Don Edwards

At those sizes, Catalina just tucked a foot in between so she wouldn't slide down. Or maybe both feet in hopes that she would.

Or, alternatively, it was a single whale assuming the authority to speak for other whales. Of course, most of what it said about whales was basically about their metabolism and environmental needs, which would be substantially similar for all of its kind. I disagree with the logic regarding the bloodgrem, but agree with the conclusion. Constructs have the ability of independent action - otherwise, most of the time, they would be useless - and there's no inherent reason that ability can't extend to overriding the creator's instructions. On the other hand, consider that the bloodgrem was disrupted by Elliot, and then Abraham re-summoned it so it could report back. A construct wouldn't initially know anything not known by its creator. So - if the bloodgrem were a construct - either the re-summoned critter would not know anything to report, or Abraham would already have that information and there'd be no need to re-summon the thing. The sequence of events doesn't make much sense unless the bloodgrem has its own independent existence and knowledge.

1. Not all private entities - not even all private schools - receive funding grants. 2. I think the government should protect civil rights. Stepping in to bar people from protecting their own civil rights, and assisting the violators, does not qualify. 3. There were a few technical screw-ups that actually affected fewer people NATIONWIDE than were disrupted and disturbed by the protesters at one major airport. Nearly all of those screw-ups were corrected within a few hours, so the people with green cards or otherwise thoroughly vetted COULD and DID come in. Oh, and under Trump's order as written, it didn't matter if you were a Muslim. Oh, and the Obama administration suspended all processing of refugee entry requests from Iraq for six months in 2011. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131

The thing is, I'm being asked to oppose legislation because of what someone else thinks it says - even when it doesn't say that. The government needn't be involved in enforcing who uses what restroom in non-government facilities. There's a perfectly good, workable, easily manageable arrangement where the government doesn't get involved except to enforce the usual, pre-existing laws regarding assault, harassment, trespass, and things like that - things that actually violate people's rights. I oppose replacing that with dictates in EITHER direction. A city in New Jersey decided to replace the working solution with a dictate. I disapprove. The state legislature decided to supersede that with a dictate in the other direction. I disapprove of that as well. Some cities in Texas were making noises about emulating the New Jersey city. I disapprove. The Texas state legislature decided to simply bar any such dictates by localities, and not impose one of its own. I don't see a problem. (Not that my approval or disapproval is directly relevant - I vote in neither state.) I also am simply amazed by the amount of stuff that didn't merit comment when Obama did it, but is a horrible outrage (and supposedly-clearly illegal) when Trump does it. Like the so-called "Muslim ban" which - like Obama's suspension of people coming from the same seven countries for twice as long - contains no mention of any religion and does not apply to over a billion Muslims who don't happen to be from those seven countries. Obama did this because - in his judgment - it seemed that the existing procedures for screening people from those countries were inadequate, and new procedures were needed. Trump did it because - in his judgment - it seemed the procedures instituted in the prior administration were still inadequate, and need at least tightening up and possibly rewritten. Essentially the same reason. If it was okay when Obama did it, why is it wrong now? Conversely, if it's wrong now, why was it OK when Obama did it?

On available evidence, simply having magic is not considered grounds for government-imposed restraint, not even to the extent of having to do any paperwork. What one does with it, is what matters. It is not illegal to be a catgirl in a shopping mall. It is not illegal to fly over the city (FAA might want to have words with you depending on altitude). It is not illegal to change sex. Drugging people with enchanted alcohol, mind control, lighting people on fire, changing someone else's sex without their consent... that kind of stunt, and you can expect a knock on the door (or other appropriate place for getting knocked).

(waves)

I can't think of a reason they'd be less powerful. There would be a mostly-different group of people who happened to randomly stumble on how to work magic, because that "how to" would be different, but that wouldn't mean they are less powerful or that the despicable among them would be less despicable. The enforcement body that currently goes after the despicable ones, though, relies on hitting relatively inexperienced rogue magic-users, typically operating solo, with trained and experienced teams of magic users equipped as needed with batteries of magical devices from inventories built up over at least years.. How does that work when there are no trained and experienced magic users and the magical devices have stopped being magical? And then there's "pasteurized process cheese food", such as Velveeta. It isn't cheese, it doesn't even claim to be cheese. It claims to be something that you would feed to a process cheese - if you know what that is, happen across one, and it's hungry. And yet, many people call it cheese.

My first contact with Norton (back when Win95 was a new thing), I found it was an EXCELLENT security product. At work I was doing in-house computer tech support, and people were bringing that program in from home to install on their newly-networked work computers. It made our computers so absolutely secure, they could not boot up. I wiped and re-set-up at least half a dozen computers before we could get word around to NOT DO THAT - and why. Installing Windows95. From floppies.

Worse: temporary loss of magic for everyone. Why that's worse: the existing system for dealing with rogue magic-users would be devastated by the loss of all its known magic-users and magical devices, but the rate at which rogue magic-users emerge would (most likely) remain about the same.

First time I tried Linux was something like 20 years ago and I had little trouble finding software that met my needs aside from one detail: being absolutely 100% file- and interface-compatible (including the API) with the Microsoft software that I had to use at work. (That failing soon forced me back to Windows at home.) Since I retired I have almost entirely abandoned Windows (the exceptions being a couple programs where I have significant quantities of data and haven't found a Linux program that can read the format). And there is enough cross-platform software to meet most needs including quite a few relatively-unusual ones. If you want MS Office - sorry, out of luck. If you want an office suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets, database, presentation prep, graphics editing, and specialized mathematical-formula editor, and runs (with complete 100% cross-platform compatibility) on Windows, Linux, OSX, and sort-of on iOS and Android, - you have a choice of offerings, and Microsoft can't compete on the price of most of them ($0.00).

Tonight I cooked steak & lobster-tails. Some interesting things: 1) A 1.41-pound package of bacon-wrapped beef tenderloins. How many steaks in a package that size? Answer: two. I wanted the answer to be four or six. Between the two of us, we couldn't finish off two lobster-tails and the smaller steak. The larger one is in the freezer. 2) First time in quite a few years that I've cooked lobster tails. And the best job I've ever done. I put some butter in a ramekin, added spices (salt, pepper, smoked paprika, cinnamon), and put it in the oven with the broiling steak until the butter clarified. In the meantime I split the shells and skewered the tails lengthwise to keep them from curling. When the butter was ready I pried the shells open and spooned the seasoned butter inside. (Then looked at the ramekin, added more butter, and put it back in the oven so we'd have enough to dip the lobster in.) When the steak had 5 minutes left I put the tails in the oven as well, then when the steak was done I took it out and moved the tails to that location for another five minutes. 3) The steak had a weak spot and, while cooking, split from the edge nearly a third of the way across. The result was a heart-shaped steak. On Valentine's day.

In a sane world, transgender people's use of restrooms would not be an issue. People presenting as male would use the men's restroom, people presenting as female the women's. If their physical anatomy doesn't happen to match their presentation, or if for ANY other reason someone doesn't want to display their physical anatomy, they would go in a stall and close the stall door - so nobody would ever know the difference. People who go in a restroom to ogle or harass other users of the restroom would be escorted from the premises and instructed not to return, or possibly prosecuted - for trespass, if nothing else seems to fit (or the potential victims decline to be publicly identified) - without regard to either their sex or their gender. (Locker rooms are a more complicated problem. I doubt that there's an easy answer - other than a lot of single-user-at-a-time locker rooms, which would be rather expensive in new construction and quite a bit more expensive, if even possible, in existing facilities.) I disagree with the idea that anyone who claims to be feeling female at the moment has a presumptive right to be in the ladies' room (meaning that they can't be prosecuted for trespass and escorting them from the premises is a violation of THEIR rights), or the equivalent for feeling male. This is the law that several municipalities have enacted, making this issue hot in the public eye. I also disagree with the idea that government should demand that private entities attempt to enforce restroom segregation by physical anatomy or by what's written on the birth certificate. As it happens, while the New Jersey state law did demand this, the Texas law (not sure if it's been enacted yet) does not. I want the people who create trouble dealt with as trouble-makers, and the people who don't create trouble left alone. We don't need sex or gender differentiation for that, but selective application of such differentiation can be a useful tool - and it need not be government that does the selection, it can be a store manager.

One would expect that, indeed.... ... and one would be mistaken.

We could add Ballista for stuff that will almost certainly never be canon. And yes there is a Ballista font. A ballista is basically an oversized crossbow. Oversized enough that it's probably on a fixed mount, and has some sort of a gear assemblage for drawing the string back. (And here's the Trebuchet font at the same source.)

Perhaps magic is not a universal force, but several. With different species not necessarily having access to the same one. The one that humans have access to apparently has a will (which kind of implies that it's capable of some degree of deliberate concentration). Uryuom/lespuko magic looks a little like human magic - enough so to fool Mr. V's detection wand - but not enough for either species to use the other's magic. On the other hand, it seems all uryuom and lespuko have uryuom magic. On the other hand, griffins use magic sufficiently similar to what Humans use that they can use human magic - whether it's really the same or not, is not currently known.

The one time - which might or might not have been canon - that we've seen Tedd forget to shift back to male, she came to school that way. There may have been non-school instances. Even at-home instances, where Tedd intended to shift to male before Dad got home but Elliot had to remind him... So that specific incident doesn't have to be canon for the "again" to apply.

Yeah, I've seen FATAL before. Calling it the worst RPG ever written is an understatement. I don't know how that's even possible, but it's true. I had mercifully forgotten about it, and wouldn't have named if it I had remembered it. Like I won't name the web-so-called-comic that treats rape and mind control as spectator sports.

More so than Rifts/Palladium?

Does the UPS'ed UPS need to go ups tairs?

I think you have it backward. Now, Tedd should be going full-female in places where she is not known to be male, to see if she wants that experience normally once she goes on to college. Going full-female to high school where lots of people know him, would give a skewed perception of what college will be like if she "transitions" over the summer.

Tedd won't be stuck in either sex - the TFG will still work, as it isn't magic. But apparently in Tedd's mind, being a boy temporarily turned into a girl isn't the same thing as being a girl, and vice versa. She recently (Saturday evening) gained the ability to actually change sex, not just have a temporary enchantment, and now she's aware of a risk that she'll lose that - and pursuing her other ambitions would significantly increase that risk. Perhaps, even, already has. Tedd using her mark, in and of itself, does not increase the risk. Particularly if she carefully keeps separate populations of "people who know male!Tedd" and "people who know female!Tedd" with minimal overlap. What increases the risk is increasing the number of people who have access to magic. Increasing the number of people who know about magic, probably increases the number who will stumble onto a way to access it, and so is to be avoided but isn't as big a deal as, say, handing out magic watches on a street corner. I'm very slightly genderfluid centered on gender-neutral. I've had mild dysphoria for as much as half an hour at a time, maybe a half-dozen times in my life. (Twice since I learned enough to recognize it for what it was.) There is no way I consider this comparable to what a trans person deals with, but let me tell you, it still sucks. In a magic reset, everything Tedd currently knows about magic may suddenly be wrong. She'll have an easier time learning the new ways than most people, but she had to actually see his own permanent-sex-change spell in action before she thought she knew how to make a permanent-change device. And she might not (probably wouldn't) have that spell after a reset.

If feasible, I suggest putting the power supply down as near the door as possible consistent with it not being an obstacle, and waiting until your back is better before moving it to its intended location. Perhaps even have UPS bring the UPS in, if they are willing. (Or if they have it on a handtruck, ask if you can borrow that for a moment.) Or look at alternatives to lifting it. Assuming you don't have a handtruck available (definitely the preferred approach if you do)... Cut two opposing sides (the long ones if it's significantly non-square) out of the box, cut across the bottom of one remaining side, and you get two sides and the top as a sort-of-long handle to drag the thing. Remove those parts of the box when it's more or less in place. Rather than taking the UPS out of the packing material, remove the packing material from it - cutting as necessary. Oh, and those cheap flexible cutting boards are pretty good for sliding heavy objects across carpet. Plus they are vastly more useful than "furniture mover" pads, when not moving heavy objects. (They are decent cutting boards, for example.)

I don't think that rate is unusual - but to continue at that rate for that long...

In the US it varies - public schools are local entities (usually separate from other government entities and with some degree of their own taxing authority, while also usually receiving some funding from the state government and occasionally from the local and/or national government). And private schools are their own thing, subject to only some of the regulations that public schools live with but fully responsible for their own funding WITHOUT any authority to tax. As it happens, I handled the phys-ed requirement the same way you did. But my mate - growing up in a different school district, in fact in a different state - was required to take that class two days a week (versus every school day) for 4 years (versus 2). And on the days she wasn't in that class, there was no other class for her to take during that period so she had "Study Hall" which meant she sat in the library and pretended to study.) (My high school had exactly two classes that weren't every-day-at-least-one-semester. Driver education, and first aid. Each of them a half-semester course. In that school district driver education was required to graduate, unless one had a medical waiver. First aid was not, but "Study Hall" was not allowed; so almost everyone who had any chance to get a driver license took first aid.)

I have redacted the offending post and hereby apologize. If mlooney and the moderator would care to similarly redact their replies...