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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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Don Edwards

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Posts posted by Don Edwards

  1. Posted

    5 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    Except the phone voice specifically says the Immortals (plural) aren't watching "your boy" 24-7 anymore.

    Why possess magus when Magus would be in his debt?  Sure it's a backup plan, but why *not* possess Elliot?  Win-win.

    If Sirleck is considering Elliot, or anyone known to be a close friend of Elliot, as a possible next host, he's a complete idiot. There are several fairly-high-power magic users in there - just among the human teenagers, and Sirleck should be aware of a minimum of one and possibly four or more. At least two of Elliot's friends have family connections - one of them extremely obvious - to DGB and full-blown wizards, There are three Immortals involved that we know Sirleck is aware of. That's a firing squad already assembling itself; stepping in front of it and yelling FIRE! would be Darwin-Award-worthy.

    So what does Sirleck want with Elliot? To get rid of Magus.

    SeriousJupiter reacted to this

  3. Posted

    7 hours ago, Scotty said:

    People suggest that because he said "Pawn of Chaos" that means he's against Pandora, but Elliot isn't the only "pawn of Chaos", you have the entire main eight, Dex, Rhoda, Catalina, Luke and his friends, and lord knows how many others that Pandora has been manipulating.

    Also, just because the Colonel is aware that Pandora has been manipulating Elliot, doesn't mean that this fact has anything to do with why he planned to get Elliot killed.

    Quote

    Even the hammers thing wasn't comparatively too bad. More of a tasteless practical joke than something actually meanspirited. That Les Immortals abused it for their aberration hunting wasn't something his younger self could have predicted and even his older, much wiser self seemed a little surprised by and taken aback over.

    Personally I think that their use of the hammers thing for the aberration hunt was pretty clever and quite justified. It's their shoving the jobs onto a couple of barely-teenage kids (or at least leaving the kids thinking it was up to them) that's a problem.

    They could have done everything they did with Nanase and Susan, and said "But all this is so you can defend yourself in case the monster gets to you again first, before the proper authorities - whom we're about to go notify - get to the monster. They are better equipped, better trained, more experienced in magic, and PAID, to handle things like this. If possible, stay out of it." I would have had no problem with that.

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  4. Posted

    2 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    It still doesn't make any sense. With the amount of information we have the blond 12 year old with the baseball cap who frequents the comic shop is just as likely as Noah.

    ...gets about as much screen time too...

    I disagree. Duck is MORE likely than Noah is to be Noriko's child.

    (But it's still a very low probability. The only way Noah makes sense is if someone got a sample of Noriko's DNA and put it into a Uryuom egg without her knowledge or consent - and that works exactly as well for Duck. Other options, Duck at least has a more plausible age difference as compared to Tedd, but still, why is Duck in Moperville rather than with Noriko?)

  6. Posted

    7 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    I'd agree with this.  The issue isn't "betray trust", it's "keep the circle at 8" that's the problem now.  Depending on how you look at it, we could be as high as 12...

    Actually I see several circles in some degree of contact with one another - ranging from "aware that there's another bunch that can be contacted through this person" to "have several members in common". They are separate circles because within each one everyone knows a good bit about everyone else's magic, but for each pair of them - in at least one direction - there's a substantial body of important information common to all the members of one circle that isn't similarly shared in the other circle.

    In approximate order of first appearance the circles I see are:

    1. DGB
    2. the dojo: Greg, Elliot, Justin, Nanase, Grace, and Ellen
    3. the Main 8
    4. Raven and Noah
    5. Luke and at least three friends
    6. Charlotte's Angels
    7. Ashley and Elliot

    Luke's group is the most isolated. The only thing we've been shown they know about any other group is that Justin is part of a group - possibly along with Grace and/or Tedd - that is fairly knowledgeable but doesn't know everything. The only thing we've been shown that anybody else knows about them is that Luke is in a group of at least four people who are trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

    On the other extreme, Charlotte's Angels and Ashley/Elliot each have 50% overlap with the Main 8. And the head of the dojo is the only member of that circle who is not part of the Main 8.

    Now as for Mr.V's request to keep the size of the group down to 8. I assert that - so far - this has been done. The closest they've come to an exception is not Ashley, but Charlotte and Diane - those two know a fair amount about Ellen's, Elliot's, and Nanase's magic, where Ashley doesn't know much about Nanase's or anything about Ellen's. C&D have Mr.V's phone number; Ashley doesn't know of his existence. (On the other hand, Charlotte and Diane were previously aware of magic; Ashley was not.)  But none of those three know anything about Susan's magic, or Tedd's, or Grace's, or Justin's. It would not make a lot of sense, at this time, to bring any of them completely into the circle.

  7. Posted

    5 hours ago, Xenophon Hendrix said:

    I can't get this thing to let me edit my posts.

    If it's white-on-white text, click the "Source" button and you'll get to see and edit your text. (And actually you CAN edit it without seeing it, or you can highlight sections of the white-on-white to make them readable for a moment... but it's vastly easier to edit if you can actually see all that's going on.)

    If it's something else, you'll have to tell us what.

  8. Posted

    3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Another option to add some realism would be to have a small but non-negligable chance of the gun going off accidentally any time you point it at someone.

    A decently well-made gun in good condition being competently handled, the chance of that happening is negligible. Something, you know, about not having a finger on the trigger - and with some guns, where the safety is easily reached, having the safety on - unless you positively intend to fire the gun in the next couple seconds.

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  10. Posted

    I once sent something to  my mother-in-law that would take a signature on delivery. They claimed to have attempted to deliver it at a certain time and found nobody home to sign for it. If they had attempted to deliver it at that time, they would have literally stepped over her before getting to the door - she was working in the garden next to the front door. And her housemate was also home.

    This was on the fifth day after I paid for next-day delivery.

  11. Posted

    1 hour ago, Scotty said:

    People pick up on things differently, Ellen, Elliot, Grace and Rhoda all saw the resemblance while Nanase and Justin didn't, even Diane herself initially dismissed the idea of looking like Susan.  Edward comes off as a stickler for details and wouldn't likely miss the resemblance.

    I discount the importance of Diane dismissing the idea of a resemblance. It seems to me that quite a lot of teenagers who aren't aware they have an identical twin would have that reaction even upon meeting that twin. Particularly relatively egotistical ones like Diane. "NOBODY's quite like me!"

    For reference I suggest either version of the movie The Parent Trap. (Link is to the 1961 version which I think was better.)

  13. Posted

    13 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    Oh Lord yes. I still remember the idiotic flap when someone was screaming about an entire storyline being "trapped in the basement." I later counted the length of the so-called 'trapped in the basement' incident and found that it was a total of thirteen pages long, of which two pages took place in a different place with different characters. The problem was that in real time this took more than a month, in part because of Dan not releasing as regularly as usual at the time. I guess that made it seem like eternity to some. *sighs*

    If there's a page every MWF, then one month is at least 12 pages (most Februaries), usually 13 pages (most other months, plus a February about once every ten years on average - leap years where February begins on a comic-release day), and, twice a year on average, 14 pages (a 31-day month beginning on Monday or Wednesday).

    It doesn't take much to make 13 pages take more than a month.

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  15. Posted

    In an old computer game I've been playing lately, there's this dragon who says that there's only one creature in the world that can threaten it, and wants me to go kill that creature.

    If the creature can threaten the dragon, and I can kill the creature, am I not theoretically able to threaten the dragon?

    (In the game, in fact, I am not - there are creatures I am incapable of attacking, period, and there are other creatures that will attack me. This particular dragon is in the former category. So far I've found only one creature in both categories, and none that are in neither.)

  16. Posted

    Sabrina Online this month (April 2016, the first part of this archive page, for anyone coming in late) is a particularly good example of how bigger (but less frequent) releases help with multi-threading. The comic does four newspaper-comic-style strips a month... all released at the same time. This month the first two strips are one scene, the third is in an entirely different thread, and the fourth is a some-hours-later aftermath of the first two. I don't think it would have worked nearly as well if there were one strip a week.

    This isn't saying that I think EGS or NP should be published in a similar fashion. Doing so would have consequences, and they may not be to Dan's liking (or, less importantly, ours). Just that different manners of publication, even seemingly-mild differences, change constraints on what works and what doesn't.

  17. Posted

    15 hours ago, Scotty said:

    I think it'd be kinda both, Dan could have done "Squirrel Prophet">"Playing with Dolls">"So a date"> then have "Question Mark" after that either making it clear that it happened during the "Playing with Dolls" and "So a Date" arcs, or state that it happened later in the timeline. Either way we wouldn't likely have seen "Question Mark" until at least the end of 2016.

    My point mainly was that the NP allowed Dan to show us how characters not in the main story are developing, and also lets him create canon stories that fit in any time jumps in the main story, like the MV5 story.

    It is possible for a single story to have multiple loosely-related strands going simultaneously, spending a bit of time with one then switching to the other then ....

    And other than at the climax of the story, there's no need to tie a bunch of strands up at the same time. You can have strand B start in the middle of strand A, continue in parallel to strands C and D, and tie back in 2/3 of the way through strand E.

    However, that's easier to do effectively - i.e. you can get away with more of it - when a single instance of publication has rather more content than a webcomic page, such as in a short story, a comic-book, or even when publishing a novel by chapters. Heck, even TV - I remember the 1960s-era Batman TV shows occasionally would have a narrator voice say "Meanwhile..." and the show would switch to showing what a different group of characters were doing in a different location at the same time that the stuff we just saw was happening.

    Also it helps to be better at editing out the fluff than Dan is (or I am).

  18. Posted

    18 hours ago, Wildcat said:

    This and the next page may be what you are referring to. There's a couple of conversations with Raven that might be it as well...

    No, that page and the previous would require no changes if Damien both parents, or only one. (and the next page - ??? )  His post-Swedekea conversation with Elliot says that both are dead, but nothing that indicates when or how either of them died.

    On another note, don't forget that Noriko stayed with Edward and Tedd long enough that Tedd has some memory of being a great disappointment to her. That says to me he was probably at least three or four years old when she left. I seriously don't see Edward telling his preschool son "your mother left because you are such a disappointment".

    Matoyak reacted to this

  19. Posted

    16 hours ago, Wildcat said:

    The only reason I can see for that not  {Noah being Noriko's child via Uryuom egg} to be the case is that Noah doesn't really look anything like Noriko (or what we think she looks like), which would require another parent.

    I'm not convinced, but it could work, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for hints of another of Noriko's children being in Moperville itself.

    We have it from Not-Tengu that Noriko looks very much like Nanase. While I wouldn't consider him a reliable source in general, I think on this I'll take his word. Noah looks essentially nothing like Nanase, beyond the basics of being (able to pass as) human.

    Noah believes his parents are dead. (I thought I recalled some reference to Noah implying that Damien had killed both his parents, but I couldn't find it again.)

    Noah being a child Noriko made via Uryuom-egg in hopes of a proper apprentice after her disappointment with Tedd doesn't fit in several regards. The most obvious is that they aren't together and Noah is Adrian's apprentice. Also, such a scenario would make Noah rather younger than Tedd, but he and Grace have at least one class together - a class that is usually age-segregated (well, year-of-school-segregated) which means he's essentially the same age as Tedd.

     

    15 hours ago, Xenophon Hendrix said:

    This does leave the possibility that Tedd's brother is a character that will be revealed later, but Noah has the additional advantage of being Raven's ward. We know that Tedd's parents were at least once close to Raven. He is a reasonable choice to be the guardian of a son of Noriko's who isn't a son of Edward.

    I favor the possibility that Tedd's brother (a) is at least a couple years younger and (b) lives elsewhere, probably in Europe - considering that we know Noriko has been monster-hunting there.

  20. Posted

    16 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    And there are theories that the reason they were drinking wine in middle age was that it was healthier, because water could get stale.

    I hadn't heard about "stale", but there was the little problem that any water not from wells - and water from some wells - was contaminated with whatever sort of bacteria the folks upstream were currently suffering from. And the denser the population, the more of an issue this was. Population was, of course, densest in cities.

    Yes, they regarded water as unhealthy to drink, for the very simple reason that people who drank it tended to get sick (not including drunk or hung-over) more than people who didn't. So they drank wine and beer instead. And they also mixed wine/beer (and later rum and other distilled spirits) with water, to reduce the intoxication (and stretch the expensive stuff), but if it had enough alcohol to kill the bacteria they didn't know was in the water...

    In China they had the same problem; rather than fixating on alcohol, they drank tea. To make good tea you have to boil the water. Which kills the bacteria they didn't know was in the water.

    So China invented the tea ceremony, and Europe invented the "Hold my beer and watch this!" ceremony.

    Scotty, hkmaly, Ser Pentrose and 3 others reacted to this

  21. Posted

    13 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Maybe the money the Dunkels get from "winning the lottery" allows Elliot and Ellen to have unlimited data plans on their phones.

    Unlimited data plans are hard to find. ("Unlimited" with restrictions - like your first gig or so is at best available speed and anything after that is at 2G speed, i.e. nearly useless - are somewhat easier.) When they were easier to find, they had a restriction that you couldn't use the phone device as a wifi hotspot - in other words you could stream a movie on your phone but you couldn't use the phone as your internet connection to stream a movie to your PC. Or, as I put it to my daughter, unlimited data plans are deliberately designed to be useless to most people who'll use a lot of data.

    Unlimited text and talk plans with reasonable data allowances are not hard to find. Of course, when they say "text" they mean TEXT. Sending a photo via a text message uses some of your data allowance.

  22. Posted

    56 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Still, there are worse drugs. But they are all illegal. In fact, I suspect even some illegal drugs are LESS dangerous than alcohol.

    Several of the common recreational illegal drugs are known to be less dangerous than alcohol. Just as one example, it's not hard to consume a lethal dose of whiskey, difficult to consume a lethal dose of beer, and very close to impossible to consume a lethal dose of marijuana.

    Of course, ALL of them are dangerous if done to great excess, or to more moderate excess quite frequently, or even to mild excess if one then proceeds to act on the assumption that one's judgment is not altered or impaired. And anything addictive, even if it's only psychologically addictive, can become a debilitating impediment to life.

  23. Posted

    This was more than 15 year ago, and I don't remember all the details (and may get a few wrong)...

    My daughter had a habit of building theme decks that were a lot of fun to play but didn't win a lot. More literary than powerful. She was challenged, by one of the local Magic gurus who was a friend of ours, to build a high-power deck.

    She built a hand-destruction deck.

    She got to play first, played a swamp and a Dark Ritual for some BB creature with Flying and the attribute that when it damages a player the player has to discard two cards. The spare mana point went to a spell that forced the guru to discard two cards.

    The guru played a land and a non-flying creature.

    Her second turn, she played a second swamp, another one of that spell, and attacked with her creature, so the guru had to discard four cards - emptying his hand.

    He was never again able to hold a card in his hand from one turn to the next.

  24. Posted

    5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    His other forms can't merge with phone, just the superhero one.

    We don't know that. We do know that, outside of the superhero spell, he can do morphs that change the AMOUNT of clothing he's wearing. Apparently he went from sweatpants and t-shirt to just a nightie (and presumably underpants in each case). So presumably the extra garment became part of him. What if he'd had something in his pockets? Well, he didn't. As far as I can recall, his pocket contents have only been mentioned in the context of his superhero-spell forms.

  25. Posted

    I'd bet against his being able to drive with the car keys absorbed into his body. The ignition switch in his car has a mechanical component - you have to physically move things around, and the shape of the key sets cams to the point where that's possible.

    Most smartphones are purely electronic devices. The few physical switches are momentary-contact things that don't DO something, they just ASK THE SOFTWARE to do something. (Which is why each of them can do several different things depending on context - the software has to decide what that button-push means right now.) In most cases there are other ways to ask the software to do the same thing - the most common exception being "turn on".

    I'm kind of curious what sort of battery life Elliot gets in this condition...

    Also, here's another reason he needs to develop a masculinized-female form that looks exactly like him. Get up in the morning, put on a garment that can hold his phone, put phone in garment, transform into the masculinized-female form naked, get dressed, go do something where he's rewarded for knowledge rather than judgment or planning (such as a TV quiz show)...