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Welcome! 03/05/2016
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Don Edwards
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Days Won
64
Everything posted by Don Edwards
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It's possible that Pandora initially created the blockage for some other reason. For example, a partial blockage may make magic easier for Adrian, who has lived in Moperville for apparently at least 34 years. And then when Tedd was born with his "dangerous rarity", and Adrian became his godfather, she made the blockage more complete to eventually boost Tedd.
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My understanding is that the rules for competitive kickboxing specify a required minimum amount of actual kicking - it's a relatively inefficient form of attack and thus would otherwise be rarely used, making the name of the sport a lie.
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I read that the law in France at the time said that if a baker ran out of the cheapest bread, he HAD to sell a similar quantity of SOME sort of vaguely bread-like thing, that he actually had on hand, for the same price. So (assuming that is correct) if the peasants had no bread due to a shortage of bread-flour, but there was abundant cake-flour, the peasants would legitimately be eating cake. On the other hand, if the peasants had no bread because economic conditions were bad enough that they couldn't afford cheap bread...
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Actually, the square-cube problem strikes for enlarging, not shrinking. If a person is 1/10 the height they have 1/1000 the volume and mass, and 1/100 the cross-sectional areas of bones, muscles, blood vessels, esophagus, trachea, etc. - so they would find it quite easy to eat enough, breathe enough, lift several times their (shrunken) body weight... Conversely, if a person is 10 times as large they are 100 times as strong and 1000 times as heavy. Nearly everyone carries their own weight around routinely, but approximately no animals that are human size or larger can carry 10 times their own weight.
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story Story: Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Don Edwards replied to Howitzer's topic in Comic Discussion
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There are reasons that never works. There's another important point: pre-Plague, peasants were an abundant resource and a noble could abuse them freely up to the point where being an outlaw and bandit, with every man's hand turned against them, looked better to the peasant. Post-Plague, peasants were scarce - and they were needed to farm the fields, work the mines, etc. - so they had value and if a noble abused them, the next noble down the forest path would be glad to take them in. The Plague was a huge boost to the equal-rights movement in its VERY early days. When they were still working on getting the average person any rights at all.
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Ellen and Elliot have a sort-of-fast magic attack that would be pretty nasty. Nanase has a couple magical ways of delivering a physical attack that would be pretty fast, but one requires equipment and the other requires preparation. Nanase also once blew out a punching bag, and I doubt that Ellen or Elliot are far behind in strength. I don't doubt that Grace could wreak havoc very quickly - after she changes to a suitable form, which may also count as magic weapons.
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So far as we know, humans are the only recursive toolmakers. That is, we make tools that we use to make tools that we use to make tools that... you get the idea. There is now a known tool-making spider. Instead of spinning a web, it spins a throwing-net (and then throws it to catch prey).
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Not exactly on reread, but... If Sirleck is able to contact a bunch of aberrations and persuade them to come to Moperville, why can't DGB use the same methods to track them down?
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Alternative 1: considering Diane is so far in the background, Dan just didn't draw her in that much detail. Alternative 2: they're permanent, but at the time of the flashback panel she hadn't gotten them yet. Alternative 3 (conditional): if Diane hadn't had many appearances in the comic, her design might not have been finalized yet. I'd say we don't know whether Diane's armbands are permanent or not.
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One huge stumbling block to ANY plan for covering up the unfortunately-named heroine's identity is Elliot's spectacular skill at lying convincingly.
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Actually, there are some really useful resources on that subject. Such as this one. Your pharmacist is another good resource. Knowing about drug interactions is part of their job. My lady had a weird reaction to that particular drug, or maybe a weird interaction with something else she was taking. As stated, it's a blood pressure medicine, and that's what she was taking it for... and two days after she started taking it, her blood pressure shot WAY up, higher than it had ever been before, into "this is an immediate danger" territory. Fortunately she's one of those odd people who have discernible minor symptoms when her blood pressure gets above a certain level, and we recognized the pattern; so we checked her BP, said "oh shit", and went to the ER where various things were done to bring her BP down. Since starting that drug was the only recent change, she stopped taking it, and her BP has never been that high again.
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EGS wizards are apparently somewhat like D&D wizards - they have to study and learn spells, and then cast them via a small ritual. (Although they apparently don't have to prepare spells in advance each day.) EGS awakened are more like D&D sorcerers - their spells are innate, they just will the spell to happen, and they cannot learn spells the way a wizard does. As one piece of evidence, the fact that they often discover they have a new spell by unintentionally using it. From what we've seen, the spellbook for an awakened individual contains rather detailed descriptions of what can be done with the spell, but not how to do it, as the individual doesn't have to think about how to do it. That (by itself) would not be much help to a wizard wanting to learn the spell. (Although it might be a very useful supplement to other means.) I would assume a wizard's spellbook would contain a great deal more information on how.
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Moperville South High School is big enough that a junior there, meeting another person of the same age whom he doesn't recognize as someone he's seen before, assumes it's plausible that this other person ALSO attends that school. Moperville North is apparently of similar size. There's a funny thing about probabilities: if the probability of something isn't precisely zero, then given enough opportunities the probability of it happening at least once approaches certainty (never quite reaching it, but arbitrarily close) - and it's just as likely to happen on the first opportunity as on the thousandth or millionth. Also known as, random coincidences really do happen for no reason at all.
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Hair can be dyed, and a girl named Elliot might choose to go by her middle name or a nickname (like Susan does). Still, yeah, it's a bit of a stretch. But in a world where an obvious alien wearing a shirt that says "Human" is taken to be a human...
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Let's hope there is at least one other Dunkel household in or very near Moperville. Preferably several with daughters about the right age.
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Let's see... Tensaided saw Elliot with some girl who was clearly not Susan. Later he called Elliot's phone, and a girl who probably sounded not much like Susan answered. If he nonetheless thinks the girl was Susan transformed, simply on the basis of a claim from an unreliable source that the unfortunately-named superheroine is Elliot, he is assuming a lot that he has no evidence for. Granted, for those more in the know, it's plausible (given the TFG)... if one doesn't know Susan very well. I seriously can't see Susan voluntarily taking that form to go out on a date, and the girl Tensaided saw did not appear to be coerced or unhappy with her situation. But Mr. d10 should know Susan better than that - she's been working for (and with) him for nearly a year that we know of, and probably longer. I just don't know what he's thinking at this point. And Susan, who probably does not know what went on at the mall the previous evening (she was busy playing with dolls, then went to bed, and in the morning got up and went to work), would have even less of a clue.
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How about web pages that can't even display plain text unless you unblock at least a couple third-party script sources... and the page references over a dozen of them.
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I would certainly believe he's the MOST successful magical scientist of his approximate age and limited training, for the reasons stated - but the ONLY successful magical scientist? I doubt it. (Also, like many scientists who are pioneers in their fields or unaware of what predecessors have already done/learned, he's approximately as much engineer as scientist.)
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Assuming a common statistical distribution called a "power curve" applies to vampires, it'll work out something like this: out of 111 random vampires 100 will not recognize Diane as a particular threat; 10 will recognize her as a threat; and 1 will recognize her as a *future* threat who can easily be taken out now. She's in no more, or less, danger from the 100 than anyone else. She's pretty much safe from the 10 - they will avoid her once they know of her (and, obviously, won't attack her before they know of her). She's in increased danger from the 1; he's quite likely to come after her IF he first randomly gets close enough to spot her. But the fact of being safe from the 10 might outweigh the fact of being in greater danger from the 1. On the other hand: the one vampire she has encountered so far DID recognize her as a FUTURE threat. If Sirleck is being at all picky about which vampires to invite into town (on any basis other than proximity), then there isn't a random selection - which ruins any conclusions based on an assumption of random selection. (That could work both ways. Presumably, less-powerful vampires can typically be bribed to come into town at a lower cost; if Sirleck is trying to go cheap, Spidey might be the only high-ability vamp in Sirleck's first *thousand*. But if he's seeking out quality, most of his vamps might be high-end.)
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Definitely the latter. Just try drawing out the P sound. It can't be done. (You can't draw out silent letters either, so it isn't "noooopeeeee" - that's when you have a serious problem with your urinary tract.) Also, most humans don't have magic until they get a magic mark. Adrian, being half-immortal, might have started casting spells on his own while still in diapers. Training him in magic should have begun not later than the first known occasion when he did magic.
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From someone a bit older: "It seems like only yesterday, perhaps at most the day before, a child watched a TV set and listened to the Redstones roar. I watched each second of that flight, and never did I think to leave. Fifteen minutes, not so long - except when you forget to breathe."
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I can't say you're wrong, but Wolf looks and acts too young for me to find that plausible. Of course, he is a wizard so he may be significantly older than he looks - and, unfortunately, being a wizard doesn't mean one is wise. (Even though the term pretty much literally means "too wise for one's own good".)
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A problem with canon-character fanfic is that it can be invalidated by later canon. Wapsi Square has a thriving fanfic next to the canon world - canon characters frequently are a part of it, but it's mostly not about them. Several of the fanon characters originally were author self-inserts, but well-done ones (not marysues), but they are now part of a shared universe and we write each other's characters routinely.
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Once we walked into a restaurant and immediately knew it was a family business, because I wondered if the greeters were identical triplets. I mentioned that to our waitress. She was the mother of two of the girls - who were, in fact, identical twins. The other "triplet" was her sister's kid. That's not as close a relationship as a half-sister. Tracking everyone a serial cheater has had sex with would be difficult. It gets even more complicated if Diane's mother was also promiscuous - she may not have even known who the father was - or in a relationship at the time, so she didn't want to admit to having had some on the side and the father listed on Diane's birth certificate is not really the genetic father. And unrecognized, unacknowledged genetic relationships don't seem relevant to a background check for security purposes.
