Don Edwards

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...

I'm not sure anyone is ever prepared for the death of a parent they were close to. May all the formalities be as stress-free for you as is feasible.

In most (not all) sports, the collection of the very best performers will be overwhelmingly dominated by people who are genetically male and at least grew up hormonally male. This is for two reasons: one being that males do have greater strength on the average, and the other being that males also have a larger standard deviation on many attributes. Just as one example, in the 2016 Olympics the finalists in the men's 100-meter run had times from 9.81 seconds to 10.06 seconds, a span of a quarter second. The women's gold medal winner would not have qualified to even be in the men's final, and her gold-medal time was more than half a second slower than the slowest guy in the men's final. In top-level officially-mixed competitions in most sports, I think it appropriate that the "female" participants, or a minimum number of them per team, have to test genetically and hormonally female, possibly with a special case for those with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. (Pending some experimental testing to determine just what characteristics of one's sex matter.) Otherwise they may officially be mixed, but there'll be a strong tendency toward all-male teams. There are sports where I suspect that sex - genetic, hormonal, or physical - is probably not a significant factor even at that level of competition. I'd put curling among sports where that is likely to be the case.

Yeah, those clothes would be loose enough she'd probably lose them. Is anyone surprised that Ashley is a bit of an exhibitionist? (I'd adjust Ashley's proposal to allow clothes to resize UP. Wearing mouse-size clothing after transformation to elephant-size could be uncomfortable - to put it mildly.)

I think I don't want to ask you about the woman who tried to take a peacock on a plane as her emotional support animal. (A duck is a wee bit more practical.)

Then there's the curse of eternal life that does NOT come with any prevention or slowing of aging...

At one point in the Illuminatus! trilogy, a guy is on LSD and watching everyone around him change color. Not just normal human skin colors either. It occurs to him that a lot of societal problems would go away if people DID change color. Of course, this wasn't an original concept. And it was revisited somewhat more recently, as well.

In the Jenkinsverse, humanity definitively learns of the existence of aliens when a particularly bloodthirsty species (their preferred diet is sapient beings, ideally eaten while still alive) attacks a televised NHL game in Vancouver BC. This show of force will both get the aliens a serious feast, and show humanity how helpless we are. There are no survivors of the attack. That is, no alien survivors. Some of the hockey players get minor bruises. Evil Overlord List #23: I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way -- even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless -- my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks. Evil Overlord List #150: I will provide funding and research to develop tactical and strategic weapons covering a full range of needs so my choices are not limited to "hand to hand combat with swords" and "blow up the planet".

This area rarely does rain, but it has been cold and windy the last couple days. Half a propane tank lasted over a week, the next quarter lasted two days, and the last quarter about 24 hours. Aside: on the thread list, this thread shows up as a red blob loosely resembling a censor block, followed by "The weather".

Yep, #32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

"Luring" is possible, at least in the sense of deliberately trying to give the Luftwaffe the impression that Germany could win that battle with just a bit more effort. Not saying that this was actually deliberately done, just that it's possible.

I would say that a clothing-only card would (as it would be an enchantment on the clothing), but a clothing-and-something card probably would not, or at most would function as a clothing-only card (the entirety of the card's effect would count as a single enchantment, so it would have to affect Grace and she's immune to enchantment). Or we could go wildspec and say that a clothing-and- card aimed at Grace would bounce off and affect something or someone else.

The thing is, Tedd is currently actually helping to keep magic as secret as is feasible. Granted, that isn't very secret... but it's more secret than would be likely to occur with a major reset. Now maybe Tedd will turn around and say "Arthur! Let's suggest tweaks to make our current magic system less dangerous? I'll start - give ordinary people significant resistance!"

They just needed to build a heavy light plane of medium weight, with a broad wingspan able to fit through narrow spaces...

I just looked under Canada, and there it was!

I've recently been reading a bunch of stories set in a universe where the invading aliens decided to begin their invasion of Earth by showing how incredibly powerful they were by attacking a well-televised event and wiping out everyone there. Due to the time of year and so forth, the event they chose was an NHL game in Vancouver BC. They began by crashing through the roof into the middle of the rink and shooting the players. None of the invaders survived.

And that's assuming they can't use the internet to teach globally, without any need to travel. Khan Academy: Introduction to Magic (not really, darnit)

What if a fairy were to deliberately plan things out, fully prepare for a normal fairy "death", and then break fairy law? Evidence strongly suggesting that Van and Tedd are, or aren't, half-siblings, is extremely lacking. Both weak evidence (Van doesn't have Tedd's eye-shape) and probability say they are probably not. On the other hand, given his age, Van probably remembers having been baby-sat by a number of female teenagers whom he sometimes didn't know prior to the time he was left in their care without parental supervision. But has had rather less direct one-on-one interaction with strange old men. So he'd be more comfortable with another such female teenager than with a strange old man. If Pandora had said "Tedd's best friend" - well, it wouldn't take much observation to learn who Tedd's best friend is. She was protecting Ch.. that superheroine's identity.

Actually, no, Hilbert's Hotel is full when it first opens, and nobody checks out. Probably because the rest of the hotels in the universe, collectively, don't have room for all of Hilbert's guests. Oh, and the buses that pull up there are also of infinite capacity. As are the ferries the buses arrive on.

Well, if they do a brain scan and it comes back negative, you can always run for Congress...

Not only that. The Will of Magic is not only asking about whether magic should or shouldn't remain hidden, it's also asking about whether there should be a major change. The three seers now agree that it can't be hidden, but they are technically mistaken: it can be hidden quite effectively by making it nonexistent. Granted, I doubt WoM would go for that... but how about a system where magic is very tightly constricted, only seers can do magic or (maybe) grant others the ability to do magic and the granting must be done by direct person-to-person physical contact with mutual consent... If it effectively can't be hidden, then the question of whether it should be hidden is moot. However, that does not establish that there shouldn't be a major change. One could argue that the existing magic system is a bad one to go public with and that a different fundamental design would be better. If that argument were to win, then there would be a major change in how magic works followed by the seers being free - if not encouraged - to go public with it.

My possibly-erroneous understanding is that it's common and accepted in Japanese culture for teenage girls to go through a period of romantic (and possibly sexual) interaction with other girls. Let's face it, this would offer at least one advantage over heterosexual interaction: no chance of pregnancy. On the other hand, with all the effort Mamase puts into maintaining Japanese culture, we now know she went to high school in Moperville. (Because Raven was one of her teachers, and he's been teaching at the same high school for enough decades to be noteworthy.) I'm still open to the possibility that Mamase swore a not-well-thought-out oath in response to Noriko's behavior, and settled on "it's just a phase" as a way of accepting Nanase and Ellen's relationship without violating that oath. My summary of the cause of World War I is: the various national leaders were in a room full of open powder-kegs, laying a complex web of powder trails connecting them, and occasionally one of them - or someone else - would throw a lit match. Details of exactly which lit match would cause the explosion, really don't matter. On details that actually occurred though... the terrorist who killed the Austrian Archduke declared himself a "Yugoslav". Yugoslavia did not exist. The creation of Yugoslavia would have been bad for Austria (because a good chunk of the alleged territory of that mythical nation was in Austria as it then existed) and also bad for the Serbian government as it then existed (which had most of the rest of the territory, but would have been a minority of the resulting state). So it made no sense to blame the Serbian government for the terrorist's actions, even though he was legally a Serbian national. Austria blamed the Serbian government anyway, and sent a list of I think it was six demands. Serbia pointed out the obvious logical problem, and agreed to all but one of Austria's demands. The one rejected demand was that the Austrian government would appoint all of Serbia's judges - and they need not be Serbian. On the basis of that one refusal, Austria declared war. Now, remember all those powder-trails I mentioned? Russia and Serbia had a treaty specifically calling for Russia to aid Serbia if Austria declared war on Serbia. So Russia declared war on Austria. Austria and Germany had a similar treaty in case Russia would declare war on Austria. So Germany entered the war. Germany was aware of the complex network, and figured out that France was going to enter the war and not on their side - so Germany attacked France. And so on. And so on. Thing is, if the war had started in a different manner, Germany could have been on the same side as France and/or Russia...

In the world as it currently exists, there will probably be at least 300 seers *any one* of whom can cause a magic outbreak, not merely locally, but *worldwide*. And if each of those 300 seers tries to keep magic a secret, but does teach two friends how to use magic, that means there are 600 non-seer people capable of doing the same thing. We know of one seer who is likely to directly teach at least six others, and possibly eight or more others. At least one of the six would teach another person who is part of a separate magic-using group of unknown size. There are four others edit for clarification: other seers who were previously aware of magic and probably (definitely, in one case) part of their own magic-using groups. Some of the other 995 are likely to say, "Oh, THAT's how my friend was able to do such-and-such".

And Hilbert's Hotel, while mathematically perfect, doesn't rate high for customer satisfaction - making all the already-checked-in guests move to another room every time a bus arrives...

World of Darkness is quite possibly the best game system for ease of inverting. My daughter was in the habit of picking a Flaw and designing a character in such a way that it was an Advantage - and she made up great backstories for them. My shtick was to twist the standard assumptions about various sorts of characters - for a while I played a pantheistic member of the Celestial Chorus, and I was designing a quantum-physics-based Dreamspeaker when for various reasons we dropped out of the LARP group. (Interestingly, the March 2018 issue of Discover magazine has an article about the possible quantum basis of consciousness that fits perfectly with one of the two possible paradigms I came up with for a Quantum Dreamspeaker. And definitely doesn't contradict the other one.) Not that other game systems can't be inverted. In 4E D&D, I figured out that if you want to build a really good, powerful Barbarian, the character class you should pick is Cleric... and I also built a semi-pacifist Wizard. (Semi-pacifist in that there's a geas on him against doing damage to any person with magic. But he does use a staff, and know show to thump heads with it.)