Don Edwards

Cell phones that can reach orbit are uncommon and the service is frightfully expensive. Cell phones that can reach the nearest cell tower which is hooked into a network including both satellite links and undersea cables... those are rather more common and affordable.

It seems entirely appropriate that Pan paniscus should be pansexual. Sometimes it's a matter of luck. If competitive pressures force you out of the prime hunting grounds and way up into the mountains just before a huge flash flood destroys the prime hunting ground and kills everything there, you're obviously more fit than the critters that forced you out...

Yes, Heidi is very perky. ----- And actually, all this fits with my theory that people who are absolutely-purely heterosexual are rather rare. I figure that for our way-distant ancestors, attraction to each other was exclusively either sexual (want to mate with them) or dietary (want to eat them), but then when our somewhat-more-recent ancestors started becoming social creatures it was necessary to form non-dietary attractions with other members of the group - of both sexes - and the sexual attraction was there to adapt and make more flexible. So the absolutely-pure heterosexual would have same-sex acquaintances but not same-sex friends.

Shortly after that event I read an article laying out - based solely on publicly available information - exactly why the government really should have expected the recent terrorist attack on a US Navy vessel in port while the Vice President was visiting it. Everything in the article was true, except for one detail: there had been no such attack... and that was the point of the article. They have evidence credibly pointing at TOO MANY possible terrorist attacks, every day... they can't all be true, and the government can't act to disrupt all of them without massive violations of the rights of innocent people...

Spreadsheets are pretty good at string manipulation. I have a spreadsheet designed to produce wikicode for a table on the wiki site, from data that is loaded into the cells - so really all I have to maintain is the data, and then I can copy the complete wikicode from another column and paste it into the wiki.

I love the way you word that - it sounds like either you or the person you're addressing are an alien.

102199 * 103573 * 103993 By the way, thanks for having that space in there - factoring 1100771835408811! would be absurd. In my model, "how much is being male part of your identity" and "how much is being female part of your identity" are two dimensions. People who are agender are somewhere near zero on both scales; people who are bi-gender are fairly high on both scales; what you're referring to as "cis-genderless" are (assuming I'm interpreting that correctly) more often called "gender-neutral", and are somewhere between those two - and more or less even on both scales. Cisgender people are, of course, significantly higher on one scale than on the other - as are transgender people, but the scale they're higher on doesn't match their physical sex. My suspicion is that most agender and gender-neutral people simply assume they are cisgender, because they don't experience anything that would cause them to question it - and if something magically changed their sex but not their gender, their questioning of the results would be over developed habits/knowledge and other people's expectations, not over their identity. (Prime example: Elliot.) The difference is that the gender-neutral embrace being the sex they are, while the agender don't care; so after a change the gender-neutral would seek out experience related to their new sex, while the agender would try to eliminate disruption as much as possible. Or to put it another way, after changing sex to female an agender would buy a few bras to wear under their existing T-shirts while a gender-neutral would buy bras, blouses, skirts, and dresses. (Meanwhile, a cisgender would have become transgender, so would be wanting to do some combination of hiding and passing-as-male. And a transwoman would have become cisgender, and quite happy about the change. Although it would undoubtedly still take at least a little getting used to.) The bi-gender, unfortunately, get stuck wanting to be both at the same time. And at the other end are folks who are in significantly-negative numbers on both scales, actively wanting to be neither; the most common term for that is "neutrois". Both of these are difficult to achieve or to get anyone else to recognize and respect - particularly in languages with exactly two sex-linked genders.

Or use a spreadsheet. They are very good at getting tables right.

Regarding Elliot's conjured clothing, I'd draw a distinction between two categories... one of which, I suspect, will not interest him any time soon. Haute couture stuff, runway showpieces, fursuits, and the like - those are pieces of art, and part of their draw is their uniqueness. If he conjures a duplicate, that's taking something important away from the designers and purchasers. Stuff that is in mass production... well, it's in mass production. There's no uniqueness to take away. And his conjuring one does not deprive the sellers of one, so he isn't taking anything physical from them. At most, he's taking away a potential sale... and were it not for his powers, he wouldn't be buying a dress anyway. The ethics get slightly more complicated when he creates clothes for his sister or female friends, but it's not much different than a group of girls trading clothes among themselves. Although I do think he'd bug the holy cr** out of the other contestants on Project Runway.

I suggested that a while back. Considering that I had a list of 14 dimensions of gender identity and attraction to others, and the currently-most-prominent version of string theory is content with only 11 dimensions... (No I don't remember what all 14 dimensions are. Two for gender identity, two for sexual attraction, two for romantic attraction, two for aesthetic attraction... I don't remember the others.)

This is also why certain forms of gun-safety training should begin at a very early age. Toddlers still in diapers can start on the NRA's "Eddie Eagle" gun-safety training, which can be summarized in four words: No. Stop. Go. Tell. (My understanding is that "Stop" is a relatively recent addition to the program.) No - don't touch the gun. Stop - don't let your friends touch it either. Go - leave the area so the gun won't tempt you (and you're safe if, despite your best efforts, some other kid starts playing with it). Tell - tell a responsible adult who can take appropriate action. And yet people flip out at the thought of turning kids into gun-nuts by letting the NRA indoctrinate them with such horrible pro-murder propaganda.

Fruit is intended to be eaten - in hopes that you (or some animal) will swallow the seeds and deposit them somewhere else in a nice lump of fertilizer. This even extends to hard-to-eat fruits like ghost peppers. (Yes, botanically they are fruit. So are tomatoes, and several other things that are culinary vegetables.) The catch there is that the seeds will rarely survive the typical mammalian herbivore's teeth and digestive system, so US eating them is not good for the plant's genome. They can pass through a bird's beak and digestive system with a rather high survival rate, though... and birds don't have the receptors to notice capsicum.

Kill or harm. But usually, it's simpler to do the one you DONT want to do, so ... Shoot to stop the threat. As a civilian or police officer, if another person isn't posing a threat sufficient to justify administering a potentially-fatal wound to stop the threat, you aren't justified in shooting the guy at all. And you're far more likely to stop that threat by attempting to shoot the center of the body than by attempting to hit an arm or leg. If you aren't a marksman with lots of recent training, some combat-like experience, and a weapon you're extremely familiar with, you definitely shouldn't try to shoot a weapon out of a person's hand. Also, you need to be cognizant of what's behind your target. Because there's a good chance at least one bullet will miss, and some chance that a bullet will go through - then whatever's behind your guy gets hit.

And I'm in the process of writing a story where time sometimes goes backward. (Chapters 1, 3-4, and 6 - that's how far I've gotten to date - cover from Wednesday evening through Friday evening. Chapters 2 and 5 are the following Monday morning.)

For SD cards I strongly recommend SanDisk over competing brands. For camera use they routinely UNDER-rate their cards, while some other manufacturers tend to OVER-rate them. And the recommendation is even stronger for computer-like, as opposed to camera-like, usage. Cameras write huge files all at once, and then read them all at once. (Audio devices the same except the "at once" takes longer.) Computers read or write a little bit from this file, then a little bit from that file... the standards for SD cards were written for camera usage, not computer usage, and they don't measure the ability of the card to switch where it's reading or writing from. SanDisk cards are pretty good at that; many others are pretty bad. So bad, in fact, that if you're running the OS off the SD card (the original Nook Color can do that very nicely) they'll cause the OS to crash.

I've seen enough to think that "animals cannot consent" is too sweeping a statement. I've seen a male dog withdraw consent to mate with a female dog. (Much to her disappointment... but considering that she could walk under him with her head up and not brush her ears on his belly, probably wise.) I've seen a male cat encourage another male cat to mount him. On the other hand, I haven't seen any instance of an animal of one species consent to be mounted by an animal of another, not-closely-related species.

I know Dan doesn't read this forum, and I'm only one voice among many, but I'm saying this here anyway... I'm currently regularly reading about 80 webcomics, and among them are maybe three I'd read for the graphic art. EGS is not one of those few. I'm here for the story and the characters. One of Dan's characters cosplaying as some other character will rarely interest me more than a blank page would. If his sketches and pinups don't reflect on his characters or story, then I'd actually prefer he not take the time to post them. (And I know how little of his time that should take.) Feel free to disagree. It's largely a matter of taste, and people have different tastes.

Prof, I hope your podiatrist is good at jigsaw puzzles...

Oedipus gets a bum rap. He was separated from his parents at a very early age (due to a prophecy that he would kill his father the king), so he didn't know his biological mother and father. Years later some stranger attacked him on the road for no apparent reason, and he successfully defended himself from the murderous stranger. Continuing on his journey, he arrived at a city in crisis. In addition to said crisis, its king was missing and presumed dead, and had no heirs. He resolved the crisis and in exchange was offered the throne if he would marry the prior king's widow - whom he had never met before. He accepted the deal. Later he found out that the stranger who had attacked him was his father and the widow he had married was his mother. Which he got more than a bit upset about.

But where's the fun in that?

From one of my favorite webcomics: "I'm afraid I've come to the conclusion that students go into psychology for ulterior motives. Either they want to learn how to manipulate people, or they're kooky. So, is it really any wonder that the basic psychological model of the mind is that of a manipulative kook? "Psychology really hasn't had its Einstein yet. Well, actually, I don't think they've had their Newton yet either. Or Galileo. (I'm not even sure about Aristotle.) "I kind of get the impression that their basic model exists on the back of a giant turtle in a bowl of water, supported by four giant elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle... "... and most of their research goes into find out what color the elephants paint their toenails."

On the discussion of what Heidi kissing Carol says about Elliot's sexual orientation and how transformations affect it... ... another complexity is whether Elliot is primarily heterosexual (sexually attracted to the opposite sex) or gynosexual (sexually attracted to women). Which, at least in the case of Elliot and Tedd, are obviously NOT the same thing. In fact, Tedd's statement that the TFG's sex-change transformations add sexual attraction to the now-opposite sex, and Ellen's statement that her attraction to males seems tacked on, suggests that Elliot is gynosexual, and that the most common arrangements are gynosexual males and androsexual females. As for the real world, the only way we can approach that question is to ask genderfluid people about it. And what evidence I have on the question, says that sexual attraction is not to "the opposite sex" (flip-flopping as the person's current gender changes) but to "a specific sex". However, that evidence is based on a sample size of 1 so don't take it very seriously. There's no obvious reason the answer couldn't be a mix which varies from person to person... and of course some genderfluid people will be full-time bisexual, or asexual, or demisexual, or...

Even then there are two interpretations. One is that Ellen will never do it for Ellen's reasons, and the other is that Ellen will never be shown doing or to have done it for Dan's reasons.

Nancy Sinatra's song is not applicable in this case.

First, there's a difference between not wanting to be male, and not being willing to be male for specific reasons or events. Second, specifically on the issue of reproduction, Ellen and Elliot are as close to identical twins as it's possible to be while still being different sexes (something that happens naturally approximately once in every 246 sets of fraternal twins). If Ellen were MV1'd you'd probably get Elliot. I suspect that at some point in the future Ellen and Nanase will take a long vacation together to somewhere they won't need ID, and Ellen will come back pregnant, then as soon as they get back Nanase will get artificially inseminated with Elliot as the sperm donor. (I am SO glad I won't be living with them when they are both pregnant.) At this point I think Elliot is gender-neutral. That is, he's perfectly comfortable with and enjoys being male, and never has a strong desire to be female (having a strong desire for some benefit that incidentally, in his case, comes with a female form - such as flying - is different, as is a desire to stay with his established daily rituals)... and then when he IS female, is perfectly comfortable with and enjoys being female and never has a strong desire to be male. Or he could be agender, which isn't quite the same thing. It would lack the "and enjoys" part - in place of that is a "doesn't give a sh** about" part. My theory is that most people who are gender-neutral or agender simply assume they are cisgender - they never have a noticeable internal gender conflict, so it takes some outside event or circumstance to cause them to engage in introspection regarding their gender identity... and Elliot is known to be resistant to introspection. (For that matter, most people who are cisgender probably just assume so, without engaging in the introspection that would confirm it.) (And this extends to people who are mildly trans or fluid. I'm mildly fluid - if it weren't for EGS and Rain I probably would never have realized it. I've come to suspect that my wife is mildly trans - and she agrees that my reasons for suspecting that are at least plausible.)