Don Edwards

it proves that Loudmouth is not really a cat at all. He's an alien in disguise. Cats simply are not obedient.

More seriously... we've attended science fiction conventions for like 20 years now, so I've met and chatted with more SF/fantasy authors, and made more well-known filkers regret singing with me, than I can name. Catch is, I'm not big on celebrities in general, and in particular I have never gone for autographed books. (Some idiot scribbled something on the title page! Throw it out!) So let's see... whom can I specifically recall?.. George Martin I pretty much ignored, as I don't care for his stuff. Got a picture of my wife sitting in the throne from the TV series, at her insistence (They have two of it, one occasionally travels; it was in Missoula on this occasion.) I made a comment to Mercedes Lackey at Norwescon in Seattle, and a year later at Windycon in Chicago (was in the area for two weeks for business reasons on my employer's dime) she saw me, recognized me, and replied to the comment. I got a chuckle out of Dr. Forward. Steve Barnes, teaching a Saturday-morning tai chi session, watched my daughter for about 15 seconds and asked "how many years have you been doing ballet?" (the answer, at that time, was 12.) Filkers: Heather Alexander, Michelle Dockrey (Escape Key), Cynthia McQuillen, Cat Faber and Callie Hills (Echo's Children)... dangit there are a few more I want to put here but I'm not remembering names...

HYDRATE!!!! Seriously. We're only dealing with the Montana heat, not the Texas heat, and we have a cooler in the back seat of the car that usually has somewhere between 4 and 20 blackbirds bottles of water in it. That's what this thread is for.

[Rolled over with lint roller.]

Wizards awaken? THAT doesn't fit with Nanase and Tedd being pretty much the same age, and has been dealt with... but I think we can resolve something else. There's no evidence of Mamase having a career other than homemaker and mother. Nanase definitely had and has a career. I think it fairly likely, under the circumstances, that Mamase married young (fresh out of high school or maybe college) and had a kid soon after, while Noriko waited before reproducing... which would mean that Noriko is the older of the two. She thinks the retirement plan is cheesy. I'd point out that not being as powerful a wizard as Noriko, doesn't mean she isn't a wizard or - even more generally - can't do magic.

Does this dead-tree book auto-update regularly? No? Then the title is inaccurate. It doesn't cover a period ending in the present. It covers a period ending at some specific date in the past.

Well how about "that person looks exactly like {insert name} but is a foot shorter"? Might not help you go unnoticed. Probably would help you go unidentified.

I chose my words carefully. I said it was an effective way... not a good way.

This morning we had a couple dozen raindrops hit the roof. On the other hand, our new hummingbird feeder was the site of an aerial battle a bit later, with no fewer than five hummingbirds at it. (The old one got knocked out of the tree in a windstorm a couple weeks ago, and split completely in two when it hit the ground.)

Because having that horde of fire-throwers go into battle against people with non-magical weapons, and cutting off their power just as the battle began, was an effective way to get rid of a bunch of people who knew about and had experience with magic and thus would be more likely to discover the new rules quickly, and were likely to share the knowledge to a horde of people?

Yesterday about 11 PM I put a spiced pork loin in a zip-lock bag and placed it in a deep-fryer full of water and carefully adjusted (with guidance from a cooking thermometer) to 180 degrees F. It sat on top of the stove all night, got briefly unplugged and moved elsewhere so I could cook breakfast, and later was briefly unplugged again to be moved outside. So by 3 PM today that loin had been cooking for about 16 hours. Protected from being burned (by a fairly low temperature) and from drying out (by being sealed in a plastic bag). Definitely tender. Unfortunately, the spice mix it had been packaged with was a "black pepper and garlic" thing, to which we had two responses: (1) too much pepper, and (2) where's the garlic?

In most circumstances, "that person looks exactly like {insert the person's name} but is a foot taller" would be an effective disguise.

Not exactly: Sirleck knows that Adrian is half-immortal, but appears to be assuming that Adrian is the child of one of the immortals Voltaire says have been targeting his flunky-vampires (Helen and Demetrius). We know he was aware of Pandora (thanks to Magus) but may think she's left the area. And of course he's aware of Magus. But doesn't appear to be aware of Jerry. Meanwhile, Magus and Voltaire are aware of him, but nobody else of great importance is - it's safe to assume that if Pandora, Helen, Demetria, Adrian, or DGB were, he'd be thermidor by now. Voltaire is known to practically everybody, save only indirectly to Pandora. Flip side, we know he's aware of Adrian, Sirleck, Helen, and Demetrius, but I don't recall anything that indicates he's aware of Pandora or Jerry. Helen and Demetrius are aware of Voltaire, vaguely aware that someone (Magus, but they don't know that) was around for a while, and DGB. Maybe not Adrian. Probably not Pandora or Jerry. Pretty much everyone is aware of them, though. Jerry is aware of at least four other immortals in the area - unless there's one we haven't been introduced to, that would be all of them. And an extremely powerful being whom most people are assuming (probably correctly) is Pandora, one of those four. He was aware of Adrian, and is probably aware of DGB. As far as being aware of Jerry, that extremely powerful being is the only one we're sure of. Voltaire is definitely aware of Adrian, Helen, and Demetrius. The odds highly favor him being aware of DGB. We don't know if he's aware of Pandora or Jerry. Also definitely Sirleck, and possibly Magus (thanks Sirleck). Pretty much everyone is aware of him. Magus is aware of, I think, everyone except maybe Jerry. Sirleck and Pandora are the only ones I'm sure are aware of him. Did I miss any? (Note: all the above is qualified with "as far as I can recall". I would express zero surprise if it turns out I've made some errors.)

And sex change. (Granted, Ellen can only do it in one direction.)

I'd modify that slightly, because of what I think an enchantment is: an effect of a spell, that requires ongoing consumption of magical energy to sustain it. Not all spells create enchantments, the most obvious example being Tedd's changing default form but the first apparent example being Tamashii Gekido. Spell resistance would be the ability to resist the direct* magical effect of any spell. Enchantment resistance would be the ability to shrug off an ongoing, magically-sustained effect after it is applied, or perhaps to specifically resist having enchantments applied. If they aren't different applications of the same underlying ability and strength, then enchantment resistance would be of little or no use against a non-enchantment spell. * There are also indirect and non-magical effects. Tamashii Gekido blasts things in various directions, and even though the blast is magical their trajectories follow ordinary laws of physics after launch; spell resistance won't stop them from hitting you.

Take a light raincoat.

That's what I'm wondering. The agency has a bunch of trained and experienced mages who would lose their magic. Any police-type organization relies heavily on being able to bring more training and experience to bear on a problem than nearly-any of the people causing the problem have, and a reset will take that away. The agency will have to find the new magic-users, scope them out, recruit them, and then give them any necessary procedural and teamwork training, while the newly-developed versions of Not-Tengu will simply start magically doing evil. Do they think they already have a convenient number of seers on tap? Remember, seers, while not unique, are rare. It isn't known that the agency has even identified Tedd as a seer, and they have more data on him than on most people that apparently have no magic.

1. If you go through family records and name your great-grandparents, there's a better-than-even chance that you're mistaken about at least one of them. Going back a thousand years, it's a near certainty - assuming the necessary records even exist. 2. A thousand years ago is also about the time of another interesting characteristic: if any given person who was alive in Europe at that time has ANY living descendants, then ALMOST EVERYONE who considers themselves to be of European ancestry is descended from that person. That would include kings. All of them. (This is the problem with special powers being determined by line of descent from some particular person. A special family that consistently, over an extended period, does NOT expand either openly or illicitly, but also does NOT go extinct... simply doesn't happen among humans or most other species.) ---------------- As for how Luke spotted Tedd's magic aura and it being blindingly bright: at the time that said comment was current, the speculation on the forum was that he happened to look just at the moment Pandora was marking Tedd.

Also relevant

That last speech balloon... SO yes.

And a very important part of the testing phase: making sure the safeties work.

On the old boards, long before this magic reset stuff came up, I wrote a scene of Noriko being informed that she's being seconded to the United States for a while to do some high-energy work with a magical engineer... named Tedd Verres...

My first hard drive cost more $$$ than four of my current smartphone. It stored 40 megabytes - and the OS on the computer it was for wouldn't support more than 32 megabytes in a single partition. My phone has 64 gigabytes of built-in storage plus an SD card slot that I could shove half a terabyte into for less than $100. The phone also has a faster processor and more RAM than that computer - and it's a four-core processor.

Good rap is something I have never encountered, and doubt the existence of. Aside from that, Critterkeeper is definitely not the only person who feels that way.

Cats customarily lie down and go to sleep. Brownie has been observed getting the order of those actions wrong - and isn't a kitten.