby ought to be an occasion for racing fried chickens.

Please don't apologise. We all need to vent sometime. Even though it is always possible to find someone worse off than yourself, personal troubles have the added pressure of being... well, personal. You need to carry them all the time and occasionally it just gets to be too much. In fact, it is wiser to vent in this way than to keep that frustration bottled up; you risk the pressure escaping at inopportune moments and in the wrong kind of context. If it is any help, I am sorry you are going through this and hope that you will find a way through it. You have my support and my best wishes in this.

This reminds me of a completely ridiculous dream I had a while ago. In it, there was a huge fuss about a strain of Ebola which for some reason attacked the teeth first and had somehow managed to get on the Internet. In order to block its propagation, Danish health services instructed everyone to carefully brush their teeth before going online. And then there was a TV clip of our Prime Minister who was absolutely red-faced with fury. He screamed at some hapless quailing guy in a lab coat, "VIRUSES DO NOT PROPAGATE ON THE INTERNET!" Then he paused a moment before going on, "All right, that sounded stupid, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!"

Pfft. I can't see the fuss. Nobody would ever bother searching half a galaxy for some thousand year old falcon.

Read up on the colonisation process. One wonderful trick employed was to sell natives the clothes and bedding of people who had died from some disease or other. Then lean back and enjoy the show as an epidemic tore through the hapless people you had cheated. This was bacteriological warfare in its earliest form but it worked quite well. And who has to rely on it? You just need to make use of the result. A disaster area is much, much easier to conquer than a healthy community with infrastructure intact.

My dream car is a literal dream car. It originated in a dream a friend of mine had. For some reason he had won a fortune and he wanted to buy the world's most expensive car. So he went to a car dealer and there learned that they happened to have it on display. A French car, of all things, named... "LeSnob." When he shared the story with me, we were both laughing ourselves sick at the sheer hideousness of the name for the thing. It did not for a moment even attempt to conceal that the sole purpose of owning this car was car bragging rights. We then decided that it was probably so expensive that even Donald Trump couldn't afford it and that my friend declared that the best part of owning the LeSnob was to once a day every day of the year to take a turn around Trump Tower to remind Trump that he couldn't afford one.

Meh. I think the Colonel is busy outsmarting himself again. He has a very high opinion of his own ability as a manipulator, and as we've already seen, he might do well initially but his schemes may easily fall apart on him in the crunch.

You really need to read up on the European looting spree of the rest of the world. While gunpowder did play a role, it was only part of the story. A big help was the spread of European diseases like cholera, smallpox, typhoid, mumps and the flu. They took an utterly hideous toll of local populations, more than decimating them in many cases. For example, a single outbreak of smallpox killed more than half the population of Tenochtitlan and the surrounding area. This was not an ideal situation from which to wage a war of survival. As to 13th century cannon, they consisted mainly of massive and primitive tubes intended for siege warfare. They were utterly useless in open battles. By the time the slave trade began, gunpowder weapons had improved a good deal though they still left much to be desired. Still, they had at least progressed from the point where they were metal tubes balanced on a forked stick and a horrible tendency to blow up or light afire the gunner by the third attempted shot at the latest.

Because I think he is a piece of chicken ordure.

Both reasons could be involved but the technology trumps the politics. Constantinople could have fallen as many times as it wanted, without improving ship designs, mapmaking and astronomical knowledge the trade expansions would not have followed. Thor Heyerdahl made some amazing journeys using only very old technology. But there is a very large step between 'possible' and 'practical.' I cannot see colonisation and the conquest of the new world starting from Europe based only on triremes or canoes.

I, however, have the requirement to be a malicious, domineering, pitiless and brutal Sith Lord. I have a banhammer.

Because that is what it is. As Tobyc correctly pointed out, it is a paraphrase of the Code of the Sith. Darth Hack, Sith Lord

Maybe Big Bang Theory should do a Big Bang cliffhanger?

Peace is a lie, there is only passion. From passion I gain strength. From strength I gain power. From power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. May the Fourth set me free.

Alternate. Universe. And Tensaided is a law unto himself.

We did, in the Off Topic forum. Feel free to start a new one.

'Not want to believe' is not the same as 'refusing to believe.' Especially not in Susan's case. If there is any character more painfully honest with herself than Susan is, I have a hard time thinking of one. I do not see denial holding her back for very long.

May the Fourth serve you well.

Languages can be funny that way. Danish is one of the latter, in a sense. Apart from certain dialects close to Germany that have three genders, Danish in general only has two -- combined gender (male and female gender conflated into one) and agender (the literal translation would be 'nogender' but it sounds a little odd to my ears.) But even English has gender in it, if vestigial and only used in very special cases. One would be ships, which by seamen are referred to as 'she' rather than 'it.' This same naval tradition exists in Denmark as well and is one of the few places where this kind of usage survives.

I do not think so. 1) It is Nanase, whom Susan knows personally. 2) Vampires are involved. In this, Susan all too well knows how deadly serious the trouble is -- and knows how unlikely it would be for Nanase of all people to invoke them in some sort of deception or scam.

Codswallop. Gender identity is a much, much older issue than the race issue. There are cultures on this planet that make specific allowances for people to move from the gender assigned at their birth to the other. We have present day hunter/gatherer tribes in which gender is basically treated as whether you hunt or you gather. We have thousands of years old legends of males becoming females or the other way around. Tiresias of Greek mythology is just one example. Race, on the other hand, is a far more modern construct and only started to become an issue once improving travel technology made large scale interaction between continental land masses possible. Race lines as we know them have only existed for a mere handful of centuries and came into being as a justification for the systematic enslavement of Black people. In previous centuries or millennia, what slavery did exist was usually based on cultural or tribal lines. Even the hapless Slavs, a people so victimised by the slave trade that their very tribal name became the root word of 'slavery', were not considered a 'race' but a tribe. Also, at its very root, the concept of 'race' is scientifically speaking utter nonsense. The concept of gender is not. Which would be more likely to be an old, old part of humanity's identity: an observable physical and social fact or a ridiculous contrivance solely brought into existence to justify the exploitation of people with high melanin content in their skin?

Good luck, old friend. And take good care of yourself.

That would depend on precisely which doctor you are visiting. Would it happen to be the Doctor?

Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Another outdated, intolerant and bigoted buffoon bites the dust.