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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Don Edwards

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Posts posted by Don Edwards

  2. Posted

    18 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Ah, yes, storing loose-leaf tea.  Tiesta comes in canisters or resealable plastic "refill" bags and much as I love the canisters, I mostly get the bags now, because I can get excess air away from the tea better.  I'm still mostly drinking white, with the occasional green.  Many of them have other flavorings added, to greater or lesser degree, something I don't see nearly as much with black teas.

    A good black pu-erh is different. You WANT air. In fact you want air circulation.

    Of course, if you drink white/green tea, a black pu-erh is probably not your next step. It's more for people who find ordinary "black" teas somewhat lacking in substance.

    53 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:
    2 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Something I need to keep in mind. A "teaspoon" of long leaf tea isn't the same amount of tea as a teaspoon of smaller kinds of tea. Actually I need to use two teaspoon full to get the right strength of tea.

    1s this one of those culinary situations where, if you really want to do it right, you need to skip volume measurements altogether and break out the scales?

    Or use to taste based on experience.

    The basic situation here is, how much of your volume measure is actually filled with air? Large components can trap big air pockets that a powder would fill in. (Sometimes, typically with liquids, the problem is how much volume is affected by temperature - which is why aircraft fuel is measured by weight, not volume.)

  3. Posted

    7 hours ago, mlooney said:

    The lack of a built in spell checker for Firefox on Android.  Given my spelling habits this is a major problem.   I've ended up installing WordPad and doing a cut and paste to the edit block to avoid looking like a badly educted 3rd grader.

    Well, you still don't get an A in spelling... even though an A is exactly what is needed.  :D

  4. Posted

    I think the theory is that deities get power from those who believe they exist.

    How much effort will YOU put into killing a being that you don't believe exists? Probably, none. The fact that you are trying to kill it pretty much demonstrates that you believe it exists - and, therefore, are giving it power.

    (The catch is - if you presumably-incorrectly believe that a deity gains powers only from its worshippers, then once you are sure all its worshippers are dead YOU will STOP believing it exists. But how about the people who believe it exists yet don't worship it? Such as most pantheists who have heard of it?)

  5. Posted

    My daughter has a story of a an RPG where the other players persuaded her to play a gnome thief - and then their characters immediately started with jokes about short people...

    She managed to persuade the king that kidnappers were after him, escort him to a place of safety, go back and convince the royal councillors that the king had been kidnapped and they should choose her as the courier for the ransom money, frame the rest of her party as the kidnappers, bring the king back and collect a reward from him for protecting him from the kidnappers, and then rescue the rest of the party...

    ... there were no kidnappers...

    (This involved a LOT of notes to & from the DM. Just to make things confusing, some of the notes she passed said things like "think a moment and then tell me no".)

    hkmaly, Ser Pentrose and banneret reacted to this

  6. Posted

    On 7/14/2016 at 9:03 PM, Troacctid said:

    They've voted dozens of times to repeal, defund, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act. Obama vetoed those bills every time they made it to his desk, so they obviously weren't collaborating with him—in fact I would consider it an excellent example of them relentlessly opposing him. Luckily for us Americans, they don't have the votes to override a veto.

    And, like I said, they they turn around and say "oh, okay" and approve a new bill giving him what he wants.

    Has he EVER accepted only most of what he wants? And if he did, did he ever NOT then turn around the next morning and demand the rest of what he wants?

    "Compromise" means "neither of us gets everything we want, but we both get something we are willing to live with." The Republicans in Congress have "compromised" by, in the end, giving Obama everything he wants and giving their supporters NOTHING they want. Why should anyone think anything other than that said Republicans are putting on a show to hide the fact that they are on Obama's side to the maximum extent they can be while retaining their power?

  7. Posted

    On 7/14/2016 at 10:13 PM, CritterKeeper said:

    Um, I don't really understand what that means.  Metal?  Are they putting gold leaf in their flags?  Stitching metal daggars to the cloth?  Are they saying you can only have a black or white background, rather than, say, blue on red, or green on yellow?

    There are two "metals" which - since English heraldry is done in medieval French - are known as "or" and "argent". That's literally gold and silver, but actually yellow and white - usually paint. Any other solid hue is a "color".

    You don't put a metal on a metal, or a color on a color.

    There are also furs, which are a repeating *small* pattern of a metal and a color, usually in roughly-equal areas, and almost always used only as the basic background. There'll typically be more than a dozen - and sometime much more - of the characteristic shape in each hue on the shield. You can put either a metal or a color on a fur, although if it's a nearly-solid hue you should treat it as that hue.

    The reason for this rule is very simple: high contrast. The original and primary purpose of heraldry is to make men in armor identifiable at a distance, often in less-than-great light. If you can't tell one thing from another, it isn't doing the job.

    And guess what you want on roadside signs...

  9. Posted

    43 minutes ago, mlooney said:

    Given her foretold ablities as a vampire hunter, a cross overlain with a wooden stake would be cool.  Or a wooden stake and a mallet in saltire would also be cool.

    Brownie point for using a term from heraldry. Think about how many signs you've seen that would be greatly improved by the simple application of one of the most basic rules of heraldry - the one about colors and metals.

    36 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

    I realize the way I wrote that was ambiguous. Curse you, easy-to-confuse pronoun! What I meant is that Grace was sensing marks at Moperville South on the day before the date at the mall, in Squirrel Prophet. In fact, when Grace sensed Rhoda's, Rhoda was next to Diane.

    I didn't think she was sensing marks so much as half-remembering that she saw those people's backs in a dream.

  10. Posted

    15 hours ago, Troacctid said:

    Are they really, though? Congressional Republicans have shown no interest in compromising with the Obama administration. Their strategy has been persistent obstructionism: standing in the way of everything he tries to do, no matter what, so that he can never look good by scoring any victories. Then they can tell voters that the government is broken and useless under the Democrats and it's time to throw out the incumbent. Remember when they shut down the government a couple years back because they refused to pass funding for Obamacare? Or all the presidential appointments they've filibustered, up to and including an actual Supreme Court vacancy that they are filibustering right now at this very moment?

    Blocking in the sense of "Here's 99% of what you asked for." "No, not good enough, I'll veto it and blame you for being obstructionist if you don't give me 110% of what I asked for." "Oh, okay, here's 110%."

  12. Posted

    26 minutes ago, Troacctid said:

    There's a fantastic xkcd graphic visualizing the history of polarization in Congress. You can see the center-right dwindle and vanish over the past 20 years or so, replaced by the hard-line far-right, especially in the House. In fact, the right wing of American politics looks more polarized now than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the left actually isn't all that polarized, with a mix of centrists, hard-left progressives, and a decent spectrum in between. Similarly, it's pretty much just the Republicans that are refusing to compromise, not the Democrats.

    So it's really not that surprising that where the Democrats are presenting a fairly conventional candidate in Hillary Clinton, the Republicans are giving us "The Donald." It's been building to that for a long time now.

    The funny thing is, about the only ones the Republicans refuse to compromise with are those from the hard-line far-right to the center-right. They're willing to compromise with the left pretty much any time, and repeatedly, giving away more of what they claim to stand for on each occasion.

  15. Posted

    2 hours ago, banneret said:

    I suspect Blaike, not Adrian, is the initial catalyst for her refusal to reset. We know that she is limiting herself to indulge his experience of adventure. I suspect that this will have tragic consequences, which convince her to question both a focused experience of life, and the rules of the immortals. Adrian is the object of her affections, but not the subject which provoked them - this would partly explain why she doesn't discuss her plans with him.

    The biggest hole in that theory is that Blaike will be about 70-80 years old when Pandora hits 200. Assuming he's still alive. That might cause her to *delay* reset a few years - and I never got the impression that 200 was a hard deadline - but not to avoid it outright.

    And Adrian will be nearly 50, so while she might delay to take care of her son, she won't delay to take care of her little baby boy. Unless half-immortals mature much more slowly than humans.

    My guess would be some immediate and long-term threat to Adrian. Not just ordinary life, or even something inherent in being a half-immortal (such as his extraordinarily-long lifespan, which could attract unpleasant attention if he stays in one place for too long). Something extra that is specifically threatening him.

  16. Posted

    13 hours ago, ijuin said:

    We don't yet have video players specifically designed for playing movies from flash cards and displaying them on a TV screen--you have to use a tablet/laptop/desktop computer as an intermediary device at present. Once you can buy a device where you can just hook it up to your TV and pop in the data card, with no need to do more than press a couple of buttons on the remote, then we will see SDXC cards supplanting Blu-ray.

    Our DirecTV box and our BluRay player will play movies off a USB thumb drive.

    And I have an SD-to-USB adapter. (Also does microSD.)

    The DirecTV box has an Ethernet jack to connect to a media server or the internet... but our home network is strictly wifi. The BluRay player does wifi.

  20. Posted

    3 hours ago, Kazzellin said:

    (The Edit function isn't working for me correctly (the text isn't filling and it won't let me type anything other than the reason for the edit), so if someone could merge these two posts, that would be awesome!)[/quote]

    Actually the edit function works perfectly except for one little detail: ordinary text appears in white on a white background. Which makes it kind of hard to see - but it's there, and you can prove it by...

    • highlighting
    • selecting the entire text and converting it to a bulleted list
    • a greasemonkey script (for firefox and maybe some other browsers) that is mentioned frequently but I don't remember the details

  21. Posted

    3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Hmmm ... anything pointing out WHEN was Pandora young? Let's see ... based on what the boy with chicken is wearing ... definitely not Egyptian ... did Roman wear stuff like this?

    For several thousand years ending a few hundred years ago, what the average agrarian-peasant kid wore was dictated by the local environment much more than by culture.

    That boy has rather nice shoes for a random medieval peasant kid... but that could just be a way Dan avoids having to draw feet.

  22. Posted

    Essentially, "gold" is the official public-release version. And when you're releasing a physical disk in a pretty box possibly with assorted "supporting" material (such as a catalog listing the company's other recent products), the thing must "go gold" some time before it can actually be released - because most likely the assembly of the complete package is occurring in some second-world country and the result has to be shipped to the first-world buyers.

    With electronic distribution, of course, a product can "go gold" at 10 AM and hit the market at 10:05. Electronic distribution is also much less expensive than preparing masses of atoms and hauling them around the planet.

    Ser Pentrose reacted to this

  23. Posted

    1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    A cheap trick to get around obscenity and indecency laws was to paint over photos of erotically posed women.  A photo of a naked woman was clearly pornography, or so the morally minded might contend, but a painting may be art.

    There is at least one of the "old masters" paintings that is strongly suspected of originally being intended as pornography...

    • The guy who commissioned it, in correspondence with the artist, referred to it only as "the nude".
    • Once it was completed, he put off having it delivered several times.
    • When his wife left town to visit relatives, he was suddenly eager to have it delivered promptly.
    • It was installed in his bedroom... behind a curtain.

  25. Posted

    2 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Sounds like small bits of DLC shouldn't be a problem, as long as it's A) clear what you're buying, and B) priced appropriately.  So, are tiny bits of DLC available for 10¢ or 25¢, or do they never offer anything for less than $0.99 or $1.99 or such?

    Some sites have minimum prices.

    At Smashwords, for example, you can publish an ebook and make it free - but if you charge for it at all, you must charge at least 99 cents.