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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!

The Old Hack

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Posts posted by The Old Hack

  1. Posted

    1 hour ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    Well, fair warning then, I'm usually about as blunt as a sledgehammer, but it's almost never meant maliciously, I'm just god-awful at tact.

    Fair enough, I just have to be the one on top if misunderstandings or conflicts happen. I do my best to resolve these as diplomatically as possible.

  2. Posted

    51 minutes ago, ijuin said:

    A thought: one reason why Pandora is trying to sow distrust of Edward among Tedd's friends is so that they will gravitate towards the second-most-knowledgeable magical authority that they know of--Adrian. Thus, Adrian would have the "Next Generation Magical Heroes" team that he had been wanting.

    I love this. Professor R in charge of the School for Magically Gifted Children. Enter the new superteam the M-Women.

  3. Posted

    I thought this might be a fun idea for a thread: a place where we can post about odd or funny dreams we've had, discuss them and/or laugh at them.

    And I just had a really funny dream. I'd been using my iPad the whole evening. When I finally went to bed and slept, I dreamed that Apple had just released the thin crust iPizza, a pizza sized and shaped exactly like an iPad. It would initially come in three flavours, mushrooms, meatballs and ham.

    I am not entirely sure what, if any, the iPizza had to do with cutting edge electronics. I do know that I would happily eat one of the things if I could get hold of one. :P

  4. Posted

    1 hour ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    to be fair, that wasn't meant as a knock at anyone's intelligence. I didn't think an argument that answered that without causing other problems was possible, regardless of who it was from.

    Unhappily, what counts on the 'net is not intent but result. As a moderator I am required to step in and deal with potential problems, and to me at least that came across as a little insulting. And I would far rather act early with a polite request than having to step into an all-out flame war where I have to hand out warning points and possibly temp bans. :(

  5. Posted

    3 minutes ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    It just doesn't add up for me. I know there's nothing concrete, but at-least to me, It makes more sense for it to be false than true.

    And that is totally fair! You're entitled to your opinion. Just please try to not tack on unnecessary "I'm betting you can't"s, okay?

  6. Posted

    On 4/9/2016 at 6:39 PM, Don Edwards said:

    Just that different manners of publication, even seemingly-mild differences, change constraints on what works and what doesn't.

    Oh Lord yes. I still remember the idiotic flap when someone was screaming about an entire storyline being "trapped in the basement." I later counted the length of the so-called 'trapped in the basement' incident and found that it was a total of thirteen pages long, of which two pages took place in a different place with different characters. The problem was that in real time this took more than a month, in part because of Dan not releasing as regularly as usual at the time. I guess that made it seem like eternity to some. *sighs*

  7. Posted

    2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1132

    In this comic, Elliot isn't convinced that Ellen isn't interested in going to the Dojo. Ellen states that not going gives her more time for other stuff, like getting homework done and hanging out with Grace. I know this was a while back and nothing's amounted to anything from it, but Ellen just straight up said that she'd rather hang out with Grace than go to the Dojo where her GIRLFRIEND is. Ellen and Nanase could have restarted the sparring tradition that Nanase and Elliot had when they dated, I doubt Elliot would have a problem with that considering he's got no issue with Ellen and Nanase dating and he knows Ellen's got his memories of the sparring matches that ended in makeouts so he probably figures she's entitled to do stuff like that. I just found that very odd.

    I think this is Ellen trying, once again, to differentiate herself from Elliot. By deliberately not going to the dojo she establishes another difference in their behavior patterns. It might be reaching a bit, but given how desperate she was to not just be female Elliot locked out of her old life, it is rather understandable to me.

    Arcanimus and ijuin reacted to this

  8. Posted

    Just now, InfiniteRemnant said:

    In this scenario, she can't NOT be aware of him.

    I see. Nonetheless, I believe the implied argument is that by now Noriko is so career-focused that she does not wish to give up a great deal of her active time to tend a child. You do not even need to posit that Noriko is a monster to make this true. All you need is a situation where vampires, aberrations and other monsters are sufficiently numerous that the people trying to keep them down are working full time and still in danger of losing ground. It's the Batman/Superman problem, in a way -- it would be lovely to take time off to raise a family, but once the insane serial killer/planet destroying space warlord/related problem is running loose, it becomes hard to justify staying home and baking cookies. :(

  9. Posted

    4 minutes ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    I want to see if he can actually come up with a sound argument for that. I'm betting he can't.

    The Moderator: Also, I must point out that the addition "I'm betting he can't" is assumptive about another poster's intelligence and rather insulting. Do NOT do that, or I will be forced to take steps as moderator. That is all.

  10. Posted

    Just now, InfiniteRemnant said:

    I want to see if he can actually come up with a sound argument for that. I'm betting he can't.

    I can. If we absolutely have to involve these bloody Uryuom eggs -- and in Noah's case, we unfortunately have to, because he is a known seyunolu -- she could have had her genetic material stolen and used in the egg without her knowledge.

    A terrible thing to do to anyone, of course, but it would explain her lack of maternal involvement. It is going a wee bit too far to blame a person for not taking interest in a child they do not know exists.

  11. Posted

    On 4/10/2016 at 3:11 AM, SeriousJupiter said:

    Sadly, yes. What's the matter with those kids?

    Let me see. Tedd has a transphobic father who has repeatedly harmed him with heteronormative microaggressions. He no longer trusts his father, which is absolutely tragic but an all too common consequence of this sort of thing.

    Sarah has a very unusual spell that would instantly put her on the map of not only the DGB but ANY intelligence organisation with awareness of magic. If she tells Mr. Verres about this, he tells the DGB. If the DGB finds out, potentially any mole in there may relay that to other intelligence organisations. Rinse and repeat. Once she lets that one out, she is a target for life. Or in very short form: Three can keep a secret if two are dead.

    Ellen is very concerned for Tedd and is terrified that letting the old secrets about Tedd's mother out may -- may -- hurt him and set him back years of growth. She is not by any means sure of this but does not wish to take the chance.

    Nanase is no longer staying silent. She is with Elliot in this.

    Justin is not that close to Mr. Verres, and an earlier conversation between the two indicates that Justin is somewhat leery of fully trusting him.

    As far as I know, Susan has no secrets she has withheld from Mr. Verres. She is at most respecting the requests of friends not to blab, which is not quite the same thing.

    Grace does not have much in the way of secrets. She does, however, have a very strong attachment to Tedd. If Tedd asks her to be silent about something, she is.

    I hope that answers your question.

    InfiniteRemnant reacted to this

  12. Posted

    On 4/10/2016 at 4:14 AM, Scotty said:

    As for why Susan would know when she was born, nothing too suspicious about that, some parents tell their kids that, Heck my photo album has the time I was born plus my weight and length marked down. Even if Susan was adopted Mr and Mrs Pompoms would have to have been given a copy of the birth certificate and any relevant information.

    I was born at 6.15 PM on March 14, 1966. According to my mother, anyway.

     

    4 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    Why assume that? in the scenario you propose, what reason is there for her not to be? 

    For one thing, she is alive. Noah has stated that his parents are dead. It is not too large a presumption that he is speaking of his custodial parents, who may or may not have been his actual parents.

  14. Posted

    6 minutes ago, Scotty said:

    Unless of course it was a birth involving paranormal circumstances.

    Twins with very similar magical potential and magic running in bloodlines? It seems likely there might have been. Mind you, I think it may be a case of Elliot simply having very strong faith in Mr. Verres' knowledge database. After all, the man is basically Dumbledore.

  15. Posted

    Speaking of soap operas. Some of them are really poorly thought through. In one of them, a character is a mother who near the end of an episode goes to put her twin babies to bed. Then, on the fly, the director decides that having babies on the set is way too complicated and has them removed from the script. The babies are never seen, heard of or even spoken of again. Kind of creepy.

    Creepier still. In another soap, a character casually gets to his feet and says he is going to the loo. Once again, he vanishes without a trace and is never spoken of again. It makes me wonder what in the world the poor twit encountered in that toilet. Maybe an Elder God?

    Then there's the classic trope where an actor needs to be replaced and their character gets into a horrible accident where somehow the only way to save their life is immediate cosmetic surgery. Cue new actor to replace the old one. It makes me envision an emergency ward where porters roll in a stretcher with a badly injured victim and the accompanying surgeon yells, "Quick! We only have 35 minutes to make him look like Brad Pitt!"

    All in all, it is better for one's sanity to not think too much about them.

  17. Posted

    4 hours ago, Purple Smart said:

    Now things are getting really interesting. Of course, most of us already saw this coming, but it's good to see that Nanase has the same idea. It also makes perfect sense. Since Susan's mother divorced Susan's father, she had become a single mother and probably just couldn't care for two children. So she had to make the tough choice of putting one of her daughters up for adoption.

    Er... that presupposes that Susan would be able to remember her father's betrayal but not the fact that she has a twin sister. I can't get that to work.

    InfiniteRemnant, SeriousJupiter and hkmaly reacted to this

  19. Posted

    59 minutes ago, The Wozard said:

    Elliot's phone bills are going to get very interesting.

    I remember this bit from A Girl and her Fed in which the Federal Agent receives a text from the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, and his friend Speedy tells him, "Man, you just got texted from the afterlife. Your phone bill this month is gonna be biblical."

  20. Posted

    3 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    Several of the common recreational illegal drugs are known to be less dangerous than alcohol. Just as one example, it's not hard to consume a lethal dose of whiskey, difficult to consume a lethal dose of beer, and very close to impossible to consume a lethal dose of marijuana.

    I remember this one time when I realised bananas contained radioactive potassium that I tried to work out how many bananas you had to eat before the radiation became a significant cancer hazard. I think I arrived at something like half a ton to a ton of bananas a day for an entire year before the radiation effects reached that level. I somehow suspect that it would not be the radioactive component of the bananas that would end up killing you.

    hkmaly, Wildcat and Ser Pentrose reacted to this

  21. Posted

    It may come as a stunning surprise to people here that my absolutely favourite card in my collection was Magical Hack. It never failed to produce hilarious results.

    One time in a multiplayer game one of my opponents played a very annoying red-black deck. One of the other players got tired of that and played Drought, which requires everybody playing who wants to generate black mana to sacrifice a swamp for each black mana they get. At this point I intervened and played my Hack on the Drought and said, "Ah, no. You have to sacrifice a plains for each black mana you get." The guy with the black-red deck looked aghast and said, "But I don't have any plains in my deck." I replied, "Then you may have a problem."

    Needless to say, with one of his colours taken entirely out of play, he did not do well in the rest of the game.

    Arcanimus reacted to this

  22. Posted

    39 minutes ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    While I'm well aware it comes off as insensitive, Biased preconceptions should be challenged not tolerated or reinforced, regardless of whether that bias is positive or negative. If a bias is never challenged, people will begin to believe it true whether it is or not.

    Also people shouldn't throw anecdotal statistics around. ever. it's, at best, misleading.

    You are not getting it. This is not about science. If this were a scientific journal, you would be absolutely correct. But it is not. It is a discussion forum about a comic where people come to relax and have fun. And it is just about as far away from fun as it is possible to suddenly find oneself in the middle of a discussion where people casually take something very traumatic for one and then turn it into idle entertainment or statistics. Especially when it turns into something that either ignores or denies one's actual lived experience.

    It is my job as a moderator to keep this space as safe as possible for the people who post here. From the responses I have seen earlier, I suspect that more than one other than me have had experiences with an alcoholic family member that impacted or harmed their lives. I do not wish to hear a defence of alcohol after what it has done to mine. And I very definitely do not wish to be told that the years of pain and confusion I went through are 'a misleading anecdotal statistic', for that is most certainly outright telling me that what I have experienced and suffered does not matter.

    You may not have intended that. It is still what you did. So therefore I ask you to please stop your 'scientific' treatment of this and take it elsewhere. If you do not, I shall be compelled to act as moderator. And I do not want to do that.

    Sweveham reacted to this

  24. Posted

    4 minutes ago, Matoyak said:

    Well, aren't there cars that just turn on via a button on the key now, rather than turning the key? I know that my dad's pickup you don't turn the key in: You push a button. But that one requires the key being plugged into the slot. No turning though, just button. Pretty sure I've heard of ones that work at a distance.

    James Bond had a car that would turn on its automatic defense system, kick the ass of several bad guy henchmen while standing peacefully parked, and when Bond clicked a button it would start itself and drive to where he waited for it and outmaneuvering two hostile cars while doing so, does that count? :danshiftyeyes:

    RainbowWizard reacted to this