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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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The Old Hack
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Content count
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Joined
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Days Won
356
Everything posted by The Old Hack
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I assure you, CritterKeeper, the Prussians were many things but they were most assuredly not Democrats. In fact, they were monarchists to the bone.
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Indeed. The slow creation of Prussia is a case in point. It happened gradually over the course of more than a century of carefully planned and mapped out political weddings. Sometimes it would take more than one, of course. One united family might give a bloodline a claim on a certain territory; several of them would tie it so strongly to the bloodline in question that they would become its de facto liege lords. This did have its complications. At first Prussia did not have a physically contiguous form. In the latter half of the 17th century it looked something like this: It took a lot of war, politicking and land trades/purchases before Prussia managed to assume its fully contiguous shape as well as obtaining uniform laws. Nonetheless, marriages played a very important part in the creation of Prussia.
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Something like this maybe?
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I wonder what its entry in the Michelin Guide looks like.
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Plausible "Hello, is this Air France? I would like to order two vampire hunters, an exorcist and a mummy exterminator."
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Oh, that is not as much logic as it is an ironic admission of personal limitations. While I do possess some knowledge I retain a healthy awareness of the fact that compared to the absolute field of human knowledge -- or worse yet, what is possible to learn -- what I have is pitifully limited and in many areas I do indeed remain all but entirely ignorant. I've come here to do two things: chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of ass. *chews gum*
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You see, this particular forum works in the following way. You take one or several frames from the EGS comic, possibly rearranging their order, and replace the text in the speech balloons with some sort of humorous meme or comment on life or the comic... ...why are you all looking at me like that?
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That is taking it somewhat too far. My belief in Murphy's Law is not in a religious sense but rather in the engineer's sense. "I need to eliminate as many ways this can conceivably go wrong as possible. If I don't, someone will someday stumble on the flaw in my design and will all too likely do so in a very painful and possibly terminal way." Admittedly I am not in a position where carelessness of mine is likely to hurt a large number of people but as a rule of thumb it still strikes me as attractive -- the more careful I am, the less likely I am to get myself or people around me into trouble. As an aside, this was an important part of my father's work before he retired. He is a doctor specialising in clinical chemistry and one of his particular interests is to devise an international standard for such work which includes designing procedures so they are as safe and error-proofed as possible. As an example, back when I was a paramedic in the Army I was supposed to deal with pairs of blood samples from three hundred soldiers. This procedure was... not very well thought out. We had six hundred test tubes, had to fill two of them with blood samples from each soldier, and we did not get the sample labels until after we were finished drawing the blood. In other words, I sat there with six hundred labels to fit on six hundred test tubes full of blood and had to hope like Hell that the test tubes had been placed in the grids in the right order in both trays -- yes, to maximize confusion each pair of test tubes were placed in different trays in what was optimistically hoped to be the matching position on both trays. Oh yes, and if a mistake happened? Clearly it would be the fault of the paramedic doing the work. After I had related this tale to Dad, he said that this was exactly the sort of disastrous lack of organisation he and his colleagues were striving to do away with. A proper procedure, he stated, would have all the test tubes labeled with the name and number of each soldier and before you tapped the blood into the test tubes you showed them to the donor and asked them if the label matched their identity. Both vials. And so in one fell swoop you eliminate a huge number of potential errors from the process. Very dangerous errors, too. I am sure I don't need to give examples of possible bad consequences. That is what paying one's dues to Murphy means. It doesn't mean a nihilistic everything-will-go-wrong-anyway attitude. It means that smart designs are less likely to lead to avoidable human mistakes.
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Changing Medications (Level of Trust Required)
The Old Hack replied to ProfessorTomoe's topic in Off Topic Discussion
Still painful and annoying, but glad it isn't serious. The last thing we needed was for it to be toe rabies or something. -
I dunno. I think I am too old to start believing in the Greek Gods at this stage of my life. I'll stick to my firm belief in Murphy and Finagle, thank you.
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I was doing dramatic exaggeration but you are actually 100% correct. The Greek Gods and their myths tend to be excellent allegories for human behavior. I think I've heard it said that the old Greek created their Gods in their own image, in fact.
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AND a travel agent. A woman of multiple talents!
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Look, it's obvious. His name is Van and his mother is a monster hunter. Clearly his last name is Helsing. (Or on an outside chance, Belmont.) Actually, I am not even sure Tedd knows her mother is a monster hunter. Hm. I'll have to backtrack in the archives -- did Pandora tell him? *scratches head*
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True. I guess this is another point we can nitpick to death. Anyway, as it happened, Eris correctly predicted that divine stupidity could easily put mere mortal stupidity to shame and that when the chips (or apples) came down, everyone would erupt in infighting.
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It gets complicated. There is a difference between being on the run and merely running. Technically, if they were running from me in a spaceship, it could also mean that I was in the spaceship with them and that we were all running around in circles inside it like some sort of Looney Tune cartoon. On the other hand, if they are flying from me in a spaceship, that more or less means that I have to be outside the spaceship for the sentence construction to work. Eh well, we can nitpick this in endless circles. If we go on for much longer I'll have to go dig out my old notes on semantics, sentence trees and logic in language. And no-one wants that, especially not me.
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They did exactly as planned. Not bad for total improvisation.
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I agree. That trunk looks entirely wrong to me. Sorry.
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Well, then I look at what I know and realise that they are most likely telling the literal truth.
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In an odd way, I was wrong about Van. He isn't there to contribute a viewpoint. He is there to contribute emotion. He can even do that without words, and he does it well. I'm glad.
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English is also my second language. The two are not quite the same case. It is possible to run a spaceship, which means managing it and its crew and supplies, but you can do that even when it is standing still on the ground. On the other hand, when you fly a spaceship, it is moving. Also, if you get to be anal-retentive, I get to be anal-retentive, too.
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So it was improvised and planned? Interesting combination.
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Flying. Spaceships don't run on little legs. Pay attention to physics.
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Nope. It wasn't improvised. It appeared to be improvised, true, and the contestants fell for it. But it was carefully devised in order to achieve the exact sort of outcome that it actually had. Mind, depending on the type of contest that one is getting a lot of competition from respectively careful use of pharmaceutics, blackmail and character assassination.
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Well duh. I had a Patrick Stewart and I wasn't afraid of using him. If they had lingered even one more minute he would have hit them with another Picard Speech and they weren't about to risk that.