Don Edwards

We don't know if there are really any such thing as male or female immortals. We know that some have at least a strong tendency to appear as male and others have at least a strong tendency to appear as female; but is that truly something other than personal preference? No idea.

And of course there's the slang meaning of "beard"... hypothetically, anyone can have one. (Which in a couple contexts I've used in an even more general sense - replacing the specifics of sexual orientation with simple social (un)acceptableness, without specification of the cause thereof.)

Perhaps the most successful weapon system in real-world history is the Strategic Defense Initiative. It contributed (exactly how much is subject to debate) to the other side collapsing, before there were even any serious experimental deployments.

If (1) elves and fairies never mate, and (2) you aren't a first-generation elf, then you cannot get above 50% fairy DNA. Elves are rare, so I suspect that both elf-fairy and elf-elf matings are even more rare. Thing is: since (we know) there is more than one fairy in the world, it's extremely likely that there is some mechanism for producing more fairies. If it possible to actually destroy (not just force-reset) a fairy, then it's nearly-certain that such a mechanism exists. And we don't know what it is.

Or even if the propulsion system is only a means of getting something from over here to over there... the hazard of a hand grenade is not based on how hard it's thrown, and it doesn't become safe if it rolls to a complete stop.

Also... IF (big if) a human's magical potential is at all tied to the amount of fairy DNA one has, then Diane almost certainly is a wizard (with zero training and very-close-to-zero experience), probably a relatively powerful one. (The expectation that Tedd would be a wizard due to having two wizard parents, kind of indicates that such a tie is commonly believed to exist. However it isn't proof of anything at all.)

Lends yet another meaning to the former-webcomic (now apparently a print-only comic) Aoi House. (The starting conceit of the comic was that the titular residence was thought to be a Greek-initials frat/sorority, where the reality was that the initial letter Y fell off the sign and nobody bothered to put it back. IMHO it had promise but failed to live up to it by basically being the same joke over and over again... nonetheless the print version is in multiple volumes.) (As you might expect from the above, it wasn't exactly work-safe.)

I'm not aware of a game system where that is true. There are quite a few where it's an available option, but for it to be the only option? For spellcasters? (I am aware of systems where most non-casters get nothing but the same abilities a bit stronger, or sometimes can do exactly the same thing one more time per turn.) All the other stuff you refer to that goes on in EGS and doesn't happen in RPGs, making the use of "level up" inappropriate for EGS... I've seen it happen in RPGs. Including gaining specific new features in mid-scene by GM fiat (my gnome bard gained a familiar that way).

Some TV channel is heavily advertising (seems like every 15 minutes) that they are going to be re-showing the first season of Xena, "Lucy Lawless' sword-and-sorcery antihero". The only way I can see describing Xena as an antihero is if she has a sibling with children who don't spell very well.

The definition of "level up" is heavily dependent on the game system - there are some that would probably use a different term if "level up" weren't already in the RPGer vocabulary. For that matter, "level up" is both an event that happens to the character and a process that is carried out by the player. I don't see a problem with the event of getting new/enhanced spells being described as "level up". It's well within the scope of what the RPGer term means.

Nanase's spellbook at that time was probably (based on the number of spells we've seen, and the clues we've gotten as to how detailed the spell descriptions are) at least 350 pages. Fairydoll was not a recently-acquired spell, so it would not be expected to be at the end of the book. And if simple counting-who's-looking is 15 pages, that would probably be at least 35 in the basic form. Now let's increase it by 5... very easy to overlook.

Crossing some of the nastier possibilities off the list may not be very satisfying emotionally, but it's better than confirming they are true.

There have been some incredibly stupid things done "in defense of marriage". The town I went to college in, had a law that there couldn't be more than three unrelated adults of mixed sex renting a residence together. Yes, in a college town. Well, these four college students were renting a house together. The two young ladies had the two upstairs bedrooms, and the two young men had the two downstairs bedrooms. All four were dating people outside the household. Somebody raised a stink about them being in violation of city ordinance. So after looking the situation over... all four were on the lease, and they needed all four of them to be able to afford the rent... a couple of them went down to the courthouse and got a paper marriage. That covered the legal situation. They continued to just be friends, they continued to date outside the household, and when the lease expired they went down to the courthouse and had the marriage annulled. It seems clear to me that the effect of the law in this case was precisely the opposite of the intent. It turned marriage from a strong bond and foundation, to a triviality for bureaucratic convenience.

Sometimes gravity really sucks. Whatever happens, I hope it isn't overly drawn-out or painful.

With a capital F.

It's the MessagEase keyboard. Available free from Google Play, and (I think) from the Apple Store. The two most essential things to know about the MessagEase keyboard: 1) It WILL take some getting used to, but once you deal with a bit of a learning curve it's fast and easy. 2) Press-and-hold the Hand key to get to the help and configuration screens.

And the social inertia is so strong, QWERTY is still the default keyboard plan for English-speaking countries, even on touch-screen devices that are capable of responding so fast that they have to be deliberately made less responsive. And also that are vastly more flexible, giving many options other than "poke the key" and "poke this key while holding that key down". (On my phone and tablet I use a 14-key keyboard that has over 100 symbols and operations without using a shift key.)

Also, my understanding is that Galileo wasn't forced to deny that the earth goes around the sun, he was forced to acknowledge that it wasn't proven to go around the sun. (Which it wasn't, at the time.)

My guess is that the reason her spellbook is thinner is because spells combined. Like, she used to have several different beam spells, and the listing for each one had details on the limits on what it could do - so now she has a smaller number that can do all the same things the old ones could do plus a bunch of stuff that formerly fell between the limits of different spells. As an analogy, imagine that formerly you had a little propeller plane that had a top airspeed of 60 MPH, and a jet that has to hit 180 MPH before it can even take off; now you have a single plane that can fly as slowly as the propeller plane AND as fast as the jet AND at any speed in between. And you have operating instructions for just the one plane, instead of two planes.

Not all piles of rocks in Egypt are pyramids. For example, one of them is sort of a kitty-cat.

It's a matter of personal taste. Understand that from the plant's point of view, the purpose of capsaicin, piperine, or allyl isothiocyanate (the "hot" components of peppers, peppercorns, and radishes*, respectively) is to make the various fruits undesirable to non-preferred consumers. Which, for capsaicin and piperine, are mammals. (Radishes, there are no preferred consumers - they hate everybody. But then, the allegedly-edible part of a radish is a root, not a fruit.) The seeds have a very low survival rate when they are chewed on by mammalian grinding teeth and then pass through a mammalian herbivore's digestive tract. Fruit-eating birds, on the other hand, will mostly pass the seeds through unharmed and then deposit them - possibly far away - in a nice little dollop of fertilizer. * A whole radish doesn't actually contain any allyl isothiocyanate. It contains two other chemicals** kept in separate compartments in each cell. When the radish is cut, crushed, ground, chewed, or otherwise damaged, this separation breaks down and the two chemicals react with each other to produce the spicy chemical. ** Yes, chemicals. I know it's a bad word in some circles, and you should never eat anything with chemicals in it. But the only thing chemical-free is hard vacuum. Like maybe you might find in the void between galactic superclusters, and I wouldn't bet overly strongly on even that. Oh, also, every living organism on this planet is the result of 2-4 billion years of random genetic modification of at least four different causes - radiation, chemicals, viruses, and sexual reproduction - so the only non-GMO food is salt.

There are - on pretty much every fringe - people perfectly willing to dictate numerous details of how everyone else MUST live, usually in the name of letting people be free to live as they like. (You can buy any color Ford model T you like, so long as you like black.) The let's-eliminate-males-so-women-can-live-as-they-like fringe of feminism does exist, I've seen it, and I consider it just as immoral and slightly less realistic as the let's-eliminate-homosexuals crowd. While I've never seen parthenogenesis explicitly promoted as preferable, the possibility is a high-probability side effect of devising means by which women can reproduce without men. I would love for there to be options for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically theirs, not one-of-theirs-plus-someone-else's. Even parthenogenesis for women with exceptionally large egos. And the same thing for males, although that obviously poses certain additional difficulties. However, I don't think anyone other than the people involved should be compelled to pay for it, nor should other options be eliminated. (In the EGSverse, with the TFG and artificial insemination - or instead of AI, in-vitro fertilization and possibly a host-mother - pretty much anyone is capable of parthenogenesis.)

Not a pile of rocks in Egypt?

And in parts of the US, a food at excessively high temperature is sometimes described as "the flavor a dog don't like." (Excessively spicy-hot is a different thing.)

It doesn't seem so much "did the wrong thing" as "assumed, without asking, what the right thing was". It happens that they were pretty much correct, but they really should have asked. In particular Mr. Verres - it seems he started the "Ellen should stay female to help her be a separate person from Elliot" thing, and the kids basically just went along with his authority. (There's also the practical matter that with what they knew at the time, if Ellen *had* chosen to be male he presumably would have needed permanent access to a TFG throughout life. And Tedd only had his original Uryuom-made TFG.)