ijuin

Better than the Ex-Men.

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.

Power is not linear. The creature may possess some special attack which will be super effective against the dragon but not against you. Or the creature may be immune against some of Dragon's powers, say hypnotism and you are not (that would explain why you can't attack him, it's not just because developers are lazy :-) ). Not speaking about the possibility you will kill the creature in unfair way.
(EDIT: Him or her. Is it a lady dragon? It is possible that you won't attack the dragon because it's against your honor to attack ladies, while the creature is not bound by such stupid rule? Or is it the dragon who is bound by- wait, that creature is the dragon's ex, isn't it?)

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.

Tedd talked himself, Sarah, and Grace into not sharing information with his father.
Pandora put a lot of effort into convincing Sarah not to talk to Tedd's father.
Ellen and Nanase talked themselves into circles justifying a decision to withhold information from anyone.
It would be the hopelessly honest Elliot making a talk with Agent Verres the first option.

Aaaaaah! Giant snake!
Oh, phew. It's satiated and probably in torpor.
 
I might as well repost the quotes I put up last time... and some others.
 
 
It is difficult to cherry pick the whole of the tree.
-- Unique Identifier, Slate Star Codex comments on 'Black people less likely', 2015-02-12
Give a man a mask and he will show you his true self.
-- Oscar Wilde
I'm not well disposed to uncritical thought, particularly not from my own side. People opposing my viewpoint do, after all, have the excuse of being wrong.
-- Eleas, on SDN
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
-- H.L. Mencken
The plural of anecdote is not “data”. But the singular of anecdote is “enough data to disprove a universal negative claim”.
Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex - 'Polyamory is boring' 2013-04-06
This post is true in spirit, in fact, in totality and in detail. It is inarguably correct and I can't see for the life of me how anyone is going to, OR COULD refute any point of it. I am aware that someone is going to try though. 
-- Tonot, on the Erfworld Forums, about something by Lipkin
I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.
—- Paul A. M. Dirac
Quoted in F Wilczek, B Devine, Longing for the Harmonies
On two occasions I have been asked by Members of Parliament 'Pray Mr. Babbage, if you put the wrong numbers in to the machine will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
They're not being mean to you because you're an outsider, they're just not going to handle you with kid gloves when you come along claiming your idea will overturn most of their lives' work.
-- GMailvuk, XKCD, on a putative Theory of Everything, 2015-02-10
the mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep
-- attributed to Bertrand Russell
Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
-- Mark Twain
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.
-- Bruce Schneier
This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
-- Scott Alexander, "The Control Group is Out of Control", concerning a study by Dr.s Wiseman and Schlitz on psychic effects
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations, then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
-- Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915), chapter 4
Nature is the ultimate bigot, because it is obstinately and intolerantly devoted to its own prejudices and absolutely refuses to yield to the most persuasive rationalizations of humans.
-- J. R. Molloy
Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
As the would-be leaders of the French Revolution could explain (if they were still alive), the biggest problem with rabble-rousing is that if one succeeds, he will find himself surrounded by aroused rabble.
-- Maggie McNeill, The Widening Gyre
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.
-- Paul Claudel
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx
Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops.
-- Rick Gaber
Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
-- Thomas Hobbes
The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just that one's brain is less malleable. Another probably even worse obstacle is that one has higher standards.
-- Paul Graham (in Is it Worth Being Wise?)
Everything you worry about will be many times better, but people will continue to feel just as bad.
-- teleny, on Everything2, in reference to the passage of time.
I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”
-- Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, book review: Singer on Marx
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi
Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.
-- Gene Sharp
Laura Ingalls Wilder had a “normal” childhood that happened to involve scarlet fever, teen pregnancy, and the systematic annihilation of the native peoples whose land she and her neighbours were homesteading. To her, this was a successful, well-spent youth. To us, it sounds like Thunderdome.
-- Madeline Ashby, Jan 28 2009, on a whatever.scalzi.com comment thread
Faith IS NOT knowledge, but evil of not measuring.
-- Gene Ray, of Timecube.com fame
When I look back upon what I have said in life, I find I envy dumb people
-- Seneca
I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.
-- Warren Buffett
No, my privilege is merely to not be subject to a certain type of egregious bullshit which no person should have to endure, and all I gain from this privilege is a blindness concerning what goes on around me.
-- JediBear, at the Whatever, concerning 'privilege' as in 'the invisible knapsack'
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France
Patriotism is supporting your country at all times, and your government when it deserves it.
-- Mark Twain
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
The reasonable man expects to conform to society. The unreasonable man expects society to conform to him. Therefore, without the unreasonable man, there would be no progress.
-- George Bernard Shaw
If you make a post defending rationalism on a rationalist blog, dozens of rationalists will suddenly show up arguing you’re not being sufficiently charitable to the person attacking them.
-- Scott Alexander, comment on his 'Why I am not Rene Descartes'
The point of having an open mind is to make it up occasionally.
-- Marcello Herreshoff
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
-- Herbert Spencer 
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
-- C.P. Snow
For if all goes well, the question "What is fun?" shall determine the shape and pattern of a billion galaxies.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Metaphysics isn't about answers. It's about questions. The questions tell you everything about the person asking them, and nothing about the universe.
-- Surgoshan (Sluggy.net)
Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because [we] actually deserve them? So now I take comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the Universe.
-- Marcus, Babylon 5
The law of gravity, while disputed by few, has failed to convince most people that it is our moral obligation to lie on the ground rather than standing, jumping, or climbing as we see fit.
-- snol, on Everything2 (in comparison to the law of evolution)

Personally I find the idea of sex with another man to be kinda unpleasant-sounding and would never want to marry one. So I have coped with this by only sleeping with women and marrying one of them instead. It has worked out well for me as a coping technique and I heartily advocate it for those folks who oppose legalizing gay marriage.
-- Don Whiteside™ (@donw) at the Whatever, 2014-02-10
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
--  G.K. Chesterton
In lit, the protag is broken, and the story is about dealing with that; in genre, the SITUATION is broken; the protag generally isn’t, because that’s not the story. Lit readers look at a genre book and go huh? How can there be a story? Protag not broken!
-- El, on 2009-jan-28, on a whatever.scalzi.com comment thread.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
-- C. S. Lewis
 
You will never break the laws or commit violence against anybody while I’m alive, and if you try it, you won’t do it when I’m dead, either.
-- Emperor Tiberius, to his son Drusus, paraphrased (obv since this isn't the kind of thing that gets written down by the principals)
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." –- from David Copperfield, Dickens
Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.
-- S. T. Rev
We never bother running a computer program unless we don't know the output and we know an important fact about the output.
-- Marcello Herreshoff
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
-- Bruce Lee
He's discussing morality, and thus couldn't care less how many dead bodies hit the ground.
-- Weremensch
 
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
-– Abraham Lincoln
I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying.
-- Michael Jordan
She uses the phrase ‘most people’ as the first person singular pronoun.
-- Xopher, via the whatever at Scalzi.com (not its original use, though it is the original speaker)
The purpose of training is to ensure a standardized response to a predictable situation.
The purpose of education is to ensure a reasoned response to an unpredictable situation
-- via OldCrow, Sluggy boards
A good way to judge content in a game is to remove the rewards. If there was no reward for tackling the task you were given, would you ever bother doing it? If the answer is no, there's probably something wrong with your content.
-- SirNiko, KoL forum
I frequently remind myself, when the difficulties of dealing with other apes are getting to be too much to tolerate, that it's a problem so hard that we evolved brains capable of maintaining a global technological civilization and figuring out quantum mechanics as a side effect of trying to solve it, and I should maybe cut myself some slack.
-- TheOtherDave, lesswrong.com, on Evolving to Extinction
The concept of intellectual cowardice was not something she wanted to think about.
-- Erfworld Book 0 (about princess Jillian)
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
-- Samuel Johnson
Whoever is already a monster should see to it that he fights monsters. And if I gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss is gonna break eye contact first.
-- Peter Seebach (apologies to Nietzsche)

The readers?

There's one dungeon in WoW called the Mana Tombs. It's controlled by a group a rogue Ethereals and they've put up a field at the entrance to prevent Ethereals from the Consortium from entering. When you go there, you see the Consortium Ethereals trying to get past the field and and occasionally one of them will try to enter and for a moment it looks like they succeeded until they suddenly go POOF and one of the technicians is like "Well, back to the drawing board."

I can understand there being a chance that Carol has the same innate ability as Sarah, but it's probably just as hard to detect and I just don't see Pandora having marked her as well. I see Pandora taking interest in Sarah because of her friendship with Tedd, and upon taking a closer look at Sarah's potential during the deck building phase of the tournament, noticed her innate ability and thought some fun could be had with it.

They are completely ordinary.
Now think about it a little. THAT is the reason DGB works so hard to keep magic secret.

Grace's inability to use Earthly magic may also be tied into her Lespuko genes, which enhance her shapeshifting and telekinetic ability.

I hadn't heard about "stale", but there was the little problem that any water not from wells - and water from some wells - was contaminated with whatever sort of bacteria the folks upstream were currently suffering from. And the denser the population, the more of an issue this was. Population was, of course, densest in cities.
Yes, they regarded water as unhealthy to drink, for the very simple reason that people who drank it tended to get sick (not including drunk or hung-over) more than people who didn't. So they drank wine and beer instead. And they also mixed wine/beer (and later rum and other distilled spirits) with water, to reduce the intoxication (and stretch the expensive stuff), but if it had enough alcohol to kill the bacteria they didn't know was in the water...
In China they had the same problem; rather than fixating on alcohol, they drank tea. To make good tea you have to boil the water. Which kills the bacteria they didn't know was in the water.
So China invented the tea ceremony, and Europe invented the "Hold my beer and watch this!" ceremony.

The problem is that Data plans and Lore plans don't communicate with each other well. For maximum compatiblity, Susan would probably just go with the generic Soong-type plan.

Much less evil than a Lore plan.

I have always been of the opinion that charging the receiving party and not just the sending party for all text messages is akin to making all postal mail cash-on-delivery. It's basically a form of harassment if you are forced to pay for an unsolicited message that you would have rejected had you known who it was from, yet you have to pay for it before you can even find out that it's an unsolicited message rather than from a friend. Imagine if you had to pay postage on every piece of advertising that is sent to you in the mail whether you wanted to receive it or not.

Much less evil than a Lore plan.

Susan would be the expert on any sort of Data plan.

Just a guess, but since they are part bird could it be a Pigeon English?

Grace would make a good Magical Girl.  I wonder if we can get her into the Lunar Mariner's troop?
And as for Greg?  He was probably in some power-up sequence in which his steam powered equipment would increase the force of his martial arts attack exponentially.  Then as the power up was reaching the dramatic point, Grace walked over and used the pointy stick to knock out some valves and hoses.  This caused Greg's apparatus to violently decompress and blow him across the room.
Notice that Grace did not celebrate the win until she saw Greg getting up on his own.

Last week I wanted to do this but the number dropped suddenly before it happened(possibly due to the April changeover). But now it's official, Dan's hit the 1000 patron mark on patreon.
That's about it, we should maybe congratulate him, or something.

I've never been drunk in my so-far thirty-odd years of life and I have no desire ever to become so. Not that I'm militantly against other people drinking, mind you--I just have no desire for alcohol myself. It probably helps that I find the taste and smell of most alcoholic beverages to be absolutely foul.

Still have to take it easy for a few weeks, and there's some staples that need to stay there for a week, but yeah. Short surgery and a lot of boredom. It honestly hasn't sunk in that my life was ever in danger.
Sure, I was worried a little at one point or another, but for the most part I stayed relaxed, kept myself awake until operating time--it'd be easier for them to put me to sleep if I was already tired--and tried not to laugh when they shaved my stomach hair (seriously, that tickled). I think the worst pain I felt during all this might've been the removing of the medical tape.
When a trip to the ER for appendicitis can be summed up as boring...

Are you sure you want to have to scan your head for malware? 

If this is on January 17th, when did they just agree to meet?

If anything he's drawing attention to how ridiculous it is