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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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ChronosCat

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Posts posted by ChronosCat

  1. Posted

    We have a fairly long driveway, as well other parts of the yard we try to keep walk-able through the winter. However, we don't have a plow (and are not in the habit of hiring someone else to plow); instead I usually snowblow it.

    Last night we had several inches of heavy wet snow. I wasn't sure if the snowblower could handle it, but assumed the worst that would happen was the snow would stick to the snowblower blades and eventually clog it; instead after a minute something inside it broke. I don't know if the snow being so heavy was the problem or if it would have happened anyway, but either way it means the snowblower will need to be repaired, and we had to remove the snow with scoops and shovels.

    As a result, I just spent seven hours scooping snow. I'm exhausted and a bit sore.

  2. Posted

    9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    That is Clarke's original quote. I believe it is being inverted to make a point.

    Clarke's Third Law is " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. "

    The quote mloony gave is a more recent counterpart to it - and it makes a similar sort of sense.

    Don Edwards' inversion of Clarke's Law, on the other hand, is just silly (unless one is going with a very specific meaning of "advanced").

  3. Posted

    6 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    I am not familiar with the term 'GLURK', although I believe I've seen it before. It sounds foreign, German maybe; "Du hast ein glurk". It is not onomatopoeia, humans do not produce that sound as a normal reaction to events.

    I always figured it was an onomatopoeia for a loud gulp.

  4. Posted

    7 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    Interesting factoid, there was a round home downtown, appeared to be built buy owner out of cinder blocks. A very small home, but it probably had walls inside, and thus corners. Still, at least conceptually, the interior would be a cool place to say "Go stand in the corner" to a kid.

    6 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    My grandfather once owned an old train round house.  The Rail Road built a new line & didn't need the old  roundhouse anymore.  They sold it for scrap to someone who salvaged what he wanted & sold it for scrap to someone else.  Grandpa was 5th or 6th in the sequence, so he never intended to keep it.  Still it might have been nice to have a house where you rode a massive turntable from room to room

    When I was a kid, an Uncle & Aunt of mine (and their three kids) lived in a geodesic dome. I always thought it was kind of neat, but I know fitting furniture that normally goes against a wall in was a challenge for them.

     

  5. Posted

    18 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    But riddle me this, name a popular Hasbro product from your childhood. I can not. I know they were around, but I don't recall what they sold.

    As a child of the 80s: Transformers, G.I.Joe, and My Little Pony (though Transformers was the only one of the three I was into at the time). (Not that I could have told you Hasbro made them at the time, but I didn't really pay attention to what brands made toys and games back then.)

  6. Posted

    It's exiting to finally see one of Grace's siblings again. I know Dan has a lot of characters to juggle, but for characters who were once so important to the story, and who remain important to Grace, it's bugged me for a while that we've gone so long without seeing them (well over a decade and a half at this point!).

    I wonder how much we'll actually see of Vladia in this story, and whether this is a sign we may actually have Grace interacting with them again before we hit the two decade mark...

    56 minutes ago, ijuin said:

    Vladia is rather conspicuously wearing a skirt over tights as her chosen work clothes. This suggests that Vladia has internalized a feminine self-image to at least the same degree as Elliot, feeling that it is appropriate to wear feminine clothes when presenting as female, regardless of it being a non-native form. Or, as Elliot put it, “I’m wearing a skirt, and I have boobs. I’m not going to start worrying about my manly image NOW.”

    Vladia talked a little bit about her views of her female-human form at the end of Painted Black and when Grace talked with her on Grace's birthday. The first time, she said that as far as she was concerned she had never been a man, merely a monster. The second time she said she was happy with her current form. Based on this, I believe Vladia is the sort of person without a strong sense of an internal gender identity, and since she had never experienced what it was like to be a human male, slipping into the role of a human female was relatively easy for her.

    11 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    What is Vladia's job on the team?  Her sonic attack & most other abilities are only available in monster form.  Shapeshifting may be available, but she is unlikely to use it.  Transforming was painful, possibly fatal, & could leave her unable to resume her human form.   Without a traditional education background, did she have enough time to train up to rookie investigator status?

    Well, according to the final recap link in the commentary, the "trainee" has "a talent for detecting people who are using concealment magic". Of course this raises the question of where she gets that power. I suspect that since we last saw her she's been learning magic. Alternately, perhaps despite not appearing on her face her antennae have not been completely suppressed (maybe they were just moved to the back of her head?), and she still has the senses they provide.

  7. Posted

    12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    That is actually where I learned of it, then I looked up details.

    I learned of it on the RPG.net forums (which I joined, ironically enough, for their active off-topic forums). Of course, I don't play D&D, so it doesn't directly affect me, but I have to admit it's a pretty messed up situation.

  11. Posted · Edited by ChronosCat
    Fixed the link.

    Dan accidentally released this Milestone for patrons earlier than usual; it can be found at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/whoops-ashley-76836142
    Tomorrow night it should be available on the main site; I'm guessing the URL will be https://www.egscomics.com/sketchbook/2023-001

    I don't have too much to say about this one other than that the art's pretty but the contents don't do much for me.

  14. Posted

    8 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    FWIW, I'm not on board with where the discussion is heading. Beauty is not the same thing as charisma. Some RPG, it might have been an edition of D&D, broke out physical beauty from charisma as comeliness.

    Developments in D&D are probably fairly irrelevant to this storyline; Dan doesn't actually have a lot of experience with tabletop RPGs. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the game they're playing in story wound up influenced by some of the video games he plays. (I seem to recall appearance playing a large role in persuasiveness in Dan's "Parable" story/game, so this may be Dan playing around with the same ideas again.)

    The part where it gets weird is when Nanase and Ellen talk about it as a phenomena they are concerned about in real life. Of course, as you said looks do play a part in how people react to one another in real life, but generally being good looking isn't enough. Considering what George said, I don't think this is Dan's mistake - I think Nanase and Ellen are supposed to be mistaken. But I suppose we'll have to wait and see to know for sure.

  15. Posted

    Well, the thing is, I (and my parents) actually rely on a Mobile Hotspot for home internet (we live out in the middle of the woods, where the only other option at the moment would be to get a satellite dish, and last we checked that was more expensive than we could afford). And no, there's no ethernet socket on it. (For that matter, I hadn't really thought about it since I never use ethernet connections, but there's no ethernet port on the laptop either - just HDMI and a couple different kinds of USB.)

  17. Posted

    35 minutes ago, ijuin said:

    I suggest you get an Ethernet cable as a backup, so that you can plug into wired internet where it is available.

    A good idea, except I'm not aware of anywhere I might go that has wired internet.

    35 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

    How comfortable are you with opening the case? I'd be inclined to take the network card out, clean the contacts, and reinstall it.

    (There are sure to be pics online of the inside of your model of laptop, with the network card identified.)

    Not very. Besides the fact that I have zero experience with working with the internal hardware of computers, there's also the fact that I just bought this laptop a few weeks ago and don't want to risk voiding the warranty or otherwise causing damage the warranty won't cover.

  18. Posted

    Yesterday evening my laptop suddenly stopped detecting any Wi-Fi signals; borrowing my parents' laptop I determined that the Wi-Fi was fine - my laptop was the problem. Restarting the computer only made it worse - now the icon on the taskbar and the entry in the settings for Wi-Fi were gone entirely. I didn't want to wait for a computer repair place to be open to fix the problem (or to either pay for someone to fix it or try to make use of the warranty) if I didn't have to, so I used my parents' computer to go to the website of my computer's manufacturer (ASUS) and check the support section for suggestions.

    I found a solution that seems to have worked for the moment, but before I thought to go to the ASUS site I found a bunch of Redit posts complaining about the network card my laptop has (and the drivers for said card) not being very reliable, and some people talking about having this problem repeatedly. So now I find myself worried that my laptop's wireless functions could malfunction again at any time without warning.

  22. Posted

    My parents gave me some jeans & some winter PJs (long gone are the days when I was disappointed to get clothing as a present), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (the movie, not the game), Beren & Luthien by J.R.R. Tolkien, the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma (I'm in the process of collecting their albums), and an IOU for Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition (the delivery was delayed, so it hasn't arrived yet).

    From my sister, I got the Pink Floyd albums A Momentary Lapse of Reason and Animals.

  23. Posted

    We lost power from around 6 PM to around 5 AM; given how many people lost power and how much work the power crews have, we were lucky it wasn't out longer.

    There is still some white stuff on the ground, though I suspect it's more ice than snow at this point (I haven't been outside to check).

    So bright side: we'll have a white Christmas with electricity (even if it is fairly cold out).

  24. Posted

    Well, it is nice to be able to see the keys when using it in a dark room (though on the other hand I try to have a light on when using my computer, and I can touch type). Anyway, finding a laptop I liked and could afford was hard enough without ruling out laptops that had unnecessary features.

  25. Posted

    Rainy today, with a predicted high of 50 (f); for context it's been in the 30s for the past couple of weeks, and we have about a foot of snow on the ground. (I wonder if any of it will still be here tomorrow?) More troubling is the predicted wind: sustained winds around 30mph, with gusts up to 60mph. If that prediction holds, there are going to be a lot of branches and even trees blown down, and we'll be lucky if we don't loose power.

    Tomorrow we get a cold snap, with temperatures dropping down to around 20... Fun.