Don Edwards

There are variations in what the diacritics (the marks adorning letters) mean and how they originated. And a single mark can have different meanings in different languages, even those whose origins are geographically adjacent (such as French and German). Spanish is one of the easiest languages to explain the diacritics of. A tilde over an N - ñ or Ñ - alters the pronunciation of that letter to be more like "ny". Other than that, it's about stress. A multi-syllable word without an accent mark is stressed on the next-to-last-syllable if it ends with a vowel, n, or s; on the last syllable otherwise. But if there's an accent mark, whatever syllable it's on is stressed. French has perhaps the most useless of the still-used diacritics. Both the grave accent on an initial vowel and the circumflex basically mean "there used to be an S after this letter, but we dropped it somewhere around Middle French and couldn't find it again." Examples, ècureil, forêt. Put the S'es back in, and you can probably figure out the English translations. The acute accent almost always means even less; omitting it is a misspelling, not a different word, and it doesn't affect pronunciation. On the other hand, the cedilla matters in French, as does the grave accent when further into the word. The cedilla goes under a C (French never uses it on any other letter) and looks kind of like a comma, i.e. Ç or ç, and means that the C makes the K sound when the ordinary rules of the language would assign an S sound. The grave accent occasionally affects meaning: des is "of the" or "some", while dès are rolled on the table in various games. English? About the only diacritic you're at all likely to encounter in modern-English text, other than in fairly-recent "loan words" from other languages, is the diaeresis (which is also one of the more difficult ones to spell). It's a pair of dots over the second of two adjacent vowels, usually double vowels, to indicate that they are pronounced in separate syllables. Example: coöperate. But it's usually omitted, and sometimes replaced by a hyphen: co-operate. Switch to some other language, and the above usage notes may or may not apply. And may apply differently: studying the default Compose-key configuration file reveals that some language(s) will put a diaeresis over some consonants, and some put a diaeresis under a letter. And there are other diacritics I'd never heard of, but are used somewhere for some purpose, such as macron (a short horizontal line above a letter). Plus languages that aren't satisfied with just one on a letter, but will apply two or three.

And if she uses a lawnmower as a weapon, would it be a coup de grass?

Or both - there were three maids, initally.

And I'd say that the girlification we've seen stereotypes teenage boys...

Grrl Power had a brief discussion of collateral damage and why you don't throw a random car at the bad guys. Batman had super skills, not super powers, and mostly got into fistfights. At least in the 1960's TV show. So not a lot of collateral damage there. Spiderman not exactly the same, but similar. Superman could defy physics. A commercial airliner could run into him and just stop, no damage, the people and cargo aboard not thrown forward... and he could hold it up in the air with one hand against its nose (rather far from its center of gravity).

Hey, mlooney, I think you and Explorer (well, maybe not Explorer) will get a kick out of this: Cat Sabbath

Dang. It's giving me ideas. Finding suitable Reddit forums and posting things like, oh, alkahest as hangover relief. Recommending the use of vibranium for speaker enclosures. And other applications of less-known mythical substances. What did they expect? Tie pay & other job rewards to MORE use of an expensive resource, and you'll spend more money on that resource. And if the programmers have a choice of doing something in a way that spends one unit of that resource, or another way that spends three, they'll prefer the latter even if it delivers inferior results. Programmers should be rewarded for producing working and reasonably-efficient code to specification, not for burning money.

Yes, I suggest that specifically for its high irony content.

Now we need a US judge to say "Yeah, that!" (Maybe one of the lawyers that got caught submitting unverified LLM-generated documents full of hallucinations to a court, can sue for the damage to their career.)

Actually, I think the real reason that this immortal is claiming that "royal auras" are a scam is because people who have them don't always agree with him and do what he wants. And their example encourages others to disobey him to. (As you can see, this is independent of whether or not they are a scam, or why.)

I'm drinking a cup of pu'erh right now. And I have a couple more bricks of it on order, likely to be delivered today or tomorrow. (Pu'erh usually comes in some sort of compressed lump. Rectangular bricks of 250 grams are one of the three most common forms.) (Also, if you see a pu'erh brick, cake, or block that is wrapped only in plastic - don't buy it. The stuff is supposed to be exposed to air for years, so the primary wrapping should be paper. Mail-ordering it, an extra plastic wrapping may be necessary for shipping, but the paper should still be there and should say what year the block was formed.)

I read it as, the immortal is telling them that the "royal aura" is a scam, and this horned person wants to understand how and why — and if — that's true. (And my answer would be, there's nothing about the "royal aura" that proves the person is either fit or entitled to rule over others.)

Here's an idea for something she'd chase... https://twokinds.keenspot.com/comic/1297/

well, it is strong evidence, for one planet with that feature...

I remember reading of one "horribly wrong" weather forecast, that resulted in rain on a large number of picnics in and near the affected city... that, on closer analysis, turned out to be an error in the prediction of the exact wind direction. An error of FOUR DEGREES.

Want another fun (possible) explanation? The test didn't work, and it took them a few minutes to fix the wiring and try again.

He is, in one sense, fairly new at the job. In another, he's an old hand. Specifically: When Edward Verres got promoted sideways, Arthur Arthur, who had previously retired from being the local boss guy with Mr. V as his successor, got pulled out of retirement. So he knows the job extremely well, but may not be up-to-date on the current staff.

I randomly advise you to ignore that random advice.

It's usually better to use a cold pack on a fresh injury, to reduce blood flow (and swelling) until all tearing in blood vessels is clotted over. THEN use hot packs to encourage blood flow & muscle relaxation, speeding healing. But if a medical professional has told you differently, listen to them not me.

Considering the war in progress, I'd prefer to see somewhat less detailed reporting of combat capabilities. At least on the side we support.

In those notes, a scientist writes down what they are about to do, including the instrumentation they're using to measure the results, and what they think will happen. In enough detail that another scientist could come along later, read those notes, and from them do exactly the same experiment. Then after doing what they write, they come back and add what did happen. Most scientists can get away with some improvisation, but that improvisation must be noted in just as much detail as intentions and results. Scientists doing potentially-deadly things, such as testing ideas for new explosives, shouldn't improvise—they shouldn't do any experiment not planned in their notes. And they should make sure that while they are doing the experiment over here, an up-to-the-second copy of their notes is safely over there.

Edward didn't get demoted, he got promoted sideways. He was too important a figure in inter-dimensional relations to demote, so he got more responsibility in that area and removed from being a field agent. Or something like that. Of course, that "removed from being a field agent" doesn't exactly apply when the field in question is literally his own house.

"Magic is serious. The Grace I know is too much of a goofball to be involved, so they must be referring to some other Grace. Or maybe the one I know is an act."

Unfortunately, the usual way of arranging that is rather permanent. Unless you believe in reincarnation.

I suspect Bishop also has a hard time seeing anything she doesn't already believe to be true.