banneret

To expand on the above post, when an individual moves, it is the product of a mixture of involuntary, automated, and voluntary processes. The involuntary accounts for necessary functions, such as breathing. The voluntary usually covers intention, and clarification through decisions along the way. The automated is the meat of the matter, we do not think ourselves through each step, we simply walk. Automaticity, or the formation of subconscious response patterns, is one of the most important aspects of human cognition. Without it, we could not easily walk, read or speak... let alone run, write or sing. However, it is most easily disrupted by bringing voluntary thought to bear on the task, a prime example being an attempt to remember a number that you regularly input "by heart".
I figure there are a two probable explanations for Grace's behaviour in Sarah's simulation.
1. Sarah's spell is using her own automatic patterns and subconscious, in conjunction with her understanding of Grace's personality, to synthesize an "actor" which responds to her requests. In this case, Grace could use any automatic patterns, like speaking, that Sarah has established. If her instructions go outside the personality or the bounds of her own patterns, the spell will either fail or derive a placeholder.
2. Sarah's spell is using her own memories to synthesize a sensory composite which reflects her direction. In this case, the composite would only be limited by Sarah's memories and capacity to distort them, and would thus be particularly susceptible to projection.
The first option is both more interesting and more useful for simulation. The second is just what people do normally, we don't need magic for that.

Fixed that for you.

Speak for yourself!  If we don't want peers then why do we tend to gather in groups with people who are good at and enjoy the same things we do?  Why would someone smart go out of their way to join Mensa to find others equally smart and to be in a Gathering where they are completely ordinary, instead of just joining a more conventional group where they could always be the smartest person in the room?  Why would so many people have fought so hard, suffered and sacrificed and died, in order to free slaves and end Jim Crow, even though every Freedom Ride bus was half-filled with people who were white and thus would only lose relative status by your theory?  Why would we have expressions like "A rising tide lifts all boats" and have the concept that society is not a Zero Sum Game?
I'm glad I live in my world and not the one you describe, which would be a very depressing place.

That all depends on what sort of stress you are putting the brain under.

As long as it doesn't turn into Frank Miller time. Good Lord what a fubar he managed to create in his All-Star Batman & Robin. Newspapers that printed a kidnapping story that happened after they went to print. Milk cartons listing a boy as missing who didn't go missing till days later. Batman and Robin driving around in the Batmobile arguing for SIXTEEN HOURS just driving from the circus to the Batcave. And the time issues were just a small part of what made the whole monumental mess so awful.

Politics is not a recent invention, as a manifestation of hierarchy and the pursuit of power among social animals we can safely assume it predates written history. As far as we know there have always been leaders who rode to war, and leaders who did not, in the same periods. The warrior king and the tribal chief riding with their hosts are romantic notions, but we must not succumb to primitivism. Soldiers are sent to fight whether or not the leader is present, and historically the presence of leaders was a matter of practical necessity. Either the leader stayed with the host to direct it or stayed with the host for security, they can only now command from afar due to advancements in technology.
 

Politics is not a recent invention, as a manifestation of hierarchy and the pursuit of power among social animals we can safely assume it predates written history. As far as we know there have always been leaders who rode to war, and leaders who did not, in the same periods. The warrior king and the tribal chief riding with their hosts are romantic notions, but we must not succumb to primitivism. Soldiers are sent to fight whether or not the leader is present, and historically the presence of leaders was a matter of practical necessity. Either the leader stayed with the host to direct it or stayed with the host for security, they can only now command from afar due to advancements in technology.
 

Neither -- in fact, none -- of your arguments negate my main point, which is that this absurd kill or be killed mentality you seem to posit as a necessity for survival is the exception and not the rule.
As to professionals arriving in minutes, why not? Much smaller communities then. All you needed was a good alarm bell and the help would be there quite speedily. In fact, a rather famous militia in the early days of America was called 'Minutemen' for precisely this reason...

I concur, there are ways and ways of surviving and thriving, and as social creatures with a wide range of communication methods and decent powers of calculation, fatal force should be the exception, not the rule. Of course, there is a lot of violence in recorded history, but it is abundantly clear that more violence is practiced than strictly warranted.

I concur, there are ways and ways of surviving and thriving, and as social creatures with a wide range of communication methods and decent powers of calculation, fatal force should be the exception, not the rule. Of course, there is a lot of violence in recorded history, but it is abundantly clear that more violence is practiced than strictly warranted.

Or tiring him out?
My main point is: I refute this ridiculous assertation that 'kill or be killed' is the only method that works. Inside the same species there tends to be several ways a confrontation may be resolved. Fight, flight, posture and submission. The same goes for humans, to a large degree. Have you ever seen a burgeoning fight where one side clenches their fists and the other responds by throwing up their hands and saying, "Hey, I didn't want a fight!"? I have. Several times.
In fact, I would say that actually resolving every fight with killing would be contrasurvival. You very quickly get an awfully shallow gene pool that way...

In retrospect, that is a deuced unlikely ban. Women's clothing is probably sold at the majority of the outlets in the mall, which are always spread out geographically. He would have to be banned from stores specifically catering to women, and the women's sections of stores which provide clothing to men as well. Not all stores have the resources to keep a list of banned customers, and few malls have enough security staff to enforce a mall-wide ban, much less one dealing with a subset of the establishments within. Anyway, I very much doubt Dan will revisit the gag, for it was from an early phase of the comic and it wasn't well executed.
 

In one campaign, I leaned upon the myopia of faith to permit the succession and execution of a deity, but that depended on the deity crafting an impersonal identity about rule, which could then be assumed by another. Fitting for a deity of betrayers and regicides, whose power is narrow, and arrayed against the order enforced by her peers and betters.

Uncritical worship provides opportunity for usurpation, which is why a deity wants some intimacy with core followers, and some signature presence in the material plane to extend the scope of belief and attach it to herself in an identifiable manner.
 

My daughter has a story of a an RPG where the other players persuaded her to play a gnome thief - and then their characters immediately started with jokes about short people...
She managed to persuade the king that kidnappers were after him, escort him to a place of safety, go back and convince the royal councillors that the king had been kidnapped and they should choose her as the courier for the ransom money, frame the rest of her party as the kidnappers, bring the king back and collect a reward from him for protecting him from the kidnappers, and then rescue the rest of the party...
... there were no kidnappers...
(This involved a LOT of notes to & from the DM. Just to make things confusing, some of the notes she passed said things like "think a moment and then tell me no".)

I was recently at a poorly staged performance of Carmen, and even never having seen this episode, I was thinking about it. Members of my family may have sung it repeatedly in my youth.

I'm listening to The Beekeeper's Apprentice in one room, and No Doubt in the other room.

in a  way, this storyline really makes me feel sorry for Pandora. She presumably didn't reset because she was concerned about having wasted this particular life, and as a result, she is leaving a legacy that her next life will probably be profoundly ashamed of. She's a clear example of why immortals reset- her basic personality is still there- she was always something of a troll, but somethiing of a lightherated one, making people do embarrassing things rather than dangerous things- but over time, the increased power has corrupted her into thinking that the consequences to others don't matter. Frankly, this makes me think the best thing for her is to go through a proper immortal death, so that her next life will not lose the knowledge of important things ( like, for example, not skipping resets) while regaining her sanity.

I feel Sweveham has the right of it. We have two parties, with similar policies and practices across both the economic and foreign spheres. They differ primarily on polarized social and operational issues which many European countries don't even debate, such as the right to bodily autonomy for women, or the necessity of taxation to fund the activity of government. Our elections are primarily run around the personalities and social stances of our politicians, rather than the expectation of differing political practice.

Of course, to your earlier post, Sweveham, our parties are nearly arbitrary groupings of politicians, primarily differentiated from one another by branding, fundraising, target demographics, and stance on the aforementioned social and operational issues. They persist because they are so large and pervasive that they've established a dominant binary, it is infeasible to practice politics here without participating in one or the other. If Europe is only just moving toward a post-democratic society, we are honestly further down that road.
 
I believe that we are not, and can not be, a healthy democratic society under the two party system. The enforced binary does not empower politicians to seek change, for it is inherently reductive and repressive. Unanimity in economic and foreign policy has driven decades of interventionism and increasingly unwise deregulation. Even the progress we have made in recent years on social issues is vulnerable in the face of this uneven polarization that prevents functional compromise in these areas. We can, we must reform both ourselves, and our political reality.

I feel Sweveham has the right of it. We have two parties, with similar policies and practices across both the economic and foreign spheres. They differ primarily on polarized social and operational issues which many European countries don't even debate, such as the right to bodily autonomy for women, or the necessity of taxation to fund the activity of government. Our elections are primarily run around the personalities and social stances of our politicians, rather than the expectation of differing political practice.

Of course, to your earlier post, Sweveham, our parties are nearly arbitrary groupings of politicians, primarily differentiated from one another by branding, fundraising, target demographics, and stance on the aforementioned social and operational issues. They persist because they are so large and pervasive that they've established a dominant binary, it is infeasible to practice politics here without participating in one or the other. If Europe is only just moving toward a post-democratic society, we are honestly further down that road.
 
I believe that we are not, and can not be, a healthy democratic society under the two party system. The enforced binary does not empower politicians to seek change, for it is inherently reductive and repressive. Unanimity in economic and foreign policy has driven decades of interventionism and increasingly unwise deregulation. Even the progress we have made in recent years on social issues is vulnerable in the face of this uneven polarization that prevents functional compromise in these areas. We can, we must reform both ourselves, and our political reality.

It might be helpful to select a representative portion of dialogue for each character you want cast, so people can read the same text and you can compare. I've done amateur voice work, but I do not like my voice.
 

In a sense, although there are some peculiar differences.
 
As you know, in table top you could get modules or additional rules books, for the most part. Earlier in the video game industry, a successful game could receive an expansion which usually consisted of lower quality, but at least substantial content, like a splat book. Generally this meant you would buy another diskette or CD with more plot, adventures, missions... a selection of material with some sort of common framework. Honestly, it was sort of like a stepping stone to a sequel in many cases.
 
However, with the advent of digital content delivery, developers realized that they didn't need to release these large collections of new content, they could sell very small pieces individually and potentially make much more money. DLC can be as large as a historical military campaign with maps, missions and new units in a strategy game, or as small as a few cosmetic items like hats and ties in an computer roleplaying game. DLC can thus be considerably worse than a splat book, because they can essentially sell you each page of the book separately, or indeed, just market a bunch of post-it notes with no rhyme or reason.

In a sense, although there are some peculiar differences.
 
As you know, in table top you could get modules or additional rules books, for the most part. Earlier in the video game industry, a successful game could receive an expansion which usually consisted of lower quality, but at least substantial content, like a splat book. Generally this meant you would buy another diskette or CD with more plot, adventures, missions... a selection of material with some sort of common framework. Honestly, it was sort of like a stepping stone to a sequel in many cases.
 
However, with the advent of digital content delivery, developers realized that they didn't need to release these large collections of new content, they could sell very small pieces individually and potentially make much more money. DLC can be as large as a historical military campaign with maps, missions and new units in a strategy game, or as small as a few cosmetic items like hats and ties in an computer roleplaying game. DLC can thus be considerably worse than a splat book, because they can essentially sell you each page of the book separately, or indeed, just market a bunch of post-it notes with no rhyme or reason.

In a sense, although there are some peculiar differences.
 
As you know, in table top you could get modules or additional rules books, for the most part. Earlier in the video game industry, a successful game could receive an expansion which usually consisted of lower quality, but at least substantial content, like a splat book. Generally this meant you would buy another diskette or CD with more plot, adventures, missions... a selection of material with some sort of common framework. Honestly, it was sort of like a stepping stone to a sequel in many cases.
 
However, with the advent of digital content delivery, developers realized that they didn't need to release these large collections of new content, they could sell very small pieces individually and potentially make much more money. DLC can be as large as a historical military campaign with maps, missions and new units in a strategy game, or as small as a few cosmetic items like hats and ties in an computer roleplaying game. DLC can thus be considerably worse than a splat book, because they can essentially sell you each page of the book separately, or indeed, just market a bunch of post-it notes with no rhyme or reason.

In a sense, although there are some peculiar differences.
 
As you know, in table top you could get modules or additional rules books, for the most part. Earlier in the video game industry, a successful game could receive an expansion which usually consisted of lower quality, but at least substantial content, like a splat book. Generally this meant you would buy another diskette or CD with more plot, adventures, missions... a selection of material with some sort of common framework. Honestly, it was sort of like a stepping stone to a sequel in many cases.
 
However, with the advent of digital content delivery, developers realized that they didn't need to release these large collections of new content, they could sell very small pieces individually and potentially make much more money. DLC can be as large as a historical military campaign with maps, missions and new units in a strategy game, or as small as a few cosmetic items like hats and ties in an computer roleplaying game. DLC can thus be considerably worse than a splat book, because they can essentially sell you each page of the book separately, or indeed, just market a bunch of post-it notes with no rhyme or reason.

Not only is the hill not symmetrical, it isn't even consistent across trips. What a disagreeable formation.
 

I can imagine a chop oozing cranberry sauce. Perhaps this isn't a great idea texturally.
 
I just had my chicken soup. It would be chicken noodle, but I cannot stand cooked carrots, and I have no need for noodles. I've added corn, and I serve it over cabbage.